Building TalentBee brand. Here's what I learned.
I have heard a lot of compliments about our brand at TalentBee.
I thought of sharing everything I've learned about building the TalentBee brand in the past four months.
Here's what Wikipedia says about: "What is Brand?"
A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers.
In our business, the brand is crucial. Without that, we are just another recruitment agency, and it's hard to get customers to buy from us.
There are a few main reasons why we decided to invest heavily in building a brand:
1) Selling is way easier & I hate cold calls. We wanted to build a brand & inbound engine around that.
2) You can charge premium prices with a good brand. You can use recruitment & employer branding services way cheaper than someone else. Our brand = our quality, and customers are willing to pay more.
3) Great brand = better retention of customers.
Different parts of the brand
Most people see the brand as the brand's visuals. That's one part of it, but for me, positioning is where you should start when building your brand.
For that, you need to understand both your customers & your competition.
Most companies forget the customer part and think about how our company differs from our competition.
That's a big problem because the part you are different from needs to be also super relevant to your customers. Here's the same in visual. ( Source of the picture: Smashbrand)
What's the best way to understand your positioning?
Talk with your customers. Here's how we did it. Last spring, we talked with around 30 SaaS founders / Head of People about their experiences in working with other recruitment agencies & what was good, and what were the biggest challenges.
One of the key learnings from here was the business understanding & ability to challenge them. That's why we decided to focus on SaaS companies and ensure all our people understand their business.
Most of the people we talked to were used to working in project-based recruitment and not focusing on employer branding and building talent pipelines. Something we believe in. These came to the main pillars of our messaging.
Name, colors & other visuals
Typically people remember your name, colors & visuals. We started with the name, and after a lot of discussions, we chose TalentBee, and from there we started to build the visual identity of TalentBee. We try to keep it as solid as possible. Here is the thing we have been doing so far:
1) Our logo is yellow & around Bee's
2) We have yellow hoodies & we use them in our social and, e.g., when we participate in events like Slush & SaaStock.
3) We have our own TalentBee honey
4) Our podcast design is around yellow & bees
Building a Brand takes time.
Most people post a few posts to social media and expect to get great results. It takes time to build a brand & you need to be systematic around this.
Here is the stuff we do every week:
1) Everyone at TalentBee posts to their personal LinkedIn daily
2) We post to TalentBee LinkedIn daily (make sure to follow us from here)
3) We post to TalentBee's Instagram daily
4) We do weekly Instagram live sessions
5) We publish the #TalentBuzz podcast about SaaS Talent Acquisition weekly.
6) We publish new blogs to your website (Check out this article about how to use PirateMetrics in Talent Acquisition)
7) We push out new reference cases as often as we have new ones.
Additionally, we organize events, go to events as guest speakers, host other podcasts, and much more.
The best benefits of building a brand so far
I have personally noticed two main benefits of building a brand:
1) Most of the cases in our pipeline have come through inbound because people have followed our content.
2) When I reach out to someone, especially in the Finnish market, they have already heard of us. It makes sales way easier.
What's the first thing that comes to your mind when thinking of TalentBee? I would appreciate your answer. Please DM me with your answer :)