Ep210 Katie Wagner - Brand Journalism: The Secret Weapon for Attracting Top Talent and Clients

Katie Wagner 0:00

One of the biggest disconnects that makes employees unhappy is you put out this manifesto about how it's going to be to work with you, with your benefits and your job description and all this stuff, and if they come on board and the actual experience of working at your company doesn't match what they were promised, they get unhappy very quickly.

Mike O'Neill 0:20

Welcome to get unstuck and on target, the weekly podcast that offers senior leaders insights and strategies to not only lead with confidence and vision, but also to achieve groundbreaking results. I'm your host. Mike O'Neill, I coach top level executives on the power of ethical leadership to forge teams to be as united as they are effective in each episode, join me for insightful conversations with leaders just like you providing practical advice to help you get unstuck and propel you and your company forward. Let's get started. You attracting top talent isn't just about job postings, it's about telling the right story. As an executive coach, I've seen firsthand how the best leaders, they don't just hire top talent, they attract them by building a compelling employer brand. In this episode, I sit down with brand journalist and employer branding expert Katie Wagner to uncover how companies can stand out in today's ultra competitive job market. We dive into how businesses can turn their workforce into their strongest recruiting asset. If you want to attract a players and keep them engaged. This is an episode you can't afford to miss. My guest today is Katie Wagner, a seasoned media professional, former journalist and the president and CEO of kwsm, a digital marketing agency with over 15 years of experience in journalism and more than a decade leading a thriving agency. Katie and her team, they specialize in branding, messaging and ongoing marketing to help businesses generate and convert more leads. Her company also has developed expertise in employer branding that is crafting recruitment campaigns that are aiming at attracting and retaining top talent, and it's that combination of brand journalism and employer branding that I'm most interested in in speaking with Katie about welcome, Katie. Hi.

Katie Wagner 2:31

Good to see you. Katie.

Mike O'Neill 2:33

You through our conversation. Introduced me to the term brand journalism for those who are not familiar. Would you just kind of give us a feel what it is and how is it different than traditional marketing? Or PR, sure. So

Katie Wagner 2:47

brand journalism is simply telling the stories of the people that use your products and services and the people that deliver your products and services. So it's really unearthing the human stories behind your business, and it's different than traditional what you would think of as content marketing, because content marketing can sometimes be focused on the features and benefits of what you offer, whereas the brand journalism is focused on the end result of those things and the pain points you solve and the lives you improve. So it's really the human side and not about the product or service itself.

Mike O'Neill 3:24

You know, we're talking about storytelling, and we hear about storytelling, but working storytelling in effectively for an organization. How can companies use storytelling to kind of build trust and credibility with their audience?

Katie Wagner 3:41

Well, I think it's important to remember that humans really relate to each other through story. If you think about how when you're talking to your friends or your clients or your colleagues, like we tell each other stories all day long, and it's how we give out information, it's how we receive information, and that's been true for millions of years. And so if you can tap into that through your business content, it does build an emotional connection with your target audience, and that can do a lot to advance trust, to build credibility and to really cement that relationship. And the best way to get started is really by conducting interviews with your constituents. So a lot of the brand journalism content we create for our clients is based on interviews with their clients or their employees, and asking them about their experience doing the work or their experience with the product or service. And out of those conversations, you put on your journalism hat, and you can start to see a lot of the stories that come out, and then we take those and we craft more fleshed out content around those emotional things that come through.

Mike O'Neill 4:48

Katie, what is it about your journalism background that differentiates you from these other digital agencies out there?

Katie Wagner 4:57

Yeah, I think the fact that we are brand journalists. This makes us really different, because we are really looking for the stories behind the work that our clients do, and we're looking for that human, emotional connection. And because of that, we're able to position our clients differently in the marketplace. We're not just talking about features and benefits and products and pain points, we're really talking about the impact that our clients have in the market, and then from a nuts and bolts standpoint, because we're interviewing our clients to create content, our content often has stats and real life examples and quotes in it, and that's content that Mike, let's say, AI, could not produce. And so because of that, we tend to have content that ranks higher in Google and drives more search traffic for our clients, because Google has an algorithm they call E, E, A T, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. So they look for those things in the content that they rank. And sometimes, if you're creating content with AI or just a generic blog post, let's say you're not always wrapping in that expertise and that real life experience and authoritativeness, and so when we can do that through interviews with our clients, we actually create content that performs better online, and it performs better from A conversion standpoint, because people connect to it better, and they're more likely to take action through it.

Mike O'Neill 6:26

When you use the term conversion, this would be someone who's reading the content, but they decide to act on what they read.

Katie Wagner 6:31

Yeah, exactly. So we run a lead gen agency, so our goal is to have them interact with the content and then reach out to the company in some way, whether it's calling them or filling out a form on the website or downloading something. You know that next step is what we consider a conversion.

Mike O'Neill 6:49

Katie, I've already mentioned this to you in our prior conversation, but I love your LinkedIn banner. It reads. Every company has a story, our job is to tell it. Yeah, that is powerful. I'm most interested in learning more about the employer branding piece. As you know, I come out of a corporate HR background where it's very competitive out there. How have you kind of positioned employer branding as something that it's why is that so important for employers now to be mindful of?

Katie Wagner 7:23

Well, I think it's more important than ever, because the hiring market is more competitive than ever, right? It is hard to find, attract and retain a players, maybe, maybe harder than it ever has been, and we're in this environment where candidates are interviewing you just like you're interviewing them, and there are a lot more choices. They get to choose where they work, and you're in a position of convincing them that you are the employer of choice. But the problem Mike is that many of us business owners spend all our time marketing to potential clients, and we forget that marketing to potential candidates and to our own employees is vital in this environment. We have to be engaging them in ways that keeps them attached to the company, keeps them engaged and excited about the work we're doing, and positions us in front of other candidates as a place they want to be. So I think that's why it's more important than ever. I'm a big believer that recruitment and retention cannot be divided. If you can't keep a players, the new A players don't want to come work for you, and if you're not attracting a players, then your existing ones are going to get tired of working with C players and leave. So I think the two sides of employer branding are the recruiting piece, but also the engaging your existing staff piece.

Mike O'Neill 8:47

That is the piece that most intrigued me. I neatly, kind of understood our recruitment, but it means that if you're going to be telling a story about yourself from an employer's perspective, and you are attracting these A players they need to experience firsthand. What is this you say that they will experience, and if they don't, you say you're going to lose them in practical ways. How does what you all do help with retention?

Katie Wagner 9:20

Well, I think the practical ways that we are showcasing current employees for our clients, making them feel valued and special good, we do things like employee case studies. So we all know, in marketing, we put together case studies of clients we've helped, but we, for our clients, put together case studies of employees who have joined the company and then been promoted or learned new skills or moved into a new role, and we show that progression through the company, which helps attract new talent, but it also makes that person feel really celebrated and valued, and allows them to reflect on the journey and how. Far they've come and the things they've learned, and by having those conversations with your existing employees and saying, We want to showcase this because we're proud of you and we want you reflecting on how far you've come, that really does a lot to build that emotional connection and to cement it. So we interview the employees about those journeys, and then the other thing I think is really easy for employers to do is feature your current employees on your social media. Is it somebody's birthday? Did they just have a baby? Did they buy a house? Did they have a work aversary, and they're celebrating another year with your company? Like these are stories that are really easy to tell on our Instagram and our Facebook and our LinkedIn, and they allow our employees to see that we want to put them front and center, and that we want to talk about their accomplishments, and that makes it feel like a much less transactional relationship, that it really is a caring relationship, and I think that can do a lot to build loyalty and engagement.

Mike O'Neill 10:55

So if a company reaches out to you and say, we want to engage kW ASM, we want to use primarily your employer branding services to attract and retain what have you found has been one of the, probably the most common obstacle that a new client deals with when you're onboarding them.

Katie Wagner 11:19

So the biggest problem I see in employer branding is that we don't pay a lot of attention to our employer brand. The employer brand is you have an employer value proposition, right? Which is what you offer employees in exchange for their loyalty to you, and it's beyond a paycheck. It involves, you know, your culture and your work life balance and your environment, that sort of thing. But then brand is how you're portraying that employee value proposition into the marketplace, right? And you don't always control your brand, because it also involves what do my employees say when they go home at night and somebody says, How was your day? That's your employer brand, right? But I think most companies, again, don't pay attention to this. They don't think about cultivating this and showcasing it. So for instance, your careers page on your website should function like the landing page in a lead generation campaign, and we all get that from a marketing standpoint. If we want to attract clients, we have to have a landing page for them to go to on the website. But the same is true with employees. We have to have the careers page that's built out with all the elements needed to make a decision, meaning it does have to have case studies and testimonials and information about values and mission and that sort of thing, and the average conversion rate, meaning people who land on it versus people that apply for a job of a careers page is 18% and so I think anybody listening that's really easy to test right look at your web analytics and see how many visits you get to the careers page versus how many people applied for a job this month. And if you're not converting 18% you can probably improve that page and do more to tell that story, but I think that's the number one thing I want to tell people, is you, you have to pay attention to that and treat it just as importantly as your external marketing campaigns.

Mike O'Neill 13:16

You know, as I'm listening, you describe this, the phrase you've got to be willing and able to walk the talk keeps kind of popping up because you have these relationships with your clients. How do you help them truly do that from an authentic standpoint? Do you find that there is sometimes value in just laying it out, that this is a fast paced environment, or demanding or whatever it might be.

Katie Wagner 13:46

Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of truth telling that happens. And, you know, we interview a lot of their employees to be able to do this work. And the stuff that comes out of that Mike is not always stuff they want to hear. It's not always favorable, but it is always important, because whether you think someone's right or wrong, to feel some way, you can't change the experience your employees are having. And one of the biggest disconnects that makes employees unhappy is you put out this, you know, manifesto about how it's going to be to work with you, with your benefits and your job description and all this stuff, and if they come on board and the actual experience of working at your company doesn't match what they were promised, they get unhappy very quickly. Yes, and so one of the ways we help our clients the most is by doing surveys and doing interviews with their clients or their sorry employees to understand is that employee experience matching up? You know, are they having a good experience? And the feedback that we uncover there that maybe isn't as positive is just as valuable as the things that we uncover that we're going to showcase, because they have to do something about it. You can't take negative feedback and not act on it in this environment or or you're going to be. Be losing talent to people who will act on it.

Mike O'Neill 15:04

You know, as you're describing this, I have kind of, in my mind, have begun almost interchanging the customer experience and the employee experience. But it seems as if companies go to a great length to kind of focus in on the customer experience. They may even have someone whose title could be even a C suite role that has that, but if the employee experience doesn't match, I think this is where I was going with my thinking, and that is if what they read online and they come in and experience something very, very different. You mentioned how quickly that can be a bit, a bit of a turn off. I'm kind of the opinion is maybe it's best to be even more transparent, and that is, don't sugar coat what it might be, because they have a more realistic expectation coming in, and that may be more of the onboarding, interviewing part of that, but those folks listening, and they're saying, Gosh, I never thought about Employer Branding this way. What might be some other things that we need to be mindful of that we haven't discussed so far?

Katie Wagner 16:16

Well, I think you have to create content that showcases your employee experience, right? So if you don't have pictures of your employees or interviews with them, blogs about their experiences, you do have to create some content that you can share. And then, you know, I hear a lot people saying, Oh, I don't look at the review sites because glass door and indeed, and everything's negative, and I don't want to hear that. And I think we have to be real honest with ourselves as business owners that there is likely a kernel of truth there, even if it's influenced by other things, or you don't like the way they're saying it, and I like what you said about being transparent, because it's much more effective in this employer branding lead generation campaign. It's much more effective to say, look, here's the feedback we've heard that is less than positive, and here's what we're doing to address it, rather than just pretending it doesn't exist. Because I promise you that candidates, just like potential clients, do research on your business. Candidates do as well, and they've already found those reviews, and if they're asking questions that are dancing around some of the things they've seen and you're not willing to address it head on, that can hurt trust and credibility, and it erodes that relationship even as it's just beginning. And so I encourage our clients to really be willing to say, Yeah, we got that feedback in the reviews, and you know, that was that person's experience, and it has valid, it's valid. And so here's what we've done to address it right, and I like things like putting together a culture committee inside the company, somebody whose job it is to look at that review feedback and say, What can we do to make this better? And I don't put leadership in those committees. I put rank and file employees there. They're the ones that are the closest to what's really happening for your staff. And I think also, you know, having a program where you ask your employees to share content on social media about their jobs. You know, I let my employees post about their jobs during the day on social media. Should they choose to, and I don't look at or approve that content before it goes out, because that is employer branding at its finest. What did they say about what it's like to work here? And if you're worried about that, I think you have to dig in and wonder why, what needs to change so that you would feel more confident allowing them to talk to people about their jobs, because they're going to do it, whether you are sanctioning that or not, right? They're going to tell people how they feel about their jobs. And so I think a lot of employer branding is really the willingness to have a real talk with yourself about what could be the things that are less than ideal that we need to address, and how are we showing recognition and acknowledgement of our employees? Because so often we forget to do that, and we we focus again on the outward facing. Let's get clients. Let's do the client work. But Mike, if you're not taking care of your employees, they're not doing the best client work, or there won't be anybody to do the client work. And so your client experience is actually very tied to your employee experience, and the sooner we can reconcile that in our heads, the better we can act on it. I'm going to tell you a very unflattering story about myself that really drove this home for me, and that was that I was pitching a big client. I'm going to keep their name out of it, but I was pitching a big client. I flew to another state to do the dog and pony show and meet this client, and they they wanted us to do lead generations. This is a marketing client, and we get to the end of two days of presentations and they say, You know what, we love everything you're saying. We think you're great, but we're not going to hire you. And I said, Oh, well, tell me why. And they said, Well, we saw a review online, and somebody was saying they felt like they. Were overworked. And if that's true, we don't feel like we're gonna get the attention from your staff and the effort that we need, because they're stressed out all the time, so we don't trust you to do the work. And that was a huge blow to me, that now the way my employees were feeling, even if it was just one person who wrote that in a review, the way that person was feeling was affecting my ability to grow the business or get clients. And so I had to do some soul searching, and I put together a committee and said, I want you to talk to your peers like, figure out how big a problem is this. What can we do about it? And two things came out of that, on the client side, we actually we participate in the Inc, best workplaces survey every year, and we score 95 out of 100 or better. And so I had to dig up four years of ink data and present it to this prospective client and say, this is also how my employees are feeling. And this is a third party survey, you know, but I had to prove to them that not everybody was overworked, and they did end up hiring us. So happy ending. But on the internal side, we actually shifted our work schedule a little bit to allow people to have more balance and more recovery time. We put in place a 980 work schedule, which means we work nine hours Monday through Thursday, and then we have eight hours on Friday, and then every other Friday off, still 80 hours over two weeks. We just shift it around so that my staff has long weekends every other weekend, and that's helped a lot with people feeling like they have time to decompress and focus on their personal lives, but that that change was a direct result of negative feedback I received, and I think, you know, that probably did a lot to improve my business. I know it did, and it's that kind of thing that you have to be willing to look at, even though, gosh, it hurt in the moment, right? I was not happy about that feedback at the time.

Mike O'Neill 21:58

Yeah, as you're describing this, help me with the right label of what to call this, if employees are going to post their experience regardless. But if a company says, You know what, if they're going to do it, let's might as well come alongside what is the term? What do you what do you call that, where you are encouraging the clients to do just that, to to for them, to encourage their employees to speak freely. Is there a word, a name for that?

Katie Wagner 22:36

I mean, I call it employee advocacy programs, right? Because what you're saying to your employees is, we think you're great. We want to attract more people to work here that are like you. The only way we can do that is if you're sharing your experiences, and people really understand what that's going to be. And so we want you to put it out there. And I encourage people to let prospective candidates interview existing employees if they want to let them talk to them, because you you know, to your earlier point, you can sugar coat that experience, but the minute they come on, they're going to understand, you know, whether that was accurate or not. And so I think the more of those stories and the more of the real information you can put out there up front, the more effective your campaigns going to be, and the the more you're going to attract and retain the right people,

Mike O'Neill 23:23

I'm gonna be at a loss of what to call this, also for this topic, and that is in today's social media environment, be it Instagram, Facebook or the like. Yeah, I've kind of drawn the conclusion that really isn't the real world. This is the world that people want to portray. I'm concerned that just confidence in what people see and read is eroding. How do you help your clients counter that? First of all is my question making sense. It is

Katie Wagner 24:00

okay. It is. And I think, you know, it's an interesting question, because I see it both ways. On one hand, we know, as a lead generation agency, stepping away from employer branding for a minute, but in our lead generation work, we know that trust in the internet is dipping. It's falling, right? It's lower because AI is putting a whole lot of stuff out there that may or may not be accurate. There's a lot of misinformation that's being spread, right? There's a lot of political stuff and and that sort of thing that gets in there. And so overall, people's trust and what they find on the internet is lower than it's been in the past. We know that factually, but I balance that in my brain with the fact that we still have people who see things on the internet and act on it. As far as like influencer marketing still works really effectively, right? People trust opinions they see on the internet and they act on. Them, and I think that part of things has a lot to do with relationship. So one of the stats that I like is that 80% of people will click on a job posting in one of their friends feeds, even if they're not looking for a job. Okay, so even if I'm not, I'm happily employed. I'm not looking for a job, but you and I are friends on Facebook, and you post my company's hiring, 80% of people will still click on it, and it's because you and I have a relationship. And this is my company specializes in something we call near bound marketing, and that's leveraging strategic partnerships, but it comes out of the fact that straight internet, you know, information is losing its credibility in some ways, and people instead trust what they hear from friends, partners, colleagues and people they actually know. And so I think the way Employer Branding works is that if my friend is posting about their job, I believe what they're saying, whereas if it's just the company posting and saying, here's a great, you know, a great new job. I'm less likely to believe that or be skeptical of it. More likely to be skeptical because I don't have that same emotional relationship. So there's sort of two sides of that coin. If you work through people they know and have the relationship with already, the trust factor is much higher. If you're just putting things out on the internet and it's it's cold, trust factor is much lower, and that's why you need your employees and the employee advocacy programs to help you with this employer branding recruiting campaign, because candidates are three times as likely to believe what your employees say about your job than the company itself, and so it is tremendously powerful to speak with their voices, and whether it's good or bad, people will believe them over what they believe. Out of You, from You, I always learn

Mike O'Neill 26:53

a lot from my guests. I'm learning a number of things from you. The term near bound is a new expression for those who have not heard it, kind of put that in language that someone like me might would understand.

Katie Wagner 27:05

Yeah. So most of us think about inbound and outbound lead generation or marketing. Inbound is traditional content marketing, where you put blogs out on the internet, you SEO them, and then people find them and you pull them back into your website. That's how we've generated leads for many, many years. The problem with inbound now is that trust in what people find on the internet is lower, so it can be less effective. And then you think about things like outbound lead generation, which are cold outreach. Salespeople do this. You get these cold emails, cold phone calls. You know, that sort of thing that has also been effective for a long time and is now losing effectiveness because it's a crowded space, right? Lot of that, and a lot of us just sort of tune out to those things when we see them. But near bound is where I this is my soapbox a little but I believe lead generation is going and near bound is reaching audiences through your strategic partners, so it actually encompasses what you and I are doing right now. So we're filming this podcast. You're going to share this podcast with your audience, and they're going to be introduced to me, but they already know you, and so there's a level of trust with you that gets transferred to me. Likewise, I'm going to share this content with my audience, and they already know me. They read my stuff, they like my content. Trust there, and it gets transferred to you. So if they watch the podcast, and then a week later, I send out an email that says, hey, you remember Mike. I'm having a co webinar with Mike, and we're going to teach you about recruiting and employer branding. They're more likely to be warm leads for that content because they've leveraged my trust with them to get to you. So it's the reason, like many of us do networking, or we have referral partners like we know this instinctually, that if you get introduced to somebody, it is a warmer lead, but there are now, through near bound ways to expand that into lead generation campaigns that happen online, through marketing, through into partners and CO creating content that really leverages that relationship. And I believe that that, combined with real, authentic storytelling is really the future of where lead gen is going.

Mike O'Neill 29:25

Katie, I've never asked this question of an expert, so let me throw this out to you. When I launched the podcast, I knew that the vast majority of podcasts are audio only, yeah, and I made a decision to add the video element. Now I was a little bit self serving. There's something about me to be able to look into your eyes right now while you're speaking that I can, I can I can read. I can understand it. It adds a dimension. I've always been interested when people say I watched your podcast, or I listened to your podcast. Podcast with the technology being like it is. We're recording this literally on Zoom, something that everybody uses every single day. You're the expert. Is it best to do a podcast that has the visual element or keep it simple and go audio only?

Katie Wagner 30:18

Well, I always like having audio and visual. But I'll, I'll tell you a slightly different reason. It's because you maximize the ability to use your content. Because you can put this content up on YouTube, we can cut it up into reels for social media and put it on Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook. And you can also syndicate the audio to podcast channels, right Spotify, or wherever you're putting it, Apple podcasts. So I think it amplifies your reach. But I think what you're saying is it speaks to the different ways people like to consume content. Yes, if somebody watches us rather than listens to us, the trust factor is higher, because this is the way we relate to each other. We see our facial expressions, we watch our eyes, we see our hand gestures. You know, like that is how humans build relationships. And I'll give you an example. I'm I'm married, but if you think about like dating sites and meet somebody and you're like messaging, and you think, Oh, this person's really great. We're messaging back and forth. We're having a great conversation, or maybe even talk on the phone, it's going well, but you don't really know if you like that person until you meet in person, because it is a totally different vibe, and there is a different way of relating to each other when we can hear each other's voices and see each other's facial expressions, all sort of in that package. So keep in mind, I'm a former TV anchor, so I'm a little biased towards video, but I think there is a lot of value in doing both. So kudos.

Mike O'Neill 31:47

Well, I appreciate you saying that. I guess what I find we do exactly what you suggested, and that is you've shared so many neat things. We'll kind of pull out some video snippets. And it's always interesting when you promote a episode, say it on LinkedIn, how many people just watch a short snippet and they say, I want to learn more, click it, and then they're watching it, be it on YouTube or they're listening to on one of the platforms. You know, Katie, we've had a pretty far ranging conversation, but let me invite you, if you had one piece of advice for companies they're looking to integrate brand journalism and or employer branding into the marketing and recruiting efforts. What would that be?

Katie Wagner 32:32

One piece of advice? I think it starts with taking a hard look at the stories you have to tell. What does differentiate you as a product, service or an employer, like, what are the things that really set you apart? And spending some time thinking about, how can you tell those stories? Meaning, what kind of content are you creating? Is it video? Is it a blog? Is it pictures, and then where are you putting them? Where is your target audience hanging out? Is it social media? Is it on your own website? I think those two things are key, and trying to launch any initiative. And I'm a big, big fan of starting small, you know, try one thing, make it sustainable, and then add on. Don't try to do everything all at once, because it can be overwhelming. It's a lot right to do this kind of communication. And so find a partner to help if you need one. But I think a lot of it can be done in house. You just need to start small and really focus on one story at a time. Well,

Mike O'Neill 33:28

I'm going to plug you as we kind of close, and that is if today's conversation did spark something, don't stop here. Connect with Katie and explore how brand journalism can elevate your business and recruiting efforts. Now let me promote my business. If you don't mind that is attracting top talent, it's one thing, but keeping them engaged and growing takes strong leadership, and that's where bench builders comes in. We help organizations develop strong leaders and solve workplace challenges. So visit bench builders.com to learn how we can support your team. But Katie, before we go, for those who want to connect with you, learn more about you and your work, what's the best way for them to reach out

Katie Wagner 34:14

through my website? Is great. It's kW, SM, digital.com, and then also I'm I'm active on LinkedIn. So if you want to find me Katie Wagner on LinkedIn, I would love that too.

Mike O'Neill 34:24

We will put both of those in the show notes. So that's in part. I was introduced to you by Courtney, someone you know in the Atlanta area. You're speaking today from, I want to say California. Are you in California? I am up in San Diego. Yeah, wonderful Katie, thank you.

Katie Wagner 34:44

Thank you. Good to see you and

Mike O'Neill 34:46

to all our subscribers. Thanks for joining us, and I hope today's conversation with Katie has given you some fresh ideas to help you get unstuck and on target. Thank you for joining us for this episode. Episode of get unstuck and on target. I hope you've gained insights to help you lead with confidence and drive your organization forward. Remember, at bench builders, we're committed to your success, your leadership excellence and your strategic growth. If you've enjoyed our conversation today, please leave a review rate and subscribe to keep up with our latest episodes. This show really grows when listeners like you share it with others. Who do you know, who needs to hear what we talked about today? Until next time, I encourage you to stay focused on the target and continue to break new ground on your leadership path. You

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