How to Use an EVP to Create the Perfect Content Strategy

This post originally appeared on Southerly's blog. You’ve taken the steps to develop a quality, attractive employee value proposition (EVP). Well done! Creating this is the first step towards marketing yourself and finding the right candidates for your company. But as the old adage goes, it’s what you do with it that counts. So, what should you do with your EVP? Use it to inform your content strategy, that’s what. Here’s how… Use it to identify content themes A good EVP should be clearly and cleverly divided into a few main selling points. These might be the ways that your teams integrate together; the difference your company’s work is making to your industry; it might be your vibrant office life. Either way, it should be manageable and divided into themes that you can use to inform what content you produce. A good EVP should not only identify the most appealing and attractive things about your company, it should outline the best ways to communicate them. Using this you can look at each month (or blocks of three months), and put together a calendar based on your themes. So, if you have four themes and you want to publish four pieces of content a month – and these can be blogs, feature articles, whitepapers, etc. – you can plan to have each piece hit a different theme of your EVP. That way, month by month, you’re creating a well-rounded picture of your company that doesn’t scream of mindless propaganda. After all, the best candidates want you to show them what you can offer them, not just tell them.

Learn your language A good EVP should not only identify the most appealing and attractive things about your company, it should outline the best ways of communicating them. From the way that you describe your company, your values (or perhaps it’s your ‘principles’), to what you call your staff, a good EVP will create coherence throughout your content. When creating content, always keep your EVP to hand and use it as a crib sheet. If ever you’re not sure about how to word something, look it up. And if it’s not there, raise it with the agency that created it and work with them to add it. Empower your people Once you’ve created a coherent and fully-zazzed EVP, spread it around your company. You’ve no better advocates for working there than your staff, and the sooner they know that you want them to discuss working there, the sooner they’ll be okay with doing it. You can even go beyond that; encourage them to share your content and to create content of their own. If your employees are given to tools to do so – your EVP – they’ll be more inclined to do so. Like any good content strategy, planning and proper implementation is the key to success. You’ll need to make sure you have a strong, professional agency to plan a strategy that can not only communicate your identified EVP, but do it in a way that doesn’t ignore the fact that you’re still speaking to people. Identifying and creating your EVP is the first step, but it’s an important one that will help you attract the best talent in the long run. What would you include in yours?