Why you need a creative agency for content (even if you have an in-house team)
As an account manager, Shannon Edwards works alongside clients to bring their employee stories to life. Prior to joining Stories Inc., Shannon partnered with her company’s in-house media team to create employer branding content. Here’s advice from Shannon on why you need a creative agency for content.
An important part of your job as a recruitment marketer is to communicate culture through media, and sometimes your in-house team can help make your vision come true. But many times, you still may need to engage an outside content creation team to achieve your big candidate attraction and engagement goals. In fact, almost all of our clients have in-house production resources.
Before joining Stories Inc., I helped build out the Inclusion and Diversity function at a Fortune 500 healthcare company. I used whatever was available to me to create content about employee experience and worked closely with our in-house media, communications, and talent acquisition teams.
In retrospect, I wish I had known then what I know now!
Four reasons why you need a creative agency for employer brand content
1. Bandwidth, Bandwidth, Bandwidth
You’re probably managing multiple projects at once. It’s hard to juggle everything on your task list! On the other hand, in-house marketing, creative, and production teams are dedicated to your company’s customer marketing efforts. This causes your important (and sometimes deadline-driven) employer branding and talent acquisition projects to be deprioritized behind customer marketing plans.
Bringing in an agency partner is having a helping hand from an expert in culture communication and marketing. They understand what candidates, employees, and other stakeholders (including customers) need to know in order to choose your company over all the others. And, they have the time.
2. Jack-of-all-Trades vs. Dream Team
In-house teams often have limited specialities compared to the content teams you have access to with an agency partner.
In-house professionals are often asked to take on all administrative and creative tasks. From scheduling and conducting employee interviews, filming, editing footage and designing graphics, video projects are a huge undertaking. Using an agency gives you access to a dedicated account manager and creative professionals. This ensures that you have not only logistical support, but also meaningful, high-quality content.
At Stories Inc., we also peer-review every client video. That’s right, everyone. We believe in championing diverse perspectives by having weekly meetings where we internally give feedback on client drafts. This allows our clients to benefit from the experience of all of our creative team.
3. Tunnel Vision vs. Scope
In-house teams are often too close to the target to provide a full and complete view of your culture content needs. An internal team tasked with creating a company culture video might do so with laser focus, but bring a narrower vision to the project.
Agencies help you look outside-in. They can see what is unique about your culture because they know so many other company cultures.
At Stories, our teams are trained to view the bigger picture for you. Each client is assigned an account manager who will help you build a content strategy. Together, you might land on a content plan that differs from your starting request and better suits your company’s culture content and recruitment needs. All of our account managers and content strategists are not only experts in employee and organizational storytelling, but they also have expertise in internal communications, employer brand management, talent acquisition, diversity/inclusion, and more.
4. A Product That You Love
Low bandwidth, lack of niche expertise and tunnel vision can all result in products that aren’t compelling, high-quality content. You should have a product that you love. Why should you have to settle?
We believe in pouring excellence into every piece of content we produce. When your content needs meet our team’s dedication, expertise, and unique facilitated employee storytelling experience, the result is a professional product that your employees, leadership team, and candidates will love.
Content agencies like the team at Stories Inc. have the resources and expertise that in-house capabilities can lack when it comes to communicating talent brand messages.
Since joining Stories Inc., I see the missed employer branding opportunities in my past role. I realize we could have curated additional content from footage we already had, and how our communications could have been more impactful.
In a time when company culture videos are more important than ever, and videos are often the first impression candidates have about working at your company, why leave anything to chance?