In a past life, I was a social media manager for NVIDIA, creating marketing plans that raised awareness for products.

Today, I am a marketing and social media manager for salesforce.com, creating marketing plans that raise awareness for our employer brand (#dreamjob).

Initially, I thought this would be a big leap, but I’m beginning to see that there are many parallels between product and employer marketing.

Similarities explained, using SAT-style analogies:

• Sales person :: Campaign/Marketing Manager –> Campaign managers raise awareness for products in a one to many model, and sales people close the deal
• Recruiter :: Employer marketing manager –> Employer marketing manager raises awareness for jobs/offices/employer, and recruiters close the deal

AND

• Sales pipeline :: Product marketing  –> Marketing is one of the drivers for the sales funnel
• Candidate pipeline :: Employer marketing –> Employer marketing is one of the drivers for the candidate funnel

AND

• Products :: Buyers –> You’re trying to touch all potential buyers, to get them interested in your product
• Job openings :: Qualified candidates –> We’re trying to reach qualified candidates, to get them interested in us and our jobs

So what does this mean?

While product marketing managers build campaigns that feed sales pipeline, the campaigns I build feed our candidate pipeline.  And both styles of marketing raise awareness for your overall company brand.

The differences between the two roles are pretty interesting as well.

In product marketing, you have (in most cases) a large supply of product. IE, you’re trying to sell as MUCH as you can, to as many people as you can.

Whereas with recruitment marketing, you have a very limited supply of jobs, and you’re only trying to market to qualified candidates.

As a result, you’re much more limited with recruitment/employer marketing. You only want to market to the people who are actually qualified, for the very limited jobs that you have.   It’s been a fun challenge to tackle, and a huge learning curve.

What I’m working on now:

• Internal mobilization: Feeding recruiters and employees compelling content that they can share with their networks, and use CTA’s that encourage network connections to ask about referrals. Luckily we get to use our own product, Chatter, which makes it really easy to share information internally.
• Glassdoor : Creating a great brand experience on our profile, running A/B tests on banners and job advertising
• LinkedIn:  Supplementing the amazing content our SM team publishes with employer content, building the brand on our career tabs, running job ads, traffic ads (and looking forward to sponsored updates!)
• Facebook: Sponsoring employer-related status updates, sidebar ads, delivering employer related organic content to our corp SM team
• Twitter: Upping the volume of content we publish from our employer account, sharing tips and tricks for interested candidates, telling the employer story
• Instagram: showing what life is like inside the walls, giving a glimpse at the very human side of a company

I’ll be sharing more of my specific findings and best practices here in the future, so stay tuned! And if you have any advice, please let me know in the comments below.