The Best Way to Promote Your EDO's Brand on Social Media

by Michael Kling

The marketing team for an economic development organization (which might just be one person) is constantly looking for new and exciting ways to promote the EDO brand to both companies and employees in their region, as well as to the organizations that fund them. There is one singular issue that can attract the attention of all constituents: jobs.

A main function of economic development organizations is to promote job growth in their geographic or industry region. In order to most effectively do this, EDOs first need to offer their own job boards on their websites that consolidate curated jobs from key employers in their regions. It is also imperative that this job board capture key metrics to help it promote the EDO brand.

Once the job board is functioning and delivering value, it becomes an opportunity for an EDO to promote the EDO brand and to help attract and capture more people for marketing purposes. Having a job board can easily double your website traffic and provide you with a great opportunity to capture names and email addresses.

An EDO can use social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter to promote the job board and therefore the EDO brand. Many companies and people in the region are much more interested in jobs available than they are in hearing about other issues promoted by the EDO.

The key to improved branding using social media is to promote topics that have universal appeal to companies, employees (and potential employees) and funders.

EDOs can promote:

  • the job board itself
  • recent job openings
  • success stories with corporate customers
  • new employers in the region
  • metrics on jobs in the region

Jenn Cornell VP Marketing & Communications at Ann Arbor SPARK says:

“Our job board (TrueJob) has been an incredible asset to our website. It’s an impactful driver of website traffic; the job portal was viewed over 300,000 times in the last year, more than double the traffic from the previous year.”

Here are some examples of how Ann Arbor SPARK, the largest EDO in Michigan, promoted their job board, increased website traffic, improved brand awareness and value and helped to capture names and email addresses for other marketing purposes. When doing the this, the EDO will notice that these posts get more views, likes and shares than other non-job related posts. This helps the region AND promotes the brand.

Here, SPARK has chosen a new job posting to highlight. This posting links directly to the job board on their website, driving more traffic and engagement. This position is also in a driving industry that SPARK is interested in promoting for the region. They’ve used best practices for posting on social media, including using short URLs and using an image as part of the post.

Here SPARK is promoting the job board that’s available on their website, highlighting the number of high quality jobs available, and linking directly to the job board. If you have a job board that tracks key metrics, you’ll be able to highlight those metrics in your social media campaigns.

Here SPARK is promoting their mailing lists. By using social media to drive more signups to your marketing email lists, you can engage those users again and again by linking to the job board to your website, inviting them to events, and much more.

Finally, here is an email outreach campaign from SPARK. New job postings are highlighted and link directly to the job board on their EDO website. The design is simple and gives job seekers a quick way to browse and click on jobs they are interested, then re-engage with your EDO website. If you aren't already growing your contact list, a job board that collects contact information can help you do so.

In a recent webinar, Jenn Cornell, VP of Marketing at Ann Arbor SPARK said:

"We didn't have a good mechanism for capturing new email addresses to keep our list very targeted and very focused on job seekers. After TrueJob started giving us the ability to pull contacts who'd opted in, our open rate went up to over 25% and the click through rate more than doubled to 11%, and it continues to improve."

In summary, in order to best promote the EDO brand, you need to focus on subjects that people pay attention to: jobs. Having a job board and using social media to promote the job board will increase traffic to your website, help you better promote your brand and get the traction that you want with employers, people in your community and the organizations that fund the EDO.

Interested in learning more? Watch a recent webinar on marketing your EDO.