Improve Your Brand Culture & Sales With Internal Marketing

Your employees are your most valuable asset; are you leveraging them to their full potential?

By using internal marketing as part of your holistic marketing strategy, you can promote your company’s objectives, products, and services to the employees within your organization. This increases employee engagement, fostering brand advocacy and awareness.

Your team will authentically promote your vision, and work with enthusiasm to achieve your collective goals.

Employees who love their company are more likely to be excited about the brand’s offerings, so the chances of them sharing your company’s content is far greater. This makes internal marketing a strong contributor to your holistic marketing efforts, so you shouldn’t discount the potential value of strengthening your connection with your employees through internal marketing.

Internal marketing can also improve the way your employees treat the customers they interact with. If your employees are more invested in the company, they are much more likely to have a positive outlook on their job. This can positively influence their behavior at work, resulting in higher levels of customer satisfaction across the board.

Entrepreneur and activist Richard Branson put it best when he said,

Crafting a comprehensive internal marketing strategy is one of the best ways to nurture a brand culture that compels people outside of your company to engage with your products and content. Curious about what it takes to launch a successful internal marketing campaign? Here’s what you need to know to get started.

What Is Internal Marketing?

Most people think of marketing as advertising and branding, but there are some inward-facing marketing methods that can improve your brand’s external reach. Internal marketing is one aspect of holistic marketing that doesn’t look outward - instead, it focuses on generating positive engagement with your workforce.

The objective of internal marketing is to get employees more engaged with your brand, and achieving this goal can result in greater profitability. To create an effective internal marketing campaign, you must communicate with your employees and find out how to get them more interested in the company. There are many ways to get this done, including employee-centric events, ongoing communication with employees, and formal training.

Internal marketing also helps each team member have clarity on their specific role in delivering value to your customers. This helps them stay focused on only the tasks that promote that goal.

How Does Internal Marketing Work?

The world of marketing has been totally reshaped in the past few decades. Now, internal marketing has the potential to lead to social media buzz and public recognition. There are many ways that businesses can grow using internal marketing, but the main intent behind your campaign should be to increase brand awareness and engagement within your company.

Here are some internal marketing strategies you can incorporate into your holistic marketing strategy.

Educating Employees

If you don’t tell your employees what your company’s goals, mission, and vision are, they won’t be able to share those messages with your customers. By making an effort to educate your employees on an ongoing basis, you can ensure that they all are aware of company goals and values. This is an effective form of internal marketing because employees that care about company values are sure to spread your brand culture to the people they engage with.

Therefore,

Nurture Communication and Collaboration Amongst Employees

If you don’t talk with your employees, how will you know what their needs are?

Communicating with your employees is a form of internal marketing that should be taken very seriously. If you wish to communicate with your employees in a way that increases brand awareness, you have to create messages that are impactful and engaging, then share those messages to your core employees. Instruct those employees to share the messages to their colleagues, and eventually, the idea you planted will permeate your entire workforce.

If you need to communicate an important message quickly, why not engage your entire workforce at once? Planned meetings, events, and mass communications are all options you can use to get in touch with your employees quickly. Remember, not all of your communications need to be directly related to work.

Your employees may be interested in a company newsletter that keeps them updated on what’s happening at the company. Bulletins are also a good resource that can be used to keep your employees talking to one another. Though, if you really want to increase communication in your company, you should consider acquiring some internal communications software. There are many products available that can be used to allow for easier communication between employees, and the easier it is to communicate, the more your employees will engage with one another.

Since your goal is to nurture relationships between your employees, there are significant benefits to such an investment. Your employees will be able to discuss non-work-related matters and get to know one another better.

Give Feedback To Employees

You need to provide your employees with guidance if you expect them to grow. By offering feedback as often as possible, you can help employees understand how to do their jobs better. This ultimately will lead to your workforce being more developed, offering the potential for increased performance and productivity.

Feedback can also be used to reinforce company values. For example, if you notice some employees are not generating positive customer interactions, you need to correct their behavior. This marks an opportunity to give feedback and reinforce your company’s values. To provide feedback and perform internal marketing at the same time, correct the behavior and explain why employees of your company are required to act that way. This will alter the way they perceive other aspects of their work, hopefully leading to better performance across the board.

Provide Recognition To Exceptional Employees

A little recognition can go a long way. When your employees do something noteworthy, give them the recognition they deserve. This will help them understand that their contributions to the company matter, which in turn will encourage them to take more pride in their work.

To provide recognition, you don’t have to have lavish awards ceremonies or payout cash prizes; mentioning an employee in your monthly newsletter could be enough to make an employee feel recognized by company leadership. Keep in mind that it isn’t always about recognizing individuals. You can also provide recognition to large groups of your workforce by hosting employer-sponsored parties and events.

To find out what forms of recognition are valued by your company’s employees, work with your managers to ask them. Some employees may appreciate tokens of appreciation, like paid time off, free food, or other similar gestures, while others would prefer to be mentioned publicly across company social media. Find out what makes sense for your employees, and start providing them with the recognition they deserve.

Get Employees Involved With Your Products and Services

Your employees may be familiar with your products and services, but if they don’t use them, they can’t really advocate for them fully. If you want your employees to become effective brand advocates, you need to get them involved with your products and services. One way many companies achieve this is by offering employee discounts, or early access to new products.

3M, an international brand that manufactures a vast array of consumer products, has a unique program that introduces its warehouse employees to the company’s products. Each quarter, employees are granted the opportunity to fill a small tote container with as many of the company’s defective or damaged products as they want. There is a limited arrangement of products available, and employees must pay a flat rate for each container. Workers are also limited to two containers full of product per quarter.

In most cases, defective and damaged products would just be thrown away, so this program allows 3M to give back to their employees while eliminating some waste at the same time. If the employees get these 3M products at a low cost, they are sure to share them with their friends, family, and associates. Each person they share the products with may become a lifelong customer of the 3M, resulting in a high customer lifetime value (CLV).

Craft Your Internal Marketing Campaign

If you want to build an internal marketing strategy, there is a lot of preparation to be done first. These are some steps you can follow to craft your internal marketing campaign:

Gather Your Team

Get all of your team leaders involved in the planning process. Start communicating with them before the campaign is launched so that they will be fully aware of your internal marketing goals and objectives. With your team rallied, you should be able to establish a company culture that reaches consumers outside of your organization.

Align Marketing Messages

To launch a successful internal marketing campaign, you must make sure that your entire workforce is on the same page. Employees should have a baseline idea of how they should talk about the company, and aligning your marketing messages can ensure that they know what to say.

Conduct Training

If you want your employees to add their own personal touch when they talk about the company, you need to ensure that they are fully aware of the company’s values. If they have the messaging set in their mind, they can reference the company positively in their own unique way. Training that discusses company values, the company vision, and employee collaboration can lead to valuable discourse that prepares your teams to start advocating for your brand.

Launch Your Campaign

Now it’s time to get started. By launching your internal marketing campaign, you are initiating a business process that has the potential to significantly alter your company’s culture. If your campaign is effective, the brand culture will improve, leading to increased opportunities for engagement with consumers.

Take Internal Marketing To The Next Level

• Enhancing your brand culture with internal marketing can take years.
• Don’t start from scratch.

As a holistic marketing agency, BeNatural Marketing can help you plan your internal marketing campaign, allowing you to start building a new company culture immediately.

Learn how a holistic marketing consultant can help your brand grow and flourish, no matter what happens in your market.