Insights:Marketing Insights: Marketing to your own employees
At first blush, marketing to your staff may seem like a waste of time.
Why is marketing to employees important? After all, they work for you, so they should know what you do and why you do it better, or at least differently, than the competition.
Unfortunately, if you’re not sharing your brand’s positioning with them then they’re really just guessing. Which is a pretty risky way to build your business. Companies that fail to provide internal communications about their marketing efforts often fail to deliver on what their marketing is promising their consumers. Naturally this leads to disappointed customers and can hurt your bottom line.
When your marketing makes a promise, which all good marketing does, the people who deliver on that promise usually have nothing to do with the creation of the advertising material. In fact, they may never see it. Which makes it almost impossible for them to provide what your customers have been told to expect.
The simple solution is to share your marketing messaging with every employee before you launch it to the world. Along with this you need to explain what they can do to deliver on the message.
There are many ways to get the word to employees:
- You can hold meetings that unveil the work and create excitement.
- If meetings are impractical for your business, you can use handouts or payroll stuffers.
- Or, use digital channels, such as emails or even internal webpages that will let your staff know the experience you’re promising customers.
Remember, the employee your customer interacts with, for all intents and purposes, is your company. A disappointing experience based on an employee not knowing your marketing message can cost you that customer forever.