Your staff are your best brand ambassadors

When you think of promoting your brand, you probably think of promoting to your customers. But there’s another audience that’s just as important: your employees! Your staff are one of your most valuable resources. If they don’t believe in your brand, how will your customers? Ensure your staff know the values of your business – what it stands for and why it exists.

So why is internal marketing so important? Because it’s the only way to create a connection between your employees and the services that you sell. Without that connection, your employees can’t understand the message you’re putting across to customers with your external marketing. They might not believe in your brand and begin to feel disengaged from the company. When your staff cares about and believes in your brand, they’re motivated to work harder, and develop a sense of loyalty to your company. Your employees are the people who need to convey your brand message to your customers on the front line: they need to believe in your brand as much as you do.

Here’s our guide to building a great internal marketing strategy.

Establish your team

Getting your HR leaders involved initially is a good idea, to establish processes and communications with your employees. You’ll also need your marketing lead involved, or management that have the best understanding of the brand and the message you’re trying to convey. This team will be able to convey the brand message to employees, and really sell the staff on the products or services that you provide.

Evaluate your current internal marketing

Generally, whether you have a formal strategy in place or not, some sort of internal marketing is already happening in your company. The question is, how effective is it? This is a good time to start identifying your employees’ perception of your brand and what your company is already doing with regards to internal marketing. From there, you can start to understand what you need to change. We’d recommend conducting a survey of your staff, to find out their current perception of the brand and find out where your gaps are.

Provide open training sessions and forums

After gathering this information, you can start to deliver your internal marketing to your staff. Arrange training sessions where you can drill down into the company and the brand with your employees and ensure they have a great understanding of what you’re trying to achieve. Get them excited about your services! If your employees are excited about your brand, you can be sure that they’ll pass that enthusiasm on to your prospective customers.

Make it easy for everyone to be involved

Allow your employees to actively engage with your brand, especially online. Keep your social media up to date end encourage your employees to follow your pages – in some cases, they might not even know you have social media! Many companies just send out a monthly e-newsletter, but often it will get missed or ignored. Your workforce will spend a lot of their time engaging with social media, so take advantage of that and keep everyone up to date with what’s going on in the business. Your employees can also share your content, meaning that you’re putting your business in front of their social networks – all potential new customers.

You should also ensure all staff have a business card. You never know when it may be useful for them to give one out!

Keep working at it

Even once you have your internal marketing set up and running, you’ll still need to be open to change and improving what you’ve put in place. Continue to provide training and meetings for discussions, adjust processes if needed, and most importantly, keep your employees constantly in the know about what’s going on. Taking their thoughts and feedback seriously will only benefit your business.

When employees believe in your brand and are engaged in the company, they generally are more likely to be motivated and loyal, and will become powerful brand ambassadors, spreading your company message. This is exactly why internal marketing is essential: if employees don’t understand the brand, how can they successfully convey it to potential customers? So get your workforce clued up, and make sure they’re as passionate about your company as you are.

For more information on how we can help you build your brand, get in touch.