Are you overlooking your best marketing tool?
No one knows your brand, your products, your services and your market like your own team – but plenty of organisations put internal communications way down the priority list when they are developing their strategies and plans. An engaged team can make a huge difference to your communications results. Here are five ways to do internal comms better:
- Do it first, not last
Get the team excited early and bring them on the journey. Too many businesses make internal comms an afterthought. Don’t tell your people what your plans are after you have already rolled them out. Let them know what’s coming so they can optimise your programs by being prepared. They know your audience and may even have some helpful suggestions or insights.
- Leverage their networks
Want more engagement and more followers on social? Get your own team to promote your content. They are already tapped into your industry and target audience. It is the quickest, easiest and cheapest way to drastically boost your social results, yet a huge proportion of businesses either don’t do it at all, or don’t do it well. Doing it well means ensuring your team knows what to do, how to do it, and how it will support your company goals. Make it easy for them – give them some suggested drafts or templates when asking them to reshare!
- Trust and share
Lots of brands talk about building partnerships with their customers. You need to build partnerships with your people, too. When things are tough, be honest. If you tried an approach and it didn’t work, let your team know. You don’t want to be a party pooper, but you do want your team to feel like, well, a team. The caveat here is that internal comms could end up external, so do exercise a degree of caution.
- Make sure you reach them
This might seem like a no-brainer, but a surprising amount of internal communications never reaches its intended audience. If you have a dealer network, or your staff mainly work in workshop, on the road or factory environment, they’re probably not all seeing that email you send out each month. Think about other ways to engage. Is it a poster in the lunchroom? A dial-in call? A printed newsletter? SMS? Just like you would consider your target audience with an external campaign, apply the same principles to your internal teams.
- Ask for their support and ideas
Ask for feedback and mean it. Collect ideas and show how you have used them. Ask your team to help you out. Research shows that people are more likely to do something for you if you’ve already asked them to do something before! People like to be appreciated, so ask, and be grateful.
Need help with your internal comms? We’d love to assist. Get in touch: [email protected]