Internal communications: your people are your best marketing tool

Your clients are interacting with your people every day. The experience they have depends on how engaged your people are with your company. How valued employees feel directly impacts their engagement levels with their company and ability to help grow the business they work at.

Companies around the world understand the need to market themselves and spend on promoting their business to new customers. But the opportunities with existing customers to grow and expand client accounts is often easier to get over the line and highly lucrative, especially with an engaged workforce.

I’ve worked with many companies who fail to understand the importance of employee communications in business growth. Good employee communications can result in higher levels in motivation, engagement, performance and business results.

To make a difference, to move the dial and go some way to keeping your people happy and engaged, there are a few things that are vital.

1.     Plan your internal comms as you would a marketing plan

Segment the different audiences in your business and plan how you would like to target each of them. Use different channels but ensure these channels are right for your audience. Assume they are all busy so use imagery, video content and short sharp text to get the message across.

2.     Two way or no way

Always provide a channel for people to feedback or ask questions. Provide opportunities for conversations with employees. It’s important to receive real-time feedback and data from your company that can guide you and help you create better communications moving forward.

3.     Give it some personality

Put a face to your communications and write in a personal, honest and simple tone of voice. It doesn’t need to come from a CEO Office email or be written like a formal corporate press release. If the tone of the content is right, have a bit of fun with it.

4.     Business support for the comms team is key

Which means trusting your internal communications team with sensitive information, bringing them into decisions early so they can plan a full campaign to support what’s happening in your business.

For negative situations such as retrenchment, your people may not like the decisions that have been made but if they can understand the reasons behind them, they are treated with respect and given the opportunity to ask questions then it won’t be so damaging.

To succeed with your employee communications, especially while there is so much uncertainty in the world, is to thrive as a business.