As a business owner, you are always looking for ways to create and promote a positive workplace culture. After all, you know that your employees can be more productive in a positive workplace. One of the tools that more and more companies are using to create this positive atmosphere is internal marketing.
What is Internal Marketing?
When most business owners hear the expression internal marketing for the first time, they don’t really understand what it means. After all, their employees are already well aware of the products they are selling. So, why should you promote them to your staff?
As you probably already figured out, this has nothing to do with internal marketing. Instead, internal marketing is a way for business owners to promote their organization’s values, mission, and objectives. Ultimately, internal marketing treats your staff as if they were customers. But the strategy that is used is obviously different.
Main Components Of Internal Marketing
- A clear strategy with specific goals
- Effective internal communication
- Great onboarding experience
- Education on the company’s products and services
- Trust and transparent communication
- A great employee experience
- A positive workplace culture
- Professional development opportunities
- Effective cross-departmental collaboration and teamwork
How Internal Marketing Creates a Positive Workplace Culture
As you can easily understand, to ensure that you have a good internal marketing strategy, you need to make sure that you have great internal communication. After all, the way you communicate with your employees has a deep impact on their engagement, motivation, and even on their productivity.
One of the things you need to keep in mind when you are looking to improve your workplace culture using internal marketing is that you will need to deal with some challenges. These may include:
- Reaching and engaging with all employees
- Changing the strategy based on employees’ feedback
- Change the top-down communication to inter-departmental communication
- Measuring the performance of internal communication.
Benefits of Using Internal Marketing in Creating a Positive Workplace Culture
While there are other ways and things you can do to create and promote a positive workplace culture, you should definitely consider internal marketing.
Above all, it’s important to ensure that everyone involved in your company is well aware of its mission. But more than being aware, it’s important that they also incorporate it as see it as their mission as well.
While there are many benefits of internal marketing, let’s just focus on the most important ones:
#1: Internal Marketing Makes Employees More Engaged
The sad truth for many employees is that they just don’t like what they do; they only work because they need the money to pay their bills and support their families.
While no business owner likes to hear this, it is in your hands to change it. Although you can’t make all job posts attractive, you can certainly try to make the workplace environment more encouraging and engaging. This means that you need to share with them the vision of your company so they can also embrace it. This ends up creating a purpose-driven environment that fosters professional growth and keeps employees engaged.
So, when you communicate your company’s mission and goals consistently and put your claims into action, you can create a company culture that employees are excited to participate in.
Keep in mind that you can communicate your company’s values in many different ways. One very effective method is using digital signage where you can promote related messages throughout your building. You can also use digital signage to notify employees about social gatherings. Simply put, social activities during and after the workday encourage collaboration, break up routines, and help employees get to know one another personally, which incentivizes engagement.
You may, for example:
- Display visuals like startup quotes and other meaningful typography to communicate values and goals
- Display KPI dashboards to express a data-driven company culture
- Showcase team photos and social media posts to create a sense of community
- Recognize individuals and their work to demonstrate the value placed on employees
- Display an RSS feed of international news to show a concern for the world at large.
#2: Improving Internal Communication
When you use internal marketing, you will be improving communication as well no matter if you are using emails, phone calls, online workspace chatting, social media, or any other method.
It’s important to keep in mind that a lack of communication may hurt your company’s culture and frustrate everyone involved in the process because it makes you seem careless and disorganized. On the other hand, when you have good communication in place, you’ll be putting yourself more accessible to your employees. This will make your employees feel that you value their input as well as appreciate their work.
#3: Making Your Company More Attractive To Talent
From time to time, you need to hire new employees. Either to complete a new job position you just created or to replace an employee who decided to leave your company.
The truth is that for most companies, recruiting new employees is never an easy task. Ultimately, since most don’t spend the time creating and implementing a positive workplace culture, employees aren’t happy and they just keep going. Besides, for most small business owners, it’s very difficult to attract new talent. After all, how can you compete with bigger companies’ salaries and benefits?
You just have one solution: adopting a good internal marketing strategy that allows you to create and promote a positive workplace culture. This will make your employees and new employees happy at their jobs and working for your company. So, they won’t leave as often as you will also be able to attract those talents that seemed impossible.
Potential employees who see a culture of collaboration, communication, and positivity, however, are much more likely to want to work for your company. In fact, organizational culture is just as, if not more, important than a job’s description.
When you need to recruit, you can simply ask employees for testimonials about your workplace’s culture and implement them into recruiting materials. You can also include pictures of people at work on your website’s career page to get applicants excited.
#4: Employees Become Better Brand Advocates
Final Words: Internal Marketing
No matter if you are looking to recruit new employees or if you are thinking about growing your business, you need to ensure that your employees are on your side. When they are happy at the workplace, you can be sure that they will spread the word out about your company and how happy they are for working there. This doesn’t only attract talents but customers as well.
In addition, when you implement a good internal marketing strategy, you will see your employees using the products and services you sell. And so will their families and friends who will see it as a recommendation. One of the things you can do is to offer incentives such as employee discounts to get employees on board with using your company’s products and services.
Final Words: Internal Marketing
When you are looking to create and promote a positive workplace culture, you should definitely consider internal marketing. Besides the benefits mentioned above for the employees, it will also help you grow your business.
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