Marketing tricks to try in your internal communications

As today’s workforce grows ever-more purpose-driven and distributed, internal communications must sweep, soar, and sing to hit their mark and inspirit their recipients. Yet many efforts just wilt. In this article we explore how internal communicators can take cues from marketing to improve connection and engagement with their audiences.

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According to Gallup, only 27% of U.S. employees strongly believe in their organization’s values, and less than half even know what those values are. Maybe that’s because just 7%  strongly agree that communication in their workplace is open, accurate, and timely.

The best way to uplift listless communications? Adopt an internal marketing mindset.

“When you think of marketing, you more than likely think of marketing to your customers: How can you persuade more people to buy what you sell? But another ‘market’ is just as important: your employees, the very people who can make the brand come alive for your customers,” says marketing exec and agency founder Colin Mitchell in Harvard Business Review. And yet, “companies very often ignore this critical constituency,” dedicating far more brainpower, bandwidth, and budget to the buyers than the builders.

But extending the same care and intention to your internal market—your people—can pay off big. Mitchell again: “By applying many of the principles of consumer advertising to internal communications, leaders can guide employees to a better understanding of, and even a passion for, the brand vision.”

For their part, companies with happy, engaged people are 23% more profitable.

Adopt an internal marketing mindset

When it comes to scaling your internal marketing tactics, tap into tech. You’ll be in good company. “Companies are using external marketing strategies—including communication software—to strengthen internal employee engagement and brand buy-in,” writes Zach Brooke for the American Marketing Association.

Ahead, a bit more about how to leverage each trick and its tech enablers.

Get personal with personas

Prioritize personalization. According to McKinsey & Company, 71% percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and even more (76%) get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

Your internal customers can be just as put out—or gassed up—by such efforts.

An employee experience (EX) or intranet platform can come in handy here. Profiles and past interactions, for example, can help pinpoint and push relevant news, announcements, and resources to everyone, as well as ensure content from active employees is reaching audiences interested in the subject matter.

But before all that, you need to know who you’re working with and what they’re looking for. Enter employee personas.

Long a hallmark of marketing and sales strategy, personas are fictionalized snapshots of the people you’re keen to sell to or, in this case, engage. They include vital information on each avatar’s experiences, motivations, and other variables that might indicate the messages they care most about. Good ones give you a guide for personalizing your internal comms so they cut through the noise and hit the right notes for each archetype.

Your personas, though fabricated, should be based on the realities of your people. To ensure they’re representative, gather data from a variety of sources, such as interviews, focus groups, employee resource groups, town halls, social listening, and surveys. 

While the details and format can vary, your end product should typically include the following:

• Name
• Photo
• Role / title
• Location
• Short bio and description of personality

Also consider digging deeper into certain dimensions, such as:

• Gender, age, and other demographics
• Typical schedule, workload, tasks, and processes
• Goals and motivators (and frustrations and demotivators)
• Network and community
• Level of organizational awareness

Once you’ve built your personas, you can use your EX or intranet platform to create and scale custom comms experiences inspired by them. Consider, for example:

• Crafting homepages, discussion groups, and content for each persona
• Defining employee groups based on persona criteria so new joiners automatically see all the stuff you’ve designed just for them
• Using features like Geofencing so employees see location-specific content regardless of whether they’re based in one place or are on the move
• Tailoring intranet broadcasts by recipient group and delivery method so everyone gets the parts of a broad-based message that resonate most with them
• Creating topic tags that allow employees to discover and subscribe to relevant information—and help them surface ever more insights by fueling AI-generated suggestions based on their past behaviors
• Allowing employees to select where and how they’re notified about new information on their favorite topics (e.g., by email, by push, or in platform)

Become a better listener with surveys

According to The Workforce Institute at UKG, 74% of employees say they’re more effective and engaged when they feel heard. And yet, that experience is far from the norm: Only 30% of U.S. employees strongly believe that their opinions count at work, Gallup says.

Employee listening is the antidote. It’s the ongoing capture, analysis, and actioning of what your people think and feel, and it can help you shape comms that stick by allowing you to speak their language and shift course based on what they share.

Take a page from a marketer’s customer research playbook and design your listening program with both individualized outreach (e.g., through focus groups and interviews) and broad-based efforts. The latter can be facilitated by your EX or intranet software. As an example, Interact’s suite of custom pulsing tools allows ICers to deploy:

• Quick-hit surveys and polls at frequent intervals, such as monthly or weekly, to get a temperature check on anything from morale to manager performance
• Continuous surveys that run in the background and are pushed to employees at the right point in their journey, such as during onboarding or offboarding
• An eNPS as part of the annual process to get broad consensus on the organization’s performance

In short, a savvy listening approach can help you tap into how your people are doing, individually and collectively, so you can respond in smart and helpful ways.

Get smarter with employee idea management

Your listening efforts can go even further with a dedicated idea management strategy.

Just like marketers crowdsource product and service ideas from their customers, you can solicit, organize, and action employees’ ideas to boost business and culture. Here again, your intranet can help you scale. Leaders of a listening initiative, for example, may use a dashboard with an aerial overview of the conversations going on across a business to identify superusers, popular ways of engaging, and hot topics to fuel future campaigns.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind when implementing your approach:

• Integrate idea management with your other listening efforts. Same goes for the origin of your requests. If you’re already using an intranet or Microsoft Teams, make that the place employees can submit ideas so they don’t have to look elsewhere.
• Break up your asks into specific campaigns (e.g., customer appreciation ideas one month; productivity hacks the next), and segment by persona as appropriate (e.g., client-related asks should go to client-facing folks).
• Incentivize participation by creating leaderboards and rewarding those who submit ideas that are later implemented.

Crunch the right numbers with intranet analytics

Once you’ve pulsed your people and personalized their experiences by persona, don’t ditch all that data you collected; with the right touch, you can keep using it to delight your internal customers.

“Robust internal marketing, like its external counterpart, is facilitated by advances in data analysis,” writes Brooke in his AMA article. “Tapping that data can be a game changer for employers looking to encourage employee responses, related to workload or lifestyle.”

At McKinsey & Company, for example, managers review their teams’ responses to the firm’s weekly pulse surveys through a self-serve portal. This focused listening has produced actionable insight into how to improve inclusion, childcare and mental health benefits, connection for remote and hybrid workers, professional development, and more. 

Home in on the metrics that matter most in your organization by pairing the usual suspects (email click-through, open, and click-to-open rates) with ones that measure specific feelings you want to evoke and behaviors you want to encourage.

In addition to gauging satisfaction and real-time sentiment through your listening activities, consider how well you’re cultivating community between employees near and far. Along with participation in IRL teambuilding activities, measure virtual engagement. Interact, for example, has features to help you answer, analyze, and act on the following inquiries:

• How many of your employees are using the internet, and how often are they doing so? Who stands out as an internal champion based on their login and activity history, influence scores, and engagement with features both mandatory (e.g., required reading) and optional (e.g., bios)?
• How are personas or other groups of interest using the intranet in comparison to each other?
• What content are your employees craving more of based on their searches, views, likes, shares, and comments? What can use a tune-up based on a nearing expiration date, a distant publication date, or another warning flagged by the software as high priority? 
• How, when, and where are workers engaging most (and least) with your content and each other? Does this activity peak during or outside core business hours? Are people tuning in from their phones or laptops?
• How does your intranet experience stack up against offerings from organizations of a similar size and industry based on real-time benchmarking scores?

Build a banner internal brand with employee newsletters

Internal branding helps connect your employees with your company’s identity, values, and culture—a big win for today’s purpose-driven workforce. When implemented correctly, it can drive engagement by making workers at all levels ambassadors of your brand, thereby improving key business outcomes such as productivity and customer satisfaction.

When building your internal brand, consider the following inputs:

• Your vision, values, and mission—these become the drumbeats you hit again and again.
• Your external brand identity—you’ll need the same elements for the internal counterpart. Think logo, font, colors, tone of voice, messaging, and more (slogans and jingles, anyone?). Ensure both sides of the brand align—especially when it comes to values—but don’t be afraid to riff on colors, logo details, and naming conventions.
• Employee feedback—launching a dedicated listening initiative will ensure your internal brand really resonates with employees. Because they built it.

Employee newsletters are a great launching pad for your internal brand. They can also help on the purpose front by highlighting how the work of various teams and individuals is propelling your values.

And they can do all that without clogging inboxes. It’s a win for everyone. In a study of more than 300 communications and HR professionals, 71% said employees don’t read or engage with company emails or content, and 64% said the biggest challenges they face are volume of expected communications and leadership buy in.

Newsletters can help on both fronts by creating a channel that’s consistent, recognizable, and—if you play your cards right—highly anticipated. Leaders need only buy in once to an initiative that accommodates a variety of news, updates, and even experimental comms tactics, such as:

• Spotlights on employee achievements and milestones, along with upcoming events
• Drilldowns on new, popular, or under-the-radar benefits
• Updates on change initiatives, like a new merger, or progress toward key goals, like a new recycling effort
• Requests for employee feedback through features like a form, one-click poll, or other idea management tool

Once you have your features defined, create a striking template that reinforces your internal brand. Ensure core elements, such as the following, are consistent and easily scannable:

• A clean, functional design that stays organized with section dividers, headers, and/or one- or two-column layouts. Take inspiration from your favorite online magazines.
• Subject lines and titles that are clear, captivating, and voicey (if you dare). Experiment with emoji and wordplay to see how they affect clicks and opens—but don’t go so far as to sacrifice clarity.
• Eye-catching visuals (e.g., images, vectors, infographics, gifs, and videos) to break up text, reinforce concepts, and radiate identity.
• Crisp call-to-action buttons following relevant news items that encourage readers dig deeper or share input (and allow you to better measure that behavior).

Your intranet software can help you build and deploy your newsletter. Within Interact’s content management system (CMS), for example, anyone with content author permissions can create a template by dragging and dropping elements into place—no coding or design experience required—and then send it out to the right audience segments. To further boost engagement, the software offers an automated email digest that rounds up all the intranet content your employees may have missed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Start a rallying cry among brand advocates and champions

Beyond newsletters, another way to avoid getting lost in the email ether is by crafting a strategic multichannel communications strategy. It’s the internal equivalent of a marketer’s transmedia storytelling, which involves breaking up a narrative into pieces and then making those pieces available across different media. Chances are, you already have a lot of media (channels) to play with: email, intranet, social, SMS, mobile app, Teams, Slack, shadow-IT WhatsApp threads, and more.

Here again, your personas and analytics come in handy. Use them to figure out how, where, and on which parts of your overarching message your people like to engage.

Then, let your internal champions do the heavy lifting.

“Influencer marketing has been around since long before social media, and it can—and should—be applied to internal communications campaigns just as it’s used as a tactic in external marketing programs,” says Mike Tippets, VP at Hughes, in a Forbes Communications Council post.

Your bottom line will thank you: In a Hinge Research Institute survey, nearly 64% of employees performing social media advocacy said the effort brought new business.

Your EX platform can help you find your champions and extend their reach within and beyond your organization with features like:

• An influence score that aggregates indicators of user reach and engagement, such as shares, comments, active forum membership, or blogging.
• Content creation tools, such as an accessible CMS, that make blogging and sharing effortless.
• Mobile-friendly design,such as an appthat allows your people to create on the go and at the precise moment inspiration strikes.
• Social advocacy features that make it easy for employees to share insights, job openings, and other brand-building content to their external networks. 
• A recognition program that rewards good behavior, like championing company values, with points that can be redeemed for gifts and distinctions.
• Forums, discussion boards, and communities that giveemployees a place to connect over specific themes, challenges, or interests—and surface internal influencers who are answering questions and generating more discussions.
• Social media functionality that makes your platform sticky and keeps your people coming back. Think @mentioning, #hashtagging, image-friendly newsfeeds, forums, commenting, sharing, and gamification.

Enjoy the fruits of your labor

Flexing your internal marketing muscle makes your culture and business stronger. Your comms team gets strategy straight form the source, your people enjoy redoubled commitment toward a vision they helped build, and your customers reap the ultimate reward: a better product.

Main image by freepik