In this growing digital and information age employees are becoming vocal about their work culture and working habits. You don’t want to end up on the social media platform wherein an employee, a rogue employee or an angry employee is telling something bad about your company. It is the worst PR that you could get. That said, selling to your employees and selling the brand internally becomes very important.
For larger companies, they have big budgets and big PR teams to handle such situations but for a smaller B2B manufacturing or a mid-size company, it could impact the revenue and sales. Employees who are in direct touch with the customer, employees representing the brand on social media or are in customer facing roles become living evidence of brand representation. The employees are the “Top Ambassadors of the company”.
In this blog we will discuss in brief how you can sell the brand to its employees so that it does not affect your brand in terms of revenue.
Common problem with internal branding
Leaders often operate with the mindset that staff is being paid to do the job and they are motivated enough to do their respective jobs. They do these public events wherein they go out and speak about the brand’s innovation and technology. Also they speak about the brand on social media, but the important part is if you want to promote the company holistically you have to promote the brand internally as well and you have to have the internal branding strategy. It becomes an extension of your brand to the outside world.
You would have seen Google, Apple and NVIDIA doing product launches in an event with media and internal employees attending that conference/event and cheering for the product. Why do they do that? They do this mainly because the employee first becomes the advocate of the product and then it is out to the world to be sold.
List of common problems with internal branding in B2B companies:
- Hierarchy based structure even though the size of the company is small, leads to a time-consuming process
- Low Employee morale
- Poor business sense to understand the concept on “Internal branding”
- Thinking it as a HR job rather than a team effort
How do you do it
Combining Internal and external marketing
Employees need to hear the same message that you send out to the marketplace . Internal and external communications are often miscommunicated. They are told one thing by the management but observe that a different message is being sent out to the public.
For example, an IT company is telling the marketplace that they are going to launch a new product and they are going to merge with a technology partner. But internally there is no such news neither do the employees know about this decision is being taken. This sends out a wrong message to the employees and brings in a wrong mindset. Make sure you have your internal and external marketing communications aligned. This will build rest within the employees.
Focus on Marketing Your Brand Internally First
Whatever brand strategy, marketing or advertising you plan to activate externally, sell it to the inside first, and whatever communication is planned for your external market, customers and stakeholders alike, ensure you inform and induct your leadership team and employees first.
Why bother? Here’s one B2B example for the sake of clarity:
“Before you can do anything to gain success in your business, you’re going to need the buy-in and support of your team. A team is what grows the business. It’s not the technology; it’s not the computers.” According to Yaniv Masjedi, Vice President of Marketing, Nextiva, a cloud based communication company.
In 2008, when Nextiva just opened its doors with a handful of staff, it was easy to keep people emotionally bonded to each other and the company. As it expanded to 300, with employees situated in other locations and many not knowing the names of fellow colleagues, it became necessary in 2012 to find a way to communicate company news more effectively, without resorting to the old fashioned newsletter.
“NexTV”, a weekly, internal video series was launched. They started small; each week, different employees would gather around a laptop camera to make announcements collected from all departments. Just 2 minutes long, it was uploaded onto YouTube – edit-free – for internal viewing. This killed two birds with one stone, so to speak because people in various locations could see the faces of fellow colleagues, some of whom they had never met, and get the news at the same time.
On average, 74% of Nextiva’s employees watch the series each week, with a 96% engagement rate.
Employee empowerment and training
Apart from the senior management of the company employees are working for a company to learn to grow and build a sustainable life over a period of time. Even the management is there to learn and provide new learnings to the employees. In this scenario, it becomes very important to provide employee empowerment and train them to bring success in the company.
For example, creating a show or a podcast wherein you provide the opportunity to host the program with a junior-level person and circulate the entire video series throughout the company. What this will do is, this will provide training on a particular subject at the same time it will empower and motivate other employees to speak in front of camera and represent the company in that particular show podcast. This also gives the employee an opportunity to show off or boast about his achievement “Look I got featured in the show”. Emotional connection and morale-boosting become a key ingredient for success.
Avoiding internal politics and resistance to change
It becomes crucial for the leaders and the management to develop a positive sentiment among employees within the company and it is not the responsibility of HR but also the responsibility of marketing to boost these sentiment needed in Indian corporate culture the information flows from top to bottom and if leaders are not positive about the work that they are doing about the products of the company and a slight negativity towards these things may lead to poor sentiment in the entire company.
For example: The marketing team decides to design a stall in an exhibition and deciding the booth to look the best. The marketing works hard to make a booth look exhuberant and beautiful. But if the employees and other departments of the company don’t promote the beautifully designed booth or find it unimportant that the design of the booth actually matters. Also senior leaders just stating that “What’s the big deal in that”. This reduces employee morale and any possibility of appreciation. Employees will also be reluctant to share the event details in their social media handles.
Here are a few steps that you should take to build a strong internal marketing strategy:
- Communicate all the important messaging through necessary media channels
- Providing accountability and a sense of belongingness.
- Frequent training and activities
- Create a program so that employees can participate and contribute
For B2B and manufacturing companies, investing in internal marketing is essential for fostering a committed workforce that actively contributes to achieving business objectives. By prioritizing employee engagement and aligning them with the company’s vision, organizations can create a resilient culture that withstands external pressures while driving long-term success.
