We’ve all heard the term “brand ambassadors”—celebrities and customer enthusiasts, as well as your own employees, who convey their unabashed support about your brand to others. They each play a vital role in promoting your company, products and services. And, in fact, your own employees are the starting point—the life blood of any company or organization.

Communicating your marketing message to all your employees, not just the sales team—so they understand, believe in, and cheer for your brand—is a fundamental, but an oft-overlooked piece of the sales-marketing puzzle. Why? Because:

• A concentrated, integrated, internal marketing effort to all employees communicates not only the brand promise, but also each person’s role in it.
• It communicates corporate values and the importance of practicing them.
• It aligns your organization’s efforts with your customer’s needs.
• It links incentives, training, as well as recognition and rewards programs to the primary mission of exceeding customer expectations.

For all of these reasons and more, your internal messaging to employees must be done with precision and purpose, crystal clarity in the brand promise, and frequent communications of both.

Flipping Outward-Facing Programs Inward

Whether your point-of-customer contact is in a call center, on the retail sales floor, at a wholesale counter, in field service, or in the headquarters support office, every one of your employees needs to be on the same page. They need to know what’s expected of them. And they need to be motivated to deliver the brand promise. But, with employees working across departments and disciplines—many perhaps out of your own scope of primary responsibilities—how can you help easily put into place an enterprise-wide engagement program that benefits all? 

Choosing The Right Partner and Platform

There are many software platforms available today that let you easily implement an enterprise-wide engagement strategy. The purpose: to manage programs and processes seamlessly and turn your employees from inward-facing to outward-facing—from focusing on what they do to concentrating on who they do it for.

It may seem overwhelming, but there are specialist organizations that can handle the process for you. More importantly, perhaps, here are a few questions to get you thinking about the link between your internal and external marketing, and about potential missed opportunities within your organization that you may want to explore:

• Does your marketing strategy call for maximizing the number of different product sales to each customer? Do your people know that? Do you have any incentives in place to drive that behavior? Is it easy for them to make the referrals that are necessary to achieve those objectives? If you can’t answer, “yes” to every one of those questions, you’re potentially missing out on sales and are bound to achieve something less than the performance levels you need.
  
• Does your team—all employees entrusted with your brand promise—know what that brand promise actually is? Can they verbalize it? Do they know what they have to do to deliver it? And in a larger sense, do they know your corporate values? Most importantly, have the corporate values been personalized for them to translate into their actions on the job?

In our next article, “A Quick Peek at the Psychology Behind Employee Engagement,” we’ll explore the core principles behind driving employee engagement. In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more, contact us to chat about amping up your organization’s success with an employee engagement program of your own.