While most of our branding efforts are focused on customers and creating an awesome brand identity, rarely who notices another crucial audience – his own employees. In the end, they are the ambassadors of a brand and can make a rebrand become alive in the eyes of the consumers.
The best employees are the ones who believe in their brand, admire it, and are fully aligned with its vision and mission. After all, if the people inside the company don’t represent it properly and themselves don’t trust it, how can they inspire the same feeling in the customers?
Thus, a strong internal branding creates a chance to galvanize the employee support for your brand.
Internal Branding In A Nutshell
Internal branding is a consistent effort in which you encourage your workers to understand the reasons behind your business proposition. It doesn’t receive the same attention as external brandings, like SEO efforts and social media branding, but its role in the company’s success should not be neglected.
Internal branding will enable you to convey the parts of your brand onto the employee behavior. When done appropriately, it will develop a positive cycle – Reaching out to employees who love the brand and letting them communicate that love to clients and partners. Ultimately empowering the brand and attracting even greater workers.
Start With A Purposeful Mission Statement
Mission statement – a fundamental part of a brand’s strategy. The mission statement needs to be able to not just motivate the consumer, but also your employees. At its core, it is a “what we do and why we do it” story to be told.
If your company doesn’t know where it’s going, it will have a harder time developing the identity and purpose with which your employees identify. Businesses with a clear sense of purpose outperform the competition by as much as 400%.
Workers that understand your business purpose and what separates it from the competition will be able to transparently convey such meaning to your customers. The more they understand the difference between your brand and other companies, the more they will be prepared to communicate that to your clients in a clear and efficient manner. Which will positively affect how the customer views your brand and how they feel about it.
Give Your Employees A More Direct Role In The Internal Branding Process
Giving a more hands-on approach to your team in the internal branding efforts can be enormously effective. It switches your employees onto the new brand and allows you to have more engaged employees when implementing branding strategy across your business.
You can delegate different responsibilities to employees by appointing some of them to act as brand ambassadors. Depending on how big your company is, one or two employees or a brand representative within every department will suffice. It doesn’t matter how many you have chosen for this task, they will need resources to successfully promote your brand identity.
An internal brand ambassador needs to ask questions about the brand, act as a champion of the brand by adopting the branding efforts across internal documents, and by engaging other employees about it.
Personalize Your Employee Experience
An awesome employee experience within the company is the best path for nurturing a relationship with the workforce and allowing your employees to be more than just a screw in a machine. First, recognize your employees. This will increase morale since recognition for their work through the company’s events or social networks creates a motivated workforce that knows its efforts are acknowledged.
Next, reward their extra efforts and compliance with the brand standards. For example, you can reward your employees with personalized payroll cards, that provide them with fast access to their paychecks, when they have gone above and beyond with their efforts in your company.
Lastly, nurture the relationship between the workers and their immediate supervisors. Executives should care more about their employees and learn something about them that goes beyond their daily work roles. This will connect your employees as people and integrate them perfectly into the company’s environment.
Internal Communication
Ever since the stone age, humans have lived and hunted together. Big social groups and interactions between their members protected us against predators. Although we have exchanged tribes for corporations, the same rules still apply. Communication is fundamental for ensuring that every person in the company knows its value; that is essential when it comes to building a strong employer brand.
Develop a transparent and consistent strategy for conveying your brand values to employees. A successful internal communication strategy needs to build a mutual dialogue between managers and employees. The usual channels of internal communications are intranet, office posters and displays, social media, email, and internal messaging. Here’s another good resource on how to create an effective internal communication strategy.
Let your employees be in the loop about everything that happens inside the brand and engaged with the work culture. If workers feel alienated, they can be easily led astray from the brands’ vision and won’t notice the brand’s promise.
Creating and implementing an internal branding process is a time consuming and costly investment. But its rewards are tangible and innumerable. Engaged employees recommend their brand’s services and products and have a good understanding of how to meet the consumers’ requirements, staff turnover will be much lower and operating income will increase over the years. All humans want to belong somewhere and have a greater purpose to work towards. Make from your brand just that, and your empowered employees will carry your brand to its success.
