With social media, it’s every employee’s responsibility to represent your brand. While the message is often touted by marketing and internal comm managers alike, getting employees to actually believe it and promote your brand is no easy feat. Here are four tips to get everyone onboard…
Start with the Why
Author Simon Sinek talks about the golden circle approach, how people often know what businesses do, how they do it, but not why they do it. The most successful brands start with the why: their cause, their inspiration, why they believe in what they’re doing. The message needs to be short, simple, and universal, so employees feel empowered to talk about it. This is important with product launches, event promotions and all marketing campaigns—and of course, the message needs to be fine-tuned to your prospective buyer markets.
Socialize the Plan
Once you have the right message, you need to drive support for it internally. Think like a soccer team. A single player can’t win the game; all players need to have a stake in the output. This means getting executive buy-in, lobbying for support across multiple departments—everyone needs to share ownership.
There are several ways you can get everyone involved. First off, keep your objective simple. Give employees reasons to support what you’re doing: why it matters and how it will impact the business. Then promote your message on all channels: your company’s private social network, intranet, email, etc. Give employees the chance to respond with comments and feel involved. Plus, take the time to meet with different teams in person and present your strategy.
Market the Campaign Internally (without being annoying)
After you’ve socialized the campaign internally and you’re ready to launch, launch an internal campaign as well. Post a message to your company network, reiterating your goals and objectives—how it will help the sales team, for example—and provide a clear list of content that employees can re-share: webinars, slides, videos, potential Tweets and sound bytes for everyone to put out there.
Gather Feedback
Once your campaign has launched, check in. Along with doing the usual campaign monitoring, ask sales reps what sort of questions they’re getting from prospects and refine your campaign as needed. One great benefit of cultivating a company-wide social network is that you can gather collective feedback from employees. You can take polls and really mine your collective intelligence for insights and fresh ideas.
With digital technology, businesses now have the potential to make every employee a promotional warrior. But, how you inspire and socialize your message can make all the difference.
Discover how businesses are building momentum for their brand from the top down and the bottom up at http://www.tibbr.com.
