Marketing is a big focus of any company – almost every CEO will either have marketing on their essential business operations or will have an aspiration to spend more on marketing in the future. What too few businesses understand, however, is that marketing is a two-sided coin – there’s external marketing (showing everyone else why your business is great) and internal marketing (making sure your company culture is optimised and employees have confidence in your business). Internal marketing may not be as crucial as external marketing for small businesses, but poor internal marketing can cause a crisis for businesses with a larger team of employees. What follows are three internal marketing strategies used by companies in the UK to keep employees happy, motivated and engaged.
Courier News – Royal Mail
The Royal Mail has a magazine that’s sent to the home of every single employee nationwide (over 150,000 postal workers). The Royal Mail Group wanted to engage their employees more and make younger employees more engaged with postal work, so they decided to do an award-winning revamp of Courier News. They did this with technology – creating digital channels to supplement their offline channels so that employees can access Courier content from their phones or computers. They integrated newsflashes so that employees can stay up to date with postal-relevant news in quick bursts, so they feel part of a larger community. Feeling part of a community does wonders for humans, making them feel more satisfied and noticed – a lack of this recognition was even one of Karl Marx’s main criticisms of capitalism!
Inpulse – Various Companies
There are many problems that companies face when it comes to their internal marketing; including those related to company culture collapse during change management (which can cripple businesses if mishandled). Inpulse.com decided to take a tech-focused approach to solving these issues: they created a series of surveys that measure emotional changes across departments and articulate the data in easy-to-understand graphs so that management figures have their fingers on the pulse of the workforce and can implement any internal marketing measures that are needed. Having a thorough awareness of internal emotions allows businesses to make efficient internal marketing decisions, which can save a lot of time and money in the long run.
Digital Suggestion Box – Waitrose & Partners
This leading British supermarket had a problem in that their employees weren’t particularly engaged. They realised that one of the best ways to engage employees was to answer the question: what’s in it for me? In order to make the workforce feel like there’s something in it for them, they decided to encourage employees to contribute ideas, so that they felt the company was more democratic.
They did this with a simple technological solution –a digital suggestion box. Employees could use the digital suggestion box through a web page or a mobile app whenever they felt it necessary. Waitrose then created a social network around this, to make employees feel like they’re part of a community and therefore engage them. Employees could interact with other questions – commenting on them and liking suggestions and ideas. Employees felt recognised and that their ideas were being taken seriously – a brilliant internal marketing win.
