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Your Missed Marketing Opportunity: Promoting Employee Advocacy

Forbes Communications Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Rob Danna

I recently read an interesting article about how the future of B2B marketing is person to person, or P2P. Essentially the author’s point is all customers — regardless of whether they are B2B or B2C — expect to be treated as living, breathing, feeling humans. If you can show them you understand that by emotionally connecting with them, you’ll transform them into advocates. And advocates are more than just loyal; they are passionate champions for your brand. For many organizations, this will require a significant shift toward emotionally charged messaging that humanizes your brand and departs from common marketing jargon that only connects customers with your brand in generic ways.

In exchange, there’s a significant upside for an organization that can emotionally connect with its customers. According to research published in the Harvard Business Review, "fully connected" customers are 52% more valuable and spend twice as much on average than those who are just "highly satisfied." And let’s not kid ourselves, highly satisfied is a feat in and of itself.

I spend a lot of time talking with organizations that are looking to secure advocacy from their customers and partners, and this message certainly resonates with them. This approach holds a lot of merit in terms of the way an organization engages its employees. It may go by the name retention or engagement, but advocacy is really what an organization is looking for from its employees.

The answer to this challenge for many companies has been to focus on culture. Aligning it, enhancing it, fixing it — regardless of where a company falls in its transformative culture strategy, you would be hard pressed to find a more buzzed-about topic among organizational leaders right now. The good news? This trend has led to some amazing workplace evolutions, including greater flexibility, increased autonomy and other fringe benefits for employees. And while policy changes and behavioral adjustments are a significant step forward, I can’t help but notice companies are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to amplify the impact of those efforts to reinforce the emotion behind those changes.

They’re not marketing them internally.

A marketer’s job is to be an organizational storyteller. They spend their days understanding the customer’s journey in an effort to maximize opportunities to share personally relevant information. The end goal? Showing how much a brand knows, cares about and understands its customers. But how often is marketing or an agency involved in showing your employees (or prospective employees) how much your brand knows, cares about and understands them? Talk about a missed opportunity to reinforce emotional connection.

By merging the skill sets of HR and marketing, you will be able to amplify the reach of internal employee messaging as well as bring critical awareness to the variety of employee benefits available, be that team member events, recognition opportunities, development avenues — the list goes on.

But it’s about recognizing how far reaching the impact of a culture initiative can be, too. A culture transformation signals a fantastic opportunity to reinforce consistency for your brand experience from talent recruitment through customer experience. This attention to consistency is an emerging trend that is already seeing promising results.

Full disclosure: I work for ITA Group, an engagement solutions agency that has helped organizations plan, launch and operate transformative culture solutions. But that experience has given us the opportunity to learn about some of the specific ways marketing tactics can be overlooked during this process that are critical to long-term success.

Brand the initiative.

Identify the primary emotion you want your employees to associate with your culture and anchor your initiative’s brand to it. Not only will a brand give added emphasis at launch, it will give you a way to continually reinforce that emotion in all future activities. For example, our internal communications are associated with the brand "Be the Reason," which not only complements the themes of customer service, teamwork and employee ownership that are critical to the foundation of our culture, but also humanizes the message to team members.

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Launch the initiative.

Just like you would a new product or service offering, you must build excitement, awareness and passion about the changes you are rolling out through a formal launch. Too often clients piece-mail their strategy out to employees, which has far less impact.

Evaluate the initiative.

At times, organizations think simply announcing exciting culture changes is where the work stops. In reality, an organization’s culture continually changes based on a variety of internal and external factors. Without regularly monitoring the state of your culture — in formal and informal ways — you introduce the risk of degrading the work you put into the initiative in the first place.

While the impact of emotionally connecting with customers is well documented, the mainstream is just now coming to realize the importance of building that advocacy from within an organization’s employee base as well. The good news? We’re all humans who are biologically wired to want to connect — and we’re all consumers who have been emotionally connecting with brands for years. Now it’s on businesses to take that proven strategy and implement it across all brand touchpoints.