Did you know that employees can promote company brand way better than PPC-ads and newsletters? And you don’t need a huge budget or a marketing department for that. No wonder that for a service company marketing mix consists of 7 P’s, instead of 4. The fifth component is people, the ones who create the product.
Every employee is the face of the company. And the best marketer you can find.
A happy person who loves her work shares love to a company with the others. People get love, you get potential employees and clients. World of Digits prepared an informative presentation about why employees tend to ignore the importance of sharing love (read: branding a company) and how to encourage them.
Most advice given in this presentation focus on communicating the importance of branding in social media to employees and encouraging them materially. I would like to focus more on easy, practical and less expensive steps every company can do.
Here is a list of things you should do to raise brand awareness, attract more leads and qualified specialists:
1.Make your team happy.
If employees don’t like the company they work in, everything I suggest to do is useless.
2. Provide event tickets.
The employees will not only learn useful information at the events but also meet people from your sphere, tell them about your company and establish useful contacts.
3. Encourage writing articles.
The knowledge shared by your teammates will help other people learn, and you will get valuable content. The logic is simple: an article helps someone interested in your sphere → this person checks out who the writer is, asks questions → the reader remembers your company as a place where the expert works.
4. Optimise LinkedIn profiles.
All UPTech team members did that and it looks nice when you see how committed to the company the person is. Here’s what you can suggest depending on the company type:
- Set a profile photo in a branded t-shirt, or with any other company brand attributes.
- Set a cover photo with your company slogan and design.
- Write a custom heading for all team members. We did like this: “iOS developer in UPTech | Mobile & Web development”.
- Endorse each other’s skills and write recommendations to each other.
- If your team members write articles, ask them to republish these articles on LinkedIn as well. This is a good practice for search engine optimization as well.
- Add all relevant accomplishments, completed courses, gained awards.
5. Turn workers into experts.
Encourage your teammates to become lecturers or experts on public events. Invest into developing them as good public speakers. Here are 10 tips on how to improve public speaking skills. This way, more people get to know about your company and brilliant employees.
6. Provide brand attributes.
T-shirts, key rings, stickers, notebooks, pens, cups…the list is long and the more creative it gets, the better. It’s important to make this objects lovable, this way their owners will want to show them to the others.
7. Share code.
If your company works in IT sphere, offer your employees to share their code in open-source repositories, like GitHub. This way, they will help other developers learn, and gain a better reputation. Besides, such sites are a good source of traffic.
8. Give wow-service.
Your employees are best marketers when they do their job well, provide service beyond expectations, and make the client happy with what he gets.
Remember, that if your team is not happy with their work and company, none of the things listed above are going to work. What is worse, it will become an anti-marketing campaign and harm your business.
So, before turning your employees into marketers, make sure they have everything necessary to work comfortably. These needs vary depending on the company, but here’s what can work in your business:
- Flexible schedule. Employees come and leave whenever they want, the only condition is to get their responsibilities done. Also, working from home is a usual practice which means people can travel freely and work will never be a burden for them.
- Good social package. English classes, gym subscription, health or life insurance, driving school lessons are all bringing value to you as an employer.
- Praises. Show your gratefulness to the contributions other team members did. Make small presents without special occasions, to praise your colleague for the good work.
- Small pleasant things. Tasty cookies and coffee, cozy chairs, blankets in case of cold weather, thank-you postcards, cards on Valentine’s day — all these tiny cute things multiply the love to your company.
- Teambuilding events. This means not only New Year and Halloween parties, but movie nights, sport games or hanging out in office after work.
- Opportunity to make a change. Enable all workers to put forward their ideas regarding your company, projects, an organization of work process.
- Feedback sharing. If the process is well-organized, this will help team members improve and communicate better. Here is the guide to implementing feedback sharing in organization and tips on how to give feedback.
Making your team members happy, and communicating the importance of sharing information about your company saves much effort and costs. Not to mention that this is the foundation of the healthy working environment and business success :)