Branding 101
Your team should live your brand for it to connect to your audience
According to Forbes, a business usually has three to four' target audiences', including employees and, sometimes, investors. Mostly when companies create branding strategies, they focus on their existing and potential customers. While the primary audience for any business is its consumers, the employees are also hugely important. Companies have to engage their employees through internal branding to experience growth and success with their brand strategies.
You want your employees to believe in the products or services and promote them with sincerity. By incorporating your brand values, mission statement or tagline in internal communication through emails and regular newsletters, you can engage them with your brand and keep them motivated too.
These are a few reasons why branding should play an important role in internal communication.
Successful Internal Branding can lead to Easier Recruitment
Before applying for a position at any company, potential employees usually look for information on its operations and core values like innovation, support and responsibility. They will most likely find all this from existing employees in the organisation and the perception that consumers have of its brand. It's why the external branding that a company does with its tagline, logo design, colours and content should be similar to the internal one.
Once the present employees have the same positive perception of your brand as the consumers, they will share a reasonable opinion about the company with potential employees. It will make recruitment easier for you and also help you find out what motivates your workers. Take the example of Nike here.
The company stresses its slogan of 'Just do it' with its employees and makes them feel close to the brand. It also encourages the employees to share inspirational and success stories as the brand stands for achievement and excellence.
Creating a supportive environment for their workers has shown itself as a good place for people to work. This helps them recruit qualified candidates for open positions who are confident and demonstrate leadership qualities.
Internal Branding Helps Build out your Organisation's Culture
The idea behind frequent interaction and communications with the employees is to create a culture within the company that reflects the brand. Businesses can highlight their brand message, which can promise comfort and confidence when communicating with their employees through blogs, emails, announcements, and intranet.
This will help business owners build a positive company culture where people know the purpose behind the brand and what it stands for.
Align Internal Branding with the External
The employees need to get the same message and brand voice that the target audience is familiar with. If there is a difference in internal and external branding, the chances are that you could confuse the customers and the employees. The goal is to have the employees promote the products and services in a similar way that they are being marketed.
Imagery, brand identity designs, taglines, and slogans in internal communication can help align external and internal branding. A marketing team can send out short videos during conferences or pictures posted on the social media groups of employees about new campaigns and product promotions.
It is how most prominent brands like Coca-Cola and Starbucks have successfully managed to align their internal and external branding.
To Sum Up
These are some factors that show why branding should be playing a part in a brand's internal communication. Once you can incorporate internal branding within the interaction with the employees, it could become easier to create a healthy work environment and experience growth.