Ditch the ‘mushroom management’ and improve staff morale!
Internal marketing communications is an area that is often overlooked, but it’s a crucial tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Spread the word
OK … so your marketing teams are aware of your marketing goals, as are most likely a number of your senior directors or managers. But how do you make sure that everyone else within your business – especially those who are customer facing – receive, understand and communicate the same marketing messages that are built into your external marketing campaigns?
By keeping your staff and collaborative partners fully up-to-speed with your marketing aims, you can ensure that they’ll play their own part in increasing customer satisfaction and encouraging spend.
Your sales team
Your sales staff are by far the most important audience for rolling out your internal communication strategy.
Internal and external sales staff need to know the features, benefits and target markets of your products and services from front to back.Without a firm understanding of your current and planned marketing activities, they’ll not be in a position take advantage of them.
Without a firm understanding of your current and planned marketing activities, they’ll not be in a position take advantage of them.
Letting your sales teams know about upcoming promotional offers, events, new product launches, new services etc. at an early stage, means that they can highlight any initiatives when speaking to existing and prospective customers.
Your board members and department heads
It’s important for your entire senior management team to understand your marketing messages and programs and be fully dedicated to their reasoning and execution.
Leading by example is proven to motivate and encourage and it’s important that when asked questions by members of their team – management is fully versed and can communicate key information confidently and knowledgeably.
Customer care staff
From call centre staff and trade counter operatives to customer service and exhibition stand personnel, it’s absolutely vital that all members of staff that come into contact with existing or prospective customers – either face to face or via phone/email/online chat – are fully versed on your marketing messages and campaigns.
In fact, ALL of your employees!
You’d think that given the vast array of choices for communicating with staff these days – mobile phones, e-mail, social media, instant messaging etc – internal communication would improve.
But the opposite seems to be true: as technology advances, the quality of communication declines. Communicating information about marketing to all of your employees is crucial, even if they do not deal directly with customers.
Mushroom management (keeping your workforce in the dark) is a thing of the past and good communication is essential to motivation, innovation, good customer service, staff retention and change management.
