Positioning your communications
The starting point for any communications strategy is agreeing your positioning for all your communications – a set of guiding principles by which all campaigns are created and rolled out. This applies to employee and consumer communications alike.
There are 3 universal principles that are interlinked. When used together they ensure engagement with your audience:
1. Authentic
2. Transparent
3. Personal
Authenticity
Communications must always be authentic. It’s about real stories showing the real people in the business or real people using your brand to create a connection.
A brand or employee campaign should grow by showing its benefits to the consumer or employee through storytelling. Users “switch off” when they feel they are being overly advertised to in the case of brand marketing. And employees will too if there isn’t a good reason behind a new system, policy, culture or tech they need to adopt.
It’s about creating real connection that resonates with your audience.
Transparency
Your communications should aim to show transparency, for example, through how a brand is made ethically from the supply chain, to manufacturing, and real benefits to purchase it. For example, a jeweller shows behind the scenes photos or videos of the stages of crafting a piece.
Transparency with employees, especially change communications, is vital so they feel secure and understand why the change is being implemented.
Often employees are overwhelmed with frequent change. It throws them off left feeling frustrated that they need to learn something new yet again or change the way they work perhaps drastically. Being transparent means explaining why it’s important for them and the business to adopt the change positively.
Personal
Your brand or employee communications need to stay personal as far as possible.
For brand marketing you need to know your audience to connect with them in a genuine way. Today’s consumers are savvy. They can see through direct advertising and pure PR.
If they feel connected to the brand because it brings them joy, is effective or easy to use, meets their need, they are more likely to make the purchase. And by showcasing consumer experiences through storytelling, your reach will gather momentum through word of mouth.
For employees, using employee generated videos, and delivering a message that is personal makes it far more relatable.
Building Community
For companies and brands, social media, and being able to leverage it, is a non-negotiable.
Social media is the only way to build communities where you can have real conversations with your target audience. It’s important than that your social media accounts are managed so that conversation can be created where the author responds to comments in a personal and genuine way. Copying and pasting a response will only aggravate users. Whilst it requires more effort for the channel manager, the results will be far reaching. It’s in essence talking to a human, not an auto generated response that’s impersonal.
For employees, communities can be built through channels such as a SharePoint site which has a chat component, Viva Engage where comments are enabled, a business WhatsApp group, or a Teams group. All of which need to be regulated and managed.
