by Robert Rose
The connection with audiences and building an employee retention relationship is nicely conceptualized by the content marketing hourglass created by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi, and described in their book Managing Content Marketing. We need a well-thought-out process that identifies the right people to recruit, in the same way that we create personas for our customers, and their potential role within the organization. We work with them in the same way that we segment external audiences. We can then understand how to nurture them and convert them to employees.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Many employers treat the conversion from recruit to employee the same way as the honeymoon period in a new marriage: Once they sign on the dotted line, the romance fades and they’re left with the drudgery of everyday life. But, long, happy marriages prevail when both sides understand the importance of communication and jointly build a common story. So, just because a person begins to work for us doesn’t mean we can ignore their interests and concerns. We must keep communication open and build the story, the relationship, and the experiences. We need to get creative about engaging with employees so that we can nurture them and evolve them from people who are merely satisfied with their work to loyal employees, and eventually to brand evangelists.
Keep telling your brand story once people start working for your company. Will a company intranet and an annual town hall meeting cut it? Probably not. Because we live in an instant, real-time world, you should consider incorporating enterprise social network tools such as Yammer and Socialcast. Even Google+ supports internal hangouts and lets people post only within their organization. Companies that have nontraditional, hard-to-reach employees such as medical staff, oil rig workers, or field-tech teams, have started to develop “bring your own device” policies, so employees can connect online using their mobile device of choice. After all, employees can learn to tell the brand story only if the company can connect with them.
Nurturing prospective employees into engaged brand evangelists is a process similar to nurturing prospects into loyal customers.
2. Sales
Salespeople are the face of any company. Many come to marketing and ask for help because they’re starting to understand social selling and the idea of social business. They want to be able to write blog posts, comment in online forums, connect with people on LinkedIn, and post presentations to SlideShare.
Sadly, for many salespeople it’s easier to do a Google search to find out what their own company is saying, rather than try to hear it from marketing. This is because there’s no organized structure for how marketing publishes content internally, how it’s organized, or how the sales team can find and use it. There’s just a glut of “stuff” that salespeople don’t have time to dig through. There’s no company emphasis on helping them understand why it’s important to be consistent or how doing so can improve their performance.
We know that buyers today are up to 70% of the way through their decision-making process before they reach out to a salesperson.79 But up to 60% of all buying decisions are lost to the status quo—meaning the prospect decides to stay with what he already has instead of making a change.80 That’s a huge red flag.
It means that marketing and sales must communicate more effectively, because while customers are self-educated, that doesn’t mean that they’re well-educated. Sales must be ready to tell the same story in a familiar language for customers before they come to the table and before the first direct sales conversation.
Corporate Visions points out that executive decision makers view salespeople as 88% proficient in their knowledge of products, but only 24% proficient on conversing about business challenges.81 If you’ve successfully transitioned your marketing story into one that talks about solving problems and delivering business value, have you helped your sales team do the same?
We need a framework for better communication and feedback so that the stories we marketers tell actually prepare prospects for their first conversation with sales. Salespeople also need to speak up about what they need marketing to be communicating. According to the CMO Council, salespeople spend 40% of their time looking for or preparing content for customer communications. That’s a lot of wasted time, which can lead to problems such as inconsistent messaging and inaccurate information. That time can be minimized with better marketing, sales, and customer communication.
We marketers generate a lot of resources around industry trends, business challenges, use cases, and best practices. A primary goal is to help position our brands as trusted sources of information. But it’s equally important to make sure the sales teams are intimately familiar with our top-of-funnel strategy so that their conversations will be a much deeper extension of the same story. Several of our clients have implemented a marketing automation approach with their sales teams, so they can track behavior and understand engagement and nurturing for their sales teams through content. Just like data and analytics help inform marketers about what matters to customers, it can do the same internally with sales teams. We need to make sure that someone is covering the middle ground and that we aren’t leaving prospects in “no man’s land” between marketing and sales.
Towers Watson says that one of the benefits of building sustainable engagement within an organization is that high-performing sales employees are almost twice as likely to be highly engaged than lower-performing sales employees. Teaching our sales team how to use the brand story for conversations beyond those at the top of the funnel will improve their ability to find opportunities to drive more business—and to improve their individual performance.
When we consider content such as customer examples, testimonials, product or service demos, and white papers, we must think about how to use these to help sales continue to tell the brand story later in the sales cycle. We also need to teach sales reps how to use content to sell more effectively. Moreover, this will help reduce the 40% time-suck, so they can spend more time doing what they do best—selling.
3. Research and Development
Marketers rarely see their role as a connecter and unifier, a role that begins with research and development. It’s not just that R&D needs to know what’s going on with the company in general, it’s that marketing needs to take the brand story and start from the very beginning, not four steps down the road during focus groups, and help discover new ways to delight customers.
For example, Emerson’s brand story revolves around solving problems for their customers. They took the voice of their customers and backed it up to everything they created and delivered. They realized that many of the answers to their customers’ problems weren’t new products, but rather more innovative approaches to how they did business. They saw that, as their customers became savvier, they looked for things such as efficiency, productivity, and cost savings because their own financial demands were stringent. They moved from producing only products to evangelizing the experience they were creating for customers and creating as simple and seamless an experience as they could.
This approach led to studying what mattered most to customers in a different light. For example, for one customer, solving their problems and simplifying business didn’t come in the form of a new product. It was literally about how to do business together. In one instance, improvement came in the form of consolidated invoices that were easier to read. Simple? Perhaps. Easy to do for a global enterprise with numerous backend systems? Not exactly. But with the focus on solving problems for customers and simplifying business, teams within Emerson understood the need to collaborate across the company to make it possible.
4. Employees
When it comes to the overall employee population, we’re consistently amazed at how many companies ignore this audience. Why does a company spend hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—to brand or rebrand themselves and tell a story that they believe will make them stand out in a noisy marketplace, and then neglect teaching their all-important internal audience how to tell that story?
A recent study from
Altimeter Group found that only 51% of employees clearly understood and supported the purpose and mission of their organization. Only 43% said their employer’s culture was one of trust and empowerment that is needed for employee engagement and advocacy. Fewer than half (45%) said they knew what they should and shouldn’t do around company-related topics on social media.82
Remarkable brand stories don’t just get customers and prospects talking; it’s also exciting for employees to hear and talk about their story. Wonderful brand stories give people something to share with one another, something to banter back and forth, and something to champion. Those stories encourage people to open lines of communication and to hear different opinions and points of view.
When employees engage with the brand story, it’s much easier to invite them to be a part of the story and contribute to it. When they take part in creating and telling that ongoing story, employees take greater ownership in making it come alive through experiences. They become deeply, emotionally engaged with the companies they work for, and create seamless experiences for external audiences.
Long, happy marriages between employers and employees happen when both sides understand the importance of communication and how to create their story together. So what, exactly, does that take in today’s unpredictable environment?
Motorola Solutions serves as an example of how to do it right. The company functioned as one entity for 80 years under the Motorola name. In January 2011, Motorola split into two: B2B brand Motorola Solutions and consumer-facing Motorola Mobility, which Google later bought. Leadership had prepared for the separation for two years.
Motorola Solutions discussed the need to have a clear, compelling story that not only created engagement in their employees, but would also attract people to work for their company, retain employees, and keep them engaged for the long term. They wanted to know how to keep employees motivated and how to keep them focused. Most importantly, they wanted to tell the story of where they were going (as a company) to employees, so they could, in turn, bring it to life for customers.
They saw this as a time to teach employees how they could make a difference not only within the company, but also with their customers all around the world. They believed wholeheartedly that it would foster a sense of pride in the work that people did, while improving and enhancing their employee engagement.
From the employees’ perspective, it started one Friday afternoon when they went home as employees of one company, and then on Monday, returned to work for one of two companies. Over the weekend, Motorola Solutions physically rebranded 30 of its facilities worldwide so that when employees walked in on Monday morning they saw tangible expressions of change—evidence that their new brand story was already coming to life.83
The company spent the rest of 2011 integrating the brand promise into the corporate culture and helping employees understand how to tell it to the outside world. They took their brand story, “helping people be better in the moments that matter,” and taught employees about the impact they had on the world and kept them excited about what the company did on a long-term, sustainable basis.
This was crucial, because as Motorola Solutions’ focus shifted to telling the story externally, their ads, their website, and the content for sales and human resources told the story that employees already knew. So if a customer mentioned something about an ad, employees could easily continue the conversation and extend that story. Most importantly, customers could tell that Motorola Solutions employees believed in the story they were telling.
This employee “buy in” is important to understand. It’s not unusual for a company’s story to lack credibility with employees. If the brand story reflects the company today, employees will more easily engage as storytellers—if it’s a good story. If we’re trying to change the story being told, employees need tangible expressions of change, recruitment, recognition, rewards, and overall culture before they begin to believe. Marketing needs to help them feel proud to represent their employers. Fundamentally, it’s vital that employees tell the company’s story as a cohesive unified team.
CREATING A FRAMEWORK
Just as we strategically plan and manage the stories that we tell to audiences outside the company, we need to plan and structure how we manage content creation for internal audiences in the same way. It’s a key part of how we create consistent conversations and experiences with employees.
In this illustration, we have the team (or person) who’s responsible for internal content at the center. From there, we have four goals that they need to focus on to develop a successful content creation management system for employees.
• At the top of the circle, we need content marketers to focus on creating excitement for employees and inspiring them to be a part of learning our story and then, eventually, making it come alive.
• Once we have their attention, we move to the right to make sure that we consistently deliver the brand story over and over again. It has to be consistent through every channel where it’s told: executive communication, company intranet, employee newsletters, all employee calls, the language that human resources uses around benefits, culture, rewards, and recognition—all channels. Our goal is to make sure that employees have a deep understanding of the brand story and what it means to them in their world. This might be human resources or sales, but it can also mean research and development, accounting, and IT; it has to resonate and feel real for employees in every department. We want to make it easy for every person to share and consume the story. Because the more the story is shared, the more it’s reinforced and becomes engrained in the organization.
Marketers need a framework for internal publishing in order to create consistent conversations with employees.
• Next, moving to the bottom of the circle, we want employees to know the story so well that they have a deep expertise in it. That means that they’re highly engaged in telling it and they’ll help uncover new stories, both internally and with customers, that will resonate as the story is told.
• And finally, just as with external audiences, we have to make sure that we’re delivering the right story to the right person, at the right time and place. Not every employee has to hear every story, nor do they want to. So we need to be discerning about how stories are told to different employee populations, so that we aren’t creating noise for them, which will only make them tune out. They have limited attention spans, just like customers and prospects, and we need to make sure that we’re talking about what’s relevant in their world.
Now that we know the four areas to focus on, the internal content manager needs to understand some of the dynamics of this framework.
If the content manager focuses on creating continual engagement, that will transition employees from being excited and wanting to be a part of telling the brand story, to the next phase. This is where they’re actively engaged and have a clear understanding of the brand story and understand how their work creates the actual experience that customers have.
From there, clearly communicate the story so that employees develop expertise in understanding and telling the story and can discuss the “why” behind it. They recognize when they see other examples of living and delivering that brand story, either in their own work or in that of others.
At this point, we can begin to measure the effectiveness of internal content efforts, how well employees retain the brand story, and how we can improve effectiveness. We can do this with internal audits, surveys, or focus groups to get a better sense of what we can do to increase overall effectiveness. We can then start to look for other opportunities to further engrain the brand story, so it becomes second nature. Following this model, content managers will be able to uncover stories that are hidden deeper within an organization—better stories—and begin to tell them internally and externally.
Finally, think about how to increase the effectiveness of what’s being done to improve engagement and to make sure that people hear the stories that are the most relevant to
them. This way, we can keep the excitement going for what the organization is doing and can solidify and grow relationships with employees, as they feel more and more part of the bigger whole that is the brand story.
WHAT’S NEXT: THE 90-DAY VISION
Marketers must understand that a key expansion of our role is to teach employees our brand story and help them make it come alive for external audiences. Empowering employees to become brand storytellers is critical to creating seamless experiences for all audiences outside the company.
• The First Month—Assessing the state of the union
Are you doing anything now to connect with employees? This may mean your intranet (in whatever way, shape, or form it’s maintained—or not), departmental, or functional communications (e.g., human resources, updates to technical teams, communications with the field or front-line employees, channel partners, etc.). Make a complete audit of what’s already being done, by whom, the audience, and frequency. Groups may continue to manage their micro-communities, but you still need to understand them and tap them to share what’s going on with the greater employee population as needed.
Bring employees into your CCM strategy.
As you move through the CCM framework, identify the CCM team members responsible for internal publishing.
As you plan to organize and manage your CCM framework, keep in mind that employees are part of your audience. What experiences do you want to create for them?