Borrowing brilliance - 5 marketing techniques that will transform your employee communications

Businesses are always talking about breaking down silos and collaborative working. But one often overlooked opportunity for powerful collaboration is between marketing and HR.

As an HR professional turned copywriter, I’ve had the benefit of working in both camps. And I’m here to share five helpful tips from the world of marketing. Tips you can quickly and easily apply to your HR and reward communications to make them even more impactful.

Five tactics you can steal straight from the marketing playbook

HR and marketing might seem like two very different disciplines but, when it comes to employee comms, there’s a lot of crossover. And there are some marketing tactics you can immediately put to good use in your employee communications.

1 - Selling

Great marketing creates a sense of readiness to buy or sign up to something. And with employee communications, you’re often selling something too - be it change, internal products or services (aka your reward package) or the company’s mission, vision, and values.

Marketing techniques - like understanding your audience with employee personas and creating an emotional response through powerful narratives and compelling copy - can be used to help ‘sell’ whatever it might be to employees.

This doesn’t mean switching into super-sleazy sales mode. Because, by adopting the right tone of voice for your business and message, you can be persuasive without the snake oil.

2 - Building trust

Brands build trust with their customers just as employers need to build trust with their employees.

Marketing teams do this by crafting a brand with a clear tone of voice. Employers can do the same by creating an employer brand with a specific voice, using clear language and adopting a consistent style. Communication should always be values-based, giving you another way to bring your company values to life and build trust with your team.

3 - Knowing your audience

Organisations are starting to think more about how they communicate to different segments of their employee population - a play straight out of the marketing handbook.

Segmenting employees and creating employee personas ensure HR teams know their audience and how to best communicate with them. Personas can also play a big role in helping you create the right narratives and messaging for different communication campaigns.

4 - Adding a clear call to action

Marketers often explicitly tell customers what to do next - buy, call, visit, shop, sign up!

This tactic is also great for employee communications because it guides people onto the next step. Whether that’s to take action by doing something specific or directing people to more support or resources. For example, ‘You’ve signed up for your pension – click here to fill out your beneficiary form and protect your loved ones.’

Often, employee communications don’t explicitly tell employees what to do, which can cause confusion. Simply adding a call to action can instantly make your communications more impactful.

5 - Creating communications that cover the entire employee lifecycle

As an HR leader, you’ll be familiar with the employee lifecycle. But have you heard of the customer journey? And what has this marketing concept got to do with your comms?

The employee lifecycle

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The customer journey

Where the employee lifecycle covers the employee journey from hire to retire, the customer journey covers a similar cycle:

Awareness and consideration = attraction

Marketers attract customers. Businesses need to attract employees. Both can use similar channels - word of mouth, online ads, print ads, social media, even PR.

Purchase = hire

Finding the right customer for your business and giving them enough reason to buy from you is the same as finding the right employee and giving them enough reason to work for you.

You attract them by advertising the job in the right way with the right features and benefits - in this case the mission, vision and values of the employer, the compensation and benefits, the culture and career opportunities.

Advocacy and loyalty = advocacy and retention

Engaged customers sing the praises of the product or service they’ve bought. Engaged employees say good things about the business - it’s one of the key measures of employee engagement. And engaged employees are more likely to stay with your business.

Exit/transition

Marketers like to try and retain customers - think about those last-ditch offers to keep your business if you unsubscribe from a service. They also keep in touch with ex-customers where possible, for example with email marketing, keeping the door open for the customer to return in future.

Employers can adopt similar tactics by trying to retain good employees when they want to leave. Leading organisations maintain good relationships with leavers via alumni communications. Making it more likely that they can re-engage people in the future if a return to the business could work for both parties.

What does this mean for your employee communications?

With so much crossover, there’s an opportunity for HR leaders to steal like an artist from marketing. For example, by tailoring messages to employees at different stages of the employee lifecycle and using a similar range of channels to engage employees at different points.

I’ve highlighted a few of the opportunities in the diagram below. There’s more that could be included but this is the big stuff.

Why apply these tactics to your HR communications?

Engaging employees with highly effective communications boosts employee experience, which in turn drives these business benefits:

Companies with the most effective communications are two times as likely to outperform their competitors.
Highly effective communications lead to 47% higher total shareholder returns. Companies that score in the top 25% on employee experience have better ROI.

Applying a marketing perspective to your HR communications is a great way to nail your messaging, content and delivery. Giving you a tried and tested framework for rapid communications success.

I work with HR teams to make their employee communications the best they can be. Want to know more? Contact me by email, phone +44 (0)7703 155 404 or LinkedIn message. Visit my website here.