Telling your employee reward story through multichannel communications

Your employee reward story has the power to inspire performance and engage colleagues with their compensation and benefits, helping them feel more motivated and boosting their wellbeing, productivity and job satisfaction.

To get your employee reward stories heard, you need effective internal communications. And a multichannel approach could be just the thing. 

Keep reading to learn what multichannel communications are, why they’re effective for reward and how you can use this approach. 

What is multichannel communications?

If you’re broadcasting your messages via various channels, including offline and online channels, you’re taking a multichannel approach to your comms. This approach is usually attributed to customer engagement. But it can elevate employee engagement too; it increases your reach by targeting people on different platforms, including:

• Offline internal channels:

• The office

• In-person events

• Town halls

• Team leader meetings

• Employee engagement forums

• Awaydays 

• Online internal channels

• Corporate social media (Teams, Yammer, Slack. etc.)

• Email

• Blog

• TV 

• YouTube 

• Intranet

• A branded wiki

• WhatsApp groups

• Podcast

Soon, I’ll share with you creative ways to use these channels to bolster reward comms. First, let’s look at the benefits of the multichannel approach. 

Why multichannel communications is helpful for reward comms

Multichannel communications fuels better reward comms for a variety of reasons. The most obvious benefit is that you broaden your reach, ensuring your message touches as many people as possible. But this approach also helps you:

Stay connected to a multi-generational workforce

The modern workforce stretches across decades of time and experience. Diversifying your communications is a must to ensure nobody in your business misses out on the chance to hear about your employee rewards. Multichannel communications can ensure this by keeping you present and actively engaging with employees on the channels favoured by different generations. 

Appeal to different learning styles

There are four different types of learning styles; your people have different preferences for processing information. Multichannel communications gives you the flexibility to appeal to each learning style: (visual) watch a video online, (auditory) listen to a discussion as an event, (reading) reading a blog, (kinesthetic) playing a physical game. 

Keep your audience engaged

If you only communicate your rewards via email, your employees are going to get bored fast. So experiment. Make videos, put up posters, create games - whatever you feel will spice up your reward comms in a way that connects with your colleagues and drives engagement.

Reinforce your messages 

Have you heard of the ‘Rule of 7’? It’s a marketing maxim that states a prospect needs to hear an advertising message at least seven times before they’ll take action. Multichannel comms helps you achieve this in an unobtrusive way - you can reinforce your message in different styles and formats rather than the same way over and over on the same channel. 

To recap, the multichannel approach can elevate your reward comms by helping you:

• Broaden your reach

• Stay connected to a multi-generational workforce

• Appeal to different learning styles

• Keep your audience engaged

• Reinforce your messages 

Keep reading to learn what a multichannel communications strategy looks like in practice. 

How to execute a multichannel communications strategy (with creative ideas)

The first thing you need to do is plan your multichannel comms strategy, giving you direction and goals to help you measure the results of your employee reward comms. This involves:

• Creating audience personas - to help you fine-tune your messages according to your audience, enabling more emphatic content. 

• Defining your tone of voice - to help you use language that connects with your audience more effectively.

• Creating content themes - to help you tie in your reward comms to your company culture, values and purpose, making your messages more potent and strengthening your employer brand.

• Choosing your top channels - to ensure you target employees on the channels they use the most - conduct surveys and external research to uncover these. Plus, you avoid getting overwhelmed from managing too many channels (at first, anyway!).

• Developing a content calendar - to help you stay organised and ensure your content is diversified, keeping each internal channel balanced.

• Pick a content style for each channel - to ensure your content is suited to each channel so you can maximise results (e.g. Yammer is like Facebook, so you want short and punchy copy that’s less formal than the copy you’d publish on, say, an internal blog). 

Coming up with content ideas can be the trickiest part of any communication strategy. My recent article on storytelling teaches you how to tell compelling stories around your employee rewards, focusing on stories around your employees, company culture, vision and purpose. 

I can help you further. Here are my favourite creative ideas for reward comms content that are especially good at turning heads and getting people to talk about your offering: 

• Posters on the back of toilet doors - you’re guaranteed to get eyes on your advertisement in the washroom. And because your employees won’t necessarily expect it, they’ll be more open to receiving the information.

• Interactive games like treasure hunts - games that involve touch appeal to kinesthetic learners. They’re also highly engaging and memorable. You could leave clues around the office that slowly reveal stories to do with your employee benefits. 

• TV advertisements - got a TV in your breakroom? Get it to display an employee benefits ad to reinforce your message and get it in front of a large audience. Note: be aware of external visitors when broadcasting confidential internal information. 

• Podcast interviews - podcasts provide a medium to reach all employees efficiently and have great storytelling potential. You could interview employees who have benefitted from your reward schemes and advertise these interviews on another popular channel. 

• A funny video on your YouTube channel - humour is attention-grabbing and linked to higher recall. Stick with simple jokes that are easy to understand by people from all circumstances and backgrounds to avoid alienating or offending certain audiences. 

That's some food for thought! Remember: the more creative and original your ideas, the easier it is to capture your audience’s attention and make your reward comms memorable. 

Put your employee reward story in the spotlight

Ensure your employee reward stories get the attention they deserve with multichannel communications.

Need help crafting compelling employee reward stories to fuel your multichannel marketing campaigns? Drop me an email at becky@clarioncallcomms.co.uk.