One of the keys to building a successful brand externally is to build your brand internally. Not only do your employees live and breathe the brand each day, but they are the ones communicating it to your current and future customers. So how do you develop a successful internal branding campaign? Here are a few tips.
- Provide easy to understand and easy to access tools. These tools could be as simple as a rack card at each employee’s desk or educational pages on your company’s intranet.
- Engage team members from multiple departments. Ask department leaders to highlight employees who are enthusiastic and willing to carry the brand flag within the team. Then educate these brand ambassadors on the brand and how to talk to their coworkers about the value of the organization’s brand.
- Do it once, twice, three times and don’t stop. Internal branding is not something that can be done once and be considered successful. If it is just done once, employees may just see it as a campaign. Regularly communicating about the brand will help engrain it in your organization’s culture. Consider highlighting a different organization benefit or value each month, explaining its value and showing examples of how the brand is lived each day by employees.
When your employees believe it, your customers and future customers will notice. By tapping into your greatest brand implementation tool – your workforce – your organization will not only be singing from the same hymn book (pardon my Southern phrasing), but so will your customers.