Recently, Joe Pulizzi wrote a post on the
12 Roles Essential to the Future of Content Marketing. In it, he listed the new roles we need to consider, not only as marketers, but also as people who drive business for our organizations. It’s a reflection of the growing responsibility we have as marketers — and the growing need for us to step up our leadership role.
Look inside first
As Joe pointed out, one of the expanding areas of responsibility is human resources (HR) and internal marketing. But many companies fall short on doing a good job of communicating with their own employees, let alone extending their brand storytelling to those they hope to recruit.
If our primary goal is to own content niches, online and off, then we have to enable employees to help tell our brand story. It’s true, customers have relationships with people, not brands. Thus, content marketing has a tremendous opportunity to ensure that customer-facing staff members understand what makes their company unique.
Employees are more than brand ambassadors; they’re promise keepers. They’re the ones who have to bring to life the promises we make in our content programs, lead-nurturing campaigns, PR efforts, and the brand storytelling efforts we distribute through all marketing channels.
If we thought of supporting HR as a way to recruit the best people to deliver on our brand promises, would we be more proactive in working with them?
In order to have the right people on hand to tell the right brand story, we have to find and hire those “right people.” That means sharing our companies’ value and perspective consistently across all channels — not just to reach customers, but to reach prospective employees, as well. We need to consider the HR perspective when we work on top-of-funnel awareness. The stories that matter to customers also matter to the rock stars we want to recruit, and should include ideas such as culture, leadership, challenge, and growth.
To make this easy, think of the content marketing hourglass (shown above) that Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi describe in their book, “Managing Content Marketing,” as a way to connect with and retain employees. There needs to be a well-thought out process that identifies the right kind of people (personas), defines their potential role within the organization (segmentation), and understands how to nurture them and convert them to employees.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Many employers think of the process of converting a recruit to an employee the same as the conversion of a girlfriend/boyfriend to a wife/husband — once they sign on the dotted line, the romance goes away, and they’re left on their own to deal with everyday life.
Create tangible expressions of your story
Happy, long marriages prevail when both sides understand the importance of communication and teamwork in how they create their story together.
Motorola Solutions serves as an example of how to do it right. In January 2011, Motorola split into two companies — B2B brand Motorola Solutions and consumer-facing Motorola Mobility (which was subsequently purchased by Google). Leadership had prepared for the separation for more than two years — on one Friday, employees went home as employees of one company, and on the following Monday, they returned to two separate businesses.
Over that weekend, Motorola Solutions physically rebranded 30 of its facilities worldwide, so when employees walked in, they saw evidence of their new brand story already coming to life. The company spent the rest of 2011 integrating the brand promise into the culture of the company and helping employees understand how to tell it to the outside world.
It’s not unusual for a company’s story to lack credibility with employees. If your story accurately reflects your company as it stands today, then employees will more easily engage in telling it. And if you’re trying to change the story you tell, then employees will need tangible evidence of that change — recruitment, recognition, rewards — before they begin to believe. Marketing needs to help them feel proud to represent their employers — because we need them to tell our story as a cohesive, unified team.
Protect your investments
Why should a customer do business with a company when even its own employees can’t explain what makes it different? And if the experience that customers have when interacting with your employees doesn’t match up with the stories you are telling, it won’t matter how much you invest in external marketing efforts to project a positive brand image.
We talk about consistency in channels when reaching customers, yet we turn around and talk to employees with a glut of homogeneous messages.
Back to Joe and Robert’s hourglass, I urge the content marketing industry to lead the charge on getting creative about engaging with employees in order to move them from satisfied to brand evangelists. Will a company intranet and an annual town hall meeting cut it? We live in an instant, real-time world, and it may be time to consider enterprise social network tools such as Yammer and Socialcast. Even Google+ supports internal hangouts and allows people to post only within their organizations. Companies that have nontraditional, hard-to-reach employees — like healthcare organizations, oil rig workers, or tech teams — have begun to develop bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, so employees can connect using their mobile device of choice.
Creating alignment is hard work, and it’s time consuming. But it’s critical that we get employees excited about our story. They have to believe it because, ultimately, they’re the ones who will be sharing it.
Now, tell us your story. How do you recruit and engage employees so you can create promise keepers?
Your unique brand story is one of the five core elements for running successful, scalable content marketing operations. Read our 2016 Content Marketing Framework: 5 Building Blocks for Profitable, Scalable Operations for an overview of the full strategic blueprint.
Comments