Creating a culture of employee engagement starts with
good listening and a willingness to reflect on the management-employee relationship. We’ve previously written about how to build an engaged workforce by focusing on
employee experience, if you’re looking to transform your company culture. For a company who’s done the work and has a workforce of enthusiastic, engaged employees, the next step can be harnessing that engagement to boost your brand’s visibility.
Engaged employees can be some of the best brand ambassadors around. When your employees believe in your company’s mission and values, they’re likely to spread the word about their workplace. Here are a few ways that engaged employees can benefit your marketing strategy.
Social media sharing & engagement from employees
According to
Imminent Digital, companies with highly engaged employees have an average 3-year revenue growth more than twice as high as companies with less-engaged employees. This may be due to the fact that engaged employees spread the word about their company, attracting other highly-engaged employees. So employees who believe in their company’s mission are more likely to talk about it in person and on social media, which in turn drives interest in your company.
And if you have international employees, cultivating an engaged workforce, with content in their native language, can have the additional benefit of gaining brand ambassadors in other countries.
Company culture initiatives
More and more, employees want to work for companies whose values and efforts align with their own values. Businesses are realizing that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a way to attract customers and cultivate employees who feel like stakeholders in the company’s mission. For example, at least
79% of employees in their 20s and 30s consider a company’s social and environmental values when choosing a workplace. As a result, many businesses have begun “cause marketing,” or partnering with nonprofits, volunteer projects, or social causes to drive social change and boost their image as well.
A great way to connect engaged employees with a business’s marketing strategy is to let employees direct the causes a company supports. Imminent Digital notes that when employees are passionate about a cause, they also take
ownership of its marketing. In an age when smart consumers see through a lot of cause marketing, noting that many companies are greenwashing or adopting causes for profit (anyone remember the disastrous Pepsi protest ad?), employees’ true passion for a cause can still convey authentic engagement.
A platform for engagement
In order to have engaged employees, you need a platform that makes it easy for employees to engage with the company and with others. Another part of a smart marketing strategy is to adopt a holistic, easy-to-use platform that integrates your HR and marketing functions. Imminent Digital recommends an
inside-out marketing platform that gives employees easy access to company wellness resources, a database of causes and projects, and tells a consistent story about the company. A single entry point to this platform will make it more likely that your employees use it, and saves them valuable time–time they can instead use for other projects or for social causes.
Dynamic Signal, a leader in this type of platform, recently had success crafting an inside-out platform for a large tech company. In the process, they harnessed the power of more than 5000 employee advocates within the company and helped employees become thought leaders in the industry.
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