What internal communications can learn from advertising
I finished my BA in Corporate Communications over 10 years ago, and started working in PR. Soon after, I went into the magical world of marketing and advertising, and my view of Corporate Communications changed forever.
The internal communications world is still very much stuck in the traditional information push model in most organizations. By the time I joined EY Colombia and was tasked with the challenge of setting up the Marketing & Communications function, I had a completely different view of how to tackle internal communications and engagement. Here are ten things I did different in internal communications based on my advertising experience.
- An internal campaign needs a proper process: Many organizations give the task to develop an internal campaign to one person. The power of good campaigns comes from developing a proper planning process, team collaboration, brainstorming and a different approach. We used to develop creative sessions where everyone on my team got to give their ideas or opinions, and then collaborate on the planning and executions.
- Develop internal campaigns as advertising campaigns: Use creative ideas, non-traditional media, segmentation, targeting and out-of-the-box execution to create internal engagement. We created campaigns that were visually stimulating, attractive and provocative, and used call to actions to ask people to engage. Not all campaigns are relevant for every person in the organization, therefore you need to segment it correctly if you want to achieve results.
- Create conversations: All of our campaigns were focused on allowing people to ask questions, provide feedback, organize events and sessions where people could be open about their concerns, vision, etc. Develop tools that allow people to ask things to leaders directly and make sure they get an answer. Unfortunately, back then we didn't have internal social media tools, so we did what we could with emails, quizzes and surveys.
- Connect to the brand: The brand was a very important part of every internal communication. We made sure that the visual identity came to live, that our office spaces were brand aligned and that people felt excited about our brand. We trated every internal campaign as we did with external, focusing on creativity and engaging copy.
- Tell our people about what we were doing in external advertising and brand: Keeping our people engaged in all the activities (campaigns, events, sponsorship, alliances, etc) that we delivered to the external market and our clients was key to inspire them to engage around these, and to increase their pride for working for the company.
- Adapt global campaigns with local creativity: As a global organization, many campaigns need to be deployed at the local level, but the local relevance was not always there. We looked for a hook to make it appealing to our people and executed in a different way, while keeping the core messaging. Sometimes this meant redesigning completely to give it the local appeal.
- Develop creative ways to explain your services: People are usually too immersed in their own work, and many didn't know what the other service lines offered. We identified the opportunity to increase cross-selling and developed an event where people from each service line would create their own exhibition stand and materials. Marketing supported the development, but the ideas were done by each team. The result was a great event to share their services with others, identifying potential client needs, and an amazing internal engagement activity, which also increased networking opportunities.Over 80% of the people attended and the awareness of other services increased significantly.
- Share your PR publications: Many organizations do their PR in an isolated way and do not connect it to their internal engagement activities. But when you use the publications done by media about your company and leaders as a tool to increase internal engagement, this contributes to people being proud of the company they work for and its leaders.
- Use your internal events to create brand experience: All companies have seasonal events like Christmas, anniversaries, sales conventions, etc. Even though these are internal only events, very often people forget that they are amazing opportunities to create brand experiences that engage your people. Developing creative ways around this, while reflecting the brand values, is an amazing way to bring your brand to life.
- Use your non traditional channels: All of our people used to go to their client sites with their laptops (very often using projectors in meetings) and their PC would go in standby mode displaying their screen saver. We identified that this was a great opportunity for us to deliver some key messages about our brand and our organization. Therefore, we developed an animated screen saver that communicated all of our key messages. This became a great way to deliver messages to our people and clients, so we changed it often to maintain interest.
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