You may have already realised that there are many parallels between marketing and internal comms - both functions involve delivering messages to a cross section of people to provoke an action or reaction and both require well thought out campaigns in order to be successful. In any business, it can be all too easy to fall into a rut with your internal comms strategy and being naturally risk averse, no one likes to experiment too wildly with such a central business function. In this blog we take a look at which content marketing tactics to borrow to create influential internal comms campaigns that get results.

Find the why

All marketers know that to influence and persuade you need to help your consumer (or employee in this case) find and understand 'the why'. This is crucial as getting to the why provokes an emotional response which triggers action which equals engagement. It’s really easy to get caught in the trap of telling employees what you want them to do rather than why they need to do it and the benefits to them if they take action. By highlighting the purpose of your campaign you'll get to the why early, allowing your employees to emotionally invest and buy-in to your campaign.

Email newsletters

In 2018 we wrote a blog on why it’s time to ditch email as your main internal comms channel, and while we still hold true to this in the main, there are times when email can be the best tool for the job. Here are our examples of why and when email newsletters can be a powerful tool:

• Breaking down walls - If your employees work across multiple offices, regions or even geographies, an internal newsletter is an opportunity to share stories and start conversations and bring awareness to other parts of the business. This is also helpful if you have remote workers.

• A trusted source of information - Mis-information and hearsay can fly around an office like wildfire, creating unease and scepticism. If authored by a respected source, a newsletter can become a vital channel for important announcements and general information.

• Reduce email overload - Everyone would love to have less emails in their inbox, so lighten the load for your employees and combine one off announcements and ad-hoc information into one central email

Online events and webinars

Virtual meetings and online workshops are increasing in popularity as people work flexibly from remote locations or simply have less time to dedicate to travelling between sites. To boost attendance and minimize travel time, consider running training sessions or meetings online using conference software. Read about our case study with Peak - Connecting the humans behind AI and learn how they engaged their workforce from the other side of the world with a 'Lunch and Learn' session using the Vevox App. If you're looking to get different results from your employees, you need to do something different!

Personalisation

One tactic that marketers use is to re-purpose content for different market sectors, sorry to bust the illusion, but not everything you see is 100% unique! Creating quality content is time consuming and a lot of the time different customer groups have similar needs but will respond better to alternative content types or different language. The same is true of your employees. One department might prefer to see the latest sales stats in bullet points in an email but put that content in front of shareholders and you might get a better response by breaking down the same information in to product groups and displaying as a pie chart. By personalising your internal comms content, you increase the relevancy and therefore the likelihood that your message gets heard.

Apps for inclusion and engagement

We all have personal experience with email overload, as we explained above there can be a time and a place for email communication. If you really want to connect with employees, consider using an engagement or feedback app. Get people out of their inboxes and shake off meeting fatigue by providing a dedicated channel for honest and uninhibited feedback that doesn't consist of a boring old pen and paper. Vevox is used by countless organisations to help engage employees with internal comms campaigns and company initiatives. Test the water with employees and try pulse surveys to encourage even the most timid of employees to have their say. 

So, there you have it, 5 content marketing tactics you can steal to boost your next internal communications campaign. Which of these are you keen to try?