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Seven step guide to turbo charge growth

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By Olivia Atkins

It can be difficult for SMEs to remain competitive today, but AdRoll’s new report ‘The Ultimate Guide to Growth’ provides a detailed step-by-step guide to help small to mid-sized businesses, solopreneurs and entrepreneurs to accelerate their growth. The robust report is split into seven categories with each providing case studies and takeaway lessons.

Identifying audiences

The report stresses the importance of marketers to first determine their ideal customer, knowing this then allows them to accurately target them. It cites various characteristics to look out for when compiling customer profiles and suggests that marketers should also tap into customer geographics and work on understanding their online behavioural habits. Empathising with their customers’ needs will help marketers to capitalise on their audience’s activity.

Understanding competitors

While getting to know your customers is important, the report also urges marketers to understand how their competitors operate, so that they can have a strong understanding of their positioning in the market. Marketers should conduct research and analysis on their competitors to work out where marketplace opportunities and threats lie, as well as keep a close eye on their opponent’s messaging.

Know your USP

Key differentiators set companies apart, so identifying these – no matter how big or small they are – is vital. The guide advises marketers to focus on your key attributes but encourages them to avoid concentrating on replicable differentiators such as new technologies or competitive prices as these can easily be beaten by competitors.

Marketing strategy creation

Marketing strategies should act as a roadmap for growing businesses with clear steps as to how to reach and engage new and existing customers. Working out the company’s value proposition will help. Marketers should consider where their customers are struggling and how they can help relieve their pain through the services they offer. They should then develop messaging to reflect this strategy, set attainable goals and create a realistic marketing budget to ensure that progress can be tracked.

Using marketing tactics

The marketing strategy set out earlier in the guide will provide marketers with clear business goals and budgets. Working out actionable tactics and which marketing channels to push marketing messages out on is essential. The report suggests looking at AdRoll’s digital advertising tactics and offers marketers the opportunity to sync up their e-commerce website with their growth platform to attract new visitors and convert existing prospects.

Creating content assets

Marketers should work out which type of content asset will suit their strategy best; the report provides pros and cons of using visual, written and ad content formats, with advice on how best to combine content assets to save on time and avoid duplication. The guide reminds marketers that ad sizes and formats also vary according to each platform, so messages need to be punchy and to the point for them to be effective.

Implementing and testing

Testing is one of the most important steps in the digital marketing growth journey. The report suggests that ads don’t need to be perfect before going live and encourages marketers to experiment with different renditions of ads to see how audiences respond. Various techniques for testing are listed, ensuring that marketers can get the most out of the experiments they do on ads, so that they know what to look out for.

Measurement

The guide advises marketers to build quantifiable KPIs and metrics that correspond to the business strategy and goals outlined earlier. Marketers should look at various analytics tools and work out which would best suit their business, but the report urges them to continue testing tactics to ensure that processes and information are consistently refined throughout the journey. Attribution models can also help marketers to gain better insight into consumer purchase habits.

Feature Image Credit: The Ultimate Guide to Growth report, with AdRoll

By Olivia Atkins

Sourced from The Drum

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Put on an alternative spread this Easter

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By Caroline Parry

Indulgence and, of course, chocolate will always be crucial to Easter, but increasingly this holiday is seen as a celebration of springtime, and people are seeking gifts and experiences that reflect this shift.

This is no doubt that Easter is important to us, with 57% of consumers considering it to be a “proper” holiday, according to a 2018 YouGov survey. This is compared to say, Mother’s Day, which Britons do not see as such a big occasion.

Its importance in our lives is reflected in our social behaviour with Facebook seeing year-on-year growth of 1.6x in our conversations about Easter in 2017. The top five topics discussed around that time are significant others, food, beverages, parties and events, and travel, while the top trending Easter hashtags are #love, #chocolate and #family.

Let’s take a look at some emerging UK Easter trends for 2019 and supporting marketing activation tips advertisers could consider on Facebook platforms in line with these….

Alternative indulgence

Confectionary sales in the UK grew from £375m in 2017 to £395m in 2018. However, while chocolate will always have a place on the shelves at Easter, increasingly consumers are looking for Easter treats to marry with their growing concerns about sustainability and health. Many more of us will be searching for guilt-free ways to spoil ourselves this Easter!

With reducing plastic waste now high up on the agenda of most consumers, forward-thinking brands are thinking outside the traditional egg box to meet these concerns. Innovative chocolate brands, such as Montezuma, vegan brand Goupie and dairy-free brand Booja Booja, are using recyclable packaging, some of which is reusable.

Treating ourselves isn’t limited to gorging on chocolate, and for many people self-care is becoming the alternative way of indulging. Health and beauty e-tailer Lookfantastic struck a chord last Easter with its £65 Beauty Egg, which offered a limited edition collection of seven ‘must-have’ products packaged in a metal egg. No surprise then that this year’s Easter Beauty Egg Bungle had an early waiting list.

Marketing activation tip: Think outside the Easter egg box, by showing more options than just chocolate in your marketing campaigns. How about a carousel ad format where you can showcase a wider brand story and message through different images? For e.g. chocolate, eco packaging, as well as an idea for guilt-free or healthier indulgence / pampering.

The great Easter escape

With family a top trending hashtag over the Easter break, it is a holiday that is increasingly about sharing special moments together. With 72% of consumers feeling no pressure to buy Easter gifts, according to a 2018 Mintel Seasonal Shopping report, we are increasingly swapping presents for social experiences.

Spending on activities far outpaces gifts, according to the same Mintel report, with an average of £113 spent on sharing experiences together compared to £67 on presents. British adults love to hark back to their childhoods when out with friends, with many getting their Easter fun fix by going bowling or trampolining.

Families also love to get out and about, and the many events staged by brands around Easter are ideal opportunities for spending time together. Crafting days and Easter egg hunts, such as the Cadbury partnership with the National Trust, are always big draws, but alternative events such as the Science Museum’s Power Up, which combines gaming with an exhibition, appeal to both parents and kids.

As people prioritise spending time together and creating that sense of belonging, it is little wonder that 10 times more photos are posted and shared during the Easter breaks than before or after.

Marketing activation tip: You can broadcast direct from events so that a wider audience can join the fun and conversation by using the Instagram live feature! Bridge the real world and digital divide seamlessly. By leveraging Facebook marketing partners you can create ads and messaging which are triggered contingent upon weather. We all know British weather can be unreliable, so it’s handy to have bespoke messaging ready to roll out in rainy or sunny circumstances over the Easter weekend.

Creating a meaningful Easter

With Facebook seeing a spike in conversation around food, beverages and parties on Easter Day itself, we know the Easter feast is a vital part of the holiday. British consumers are investing more time and money in making food more meaningful by buying seasonal produce, often sourcing key ingredients locally at stores or markets.

Supporting British producers and local retailers adds real meaning and a sense of story to our Easter food. It’s the reason that over half of shoppers surveyed by digital marketing agency Silverbean, said it is the time of year when buying home-grown products and using local suppliers is essential.

Spring is a time of abundance when it comes to vegetables, and with interest in organic foods and local, independent shopping spiking around this time of year, many turn to social to celebrate their love for fresh local produce. And they really do love it, #rhubarb and #artichoke boast almost a million tagged boasts between them.

Even the major retailers understand shoppers are looking for ways to show their support for local and British suppliers. Morrisons uses a “blue passport” to mark up its lamb products as British and highlight their home-grown credentials. Meanwhile, Hyke Gin is tackling both local and food waste by taking unwanted grapes from the British supply chain and turning it into gin.

Marketing activation tip: If you have great content like Easter ingredients, recipes and pictures to share, consider trying the Instant Experiences templates to quickly create valuable interactions with your customers. Did you know Instant Experiences are loading faster than ever? – now 15 times faster than standard mobile websites – so you can use them to seamlessly connect to an audience. Also, if you have a great local story to tell about your product, you can geo target ads to a certain audience where that messaging would resonate strongly.

Easter, a season of sun

With Easter bringing the first Bank Holidays of the year, it is an excellent opportunity for a holiday or breaks. Almost half of the £1.1bn spent over the Easter weekend in 2018 was spent on Easter getaways, according to travel website Kayak, and 89% of Easter conversation on Facebook in the UK was on mobile.

After the long winter, many are chasing the sunshine and warmth. Back in 2016, the “cool” and adventurous Scandi destinations were booming, last year saw consumers look to sunnier climes. Dubai was the most booked destination for Easter in 2018, with the perennially popular Spanish cities of Malaga and Alicante close behind.

Once again, environmental issues rate high on the agenda for British consumers. Green mini-breaks are becoming the preferred choice for many consumers. The Hilton London Bankside has responded with the creation of the world’s first vegan hotel room, which features suede-like furnishings made from mushroom matter.

Marketing activation tip: Travel insurance brands may want to up-weight their activity on Facebook and Instagram as we know most people leave it last minute to get their insurance sorted! Geo targeting such ads around airports and stations can prove effective. Hotels and retreats can showcase their unique or new look sustainable offerings in a more immersive way by using the power of 360° videos and boosting that content as ads to maximise reach and amplification.

Summary

Easter is still very much about chocolate eggs and bunnies, but consumers increasingly see it as an opportunity for treating themselves, and for spending time with family and friends by sharing great experiences. It is increasingly important however that enjoying these holiday moments is not at the expense of their wider concerns around health and sustainability.

By Caroline Parry

Sourced from The Drum

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What’s all the fuss about FOMO?

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By Sophie Katsali

When was the last time you saw a queue outside of what you would call a fairly ‘ordinary’ restaurant? Or an ‘exclusive’ concert? Perhaps a pop-up that gives away gluten-free bread outside of a tube station? Quite recently, I suppose.

People love queues, don’t they? That uncomfortable feeling of standing on your feet for ages while thoroughly investigating someone’s back just to get access to something…special. Well, not really. This is not something people particularly enjoying doing. But the fear of missing out (or ‘FOMO’) is so frantically embedded in our DNA that it is a far greater ‘discomfort’ for us to miss out than to waste some time in a queue.

How does this tie into social media marketing? Social media is nothing more than our world under a microscope. Sometimes marketers are too close to their own profession and don’t quite remember that it is as simple as that. They treat “social media users” as a different group of people altogether. This doesn’t particularly help since they sometimes fail to tap into human psychology 101.

Take your average Facebook ad. How often do you see a call to action that truly lures you in? In 2018, 69.95% of ads have included a CTA – a great jump from 2016’s 51.54% – but what do the rest of the ads (the 30.05%) include? They probably have some nice imagery. However, even if a picture is worth a thousand words, words (or in our world, “copy”) can elevate your ad to drive conversions. How? Enter FOMO.

The power of FOMO

How do you incorporate FOMO in your marketing efforts? Essentially, it’s about coming up with a “FOMO” proposition around your brand/product/service that’s too strong to pass.

There is a reason why ‘limited offers’ work. It’s all about framing what you offer in a timeframe. AdEspresso recently conducted a Facebook ad experiment to test three of the most popular CTAs; “Sign Up”, “Download Now” and “Learn More”. The “Download Now” CTA outperformed the other two by more than 40% in terms of cost per lead. Time-sensitive words like “now” and “today” work successfully because of the urgency they call out. You also want to make sure you call out your customer. You want to make it personal. According to Hubspot, personalised CTAs perform 202% better than basic CTAs. Words like “you”, “your”, “yours” make your copy instantly more approachable. All of a sudden, the ad is about them! They stop and listen.

What are people going to miss if they don’t join/download/buy/sign up to what you offer? This is a question that you can only answer after going deep into your social data and understanding who your audience is and where it lives on social. It could be a case where you discover that your main audience is more outgoing and sociable than the average social group. This comes with the assumption that they probably have a lot of friends they care about (and subsequently, care about their opinions) so you make it about their friends. You run a Facebook ad that is targeting people whose friends have joined YOUR Page and you go in with the hard sell: “Your friend is already part of [enter brand/product/service here]. Isn’t it time for you to join today?” This is one way to take advantage of our hardwired urge to not miss out on anything.

Common-sense marketing tells us we need to exaggerate about whatever we are selling. As a result, we focus too much on the specifications of the end-product and how well our brand compares to others. We make the sale about us. However, if you change the narrative and flip the mirror, a more persuasive argument is helping people see that if they don’t join you they will miss out on an opportunity that hasn’t been presented to them before.

By Sophie Katsali

Sophie Katsali is lead strategist at Wilderness

Sourced from The Drum

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Native Video study on open web highlights consumer shift

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By Dale Lovell

he power of video advertising may be well documented, but as consumer behaviour changes amid familiarity with video browsing on mobile devices, marketers who think the rules of engagement for digital video have already been written – and that there is a one size fits all approach – should think again.

The rise and effectiveness of native video on social media has been well researched to date. Engagement rates, reach, frequency and return on investment studies all show positive associations. But until now, there have been few studies showing the rise and performance of native video formats across the open web, specifically on premium publisher environments, where in-feed native video formats are becoming increasingly common.

We recently sought to fill that void through an analysis of more than 30 million in-feed video views run across our platform from January to April 2018. While we expected to be able to report findings on native video on the open web that were in line with the positive findings in social media, we didn’t expect that our findings would challenge the very notion of ‘what works’ in native video. But that’s precisely what happened.

Conventional wisdom in the video space, based on social data, has indicated that less is more when it comes to native video advertising, with many espousing that anything longer than 6 seconds in native video is simply too long. However, our findings would seem to contradict the perceived wisdom that mobile users have limited attention spans and are only interested in short video content.

According to our findings, smartphone users are more likely to spend time engaging with long-form video ads compared to 6-second ads when executed correctly. In fact, 72% of mobile users who have watched 6 seconds will continue to watch and engage with video up to 22 seconds. When native video reaches 15 to 22 seconds in length across premium publisher environments, mobile and tablet users that have watched this far are significantly more engaged than desktop users.

The evolution of our ‘mobile minds’

Perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising that people’s attention spans for native video seem to be growing longer. While the findings in our report represent the first of their kind in native video, there have been several studies undertaken around the attention of mobile phone users when it comes to reading. Over time, conclusions have shifted.

One study in 2010 found that reading on a mobile device was impaired when content was presented on a mobile-size screen versus a larger computer screen. But a similar study, undertaken six years later in 2016, showed different results. This study, conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, concluded that there were no practical differences in the comprehension scores of participants, whether they were reading on a mobile device or a computer. In fact, the study found comprehension on mobile was about 3% higher than on a computer for content that was just over 400 words in length, and at an easier level to read.

Why the difference in results? It’s very possible that, over the period between 2010 and 2016 — the exact period during which smartphones became ubiquitous — we’ve all become more accustomed to reading on smaller screens. It’s reasonable to assume that the challenges the average person had reading on a small screen back in 2010 no longer apply now that people have adjusted to life on those smaller screens.

In a similar manner, it would appear that user behavior is changing around video consumption on mobile devices as well.

Well-held assumptions that less-is-more for video length and the broader worries about a crisis in user attention spans very well may prove to have been misplaced.

Creating compelling video content

As attention spans for native video lengthen, marketers would do well to reassess their best practices as it relates to creating content for mobile consumption. In particular, native video creators should think carefully about improving video performance during the key drop-off periods on a specific device.

For videos that will be consumed on mobile or tablet, videos should be edited to pack a punch in the first 6 seconds, in order to draw in users. The latest data suggests that the optimal length for native video content on mobile and tablet should be between 15 and 22 seconds. After 22 seconds, user interest does wane. If videos have to be longer, marketers should ensure that there are more-exciting sequences and enticing calls to action around 22 seconds, in order to maintain viewer interest up to 30 seconds.

If nothing else, these recent findings demonstrate that marketers must remain fluid in their understanding of how users engage with content on their devices. Behaviour is shifting, and yesterday’s best practices won’t necessarily apply tomorrow.

By Dale Lovell

Dale Lovell is co-founder of Adyoulike

Sourced from THE DRUM

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How to maintain a healthy B2B marketing budget

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By Ruth Connor

Back in the land of B2C marketing, I could build a water-tight business case for TV using insight from Think Box, present a strong argument for redeveloping my e-commerce process by pointing to indisputable benchmarking data, and get under the skin of my target customers using a bucket-load of comms planning tools.

Best of all, I could prove the impact of my efforts to senior management.

“Just look at those numbers! No, seriously. Look. At. Those. Numbers.”

Before long I was up for a fresh challenge, so I jumped ship and embraced the B2B world.

Things were, shall we say, different.

My tried and tested methods didn’t land in the same way.

And it got worse.

The finance director said the B2B marketing budget was discretionary.

And if that wasn’t enough, the sales team got all the credit for the revenue generated.

10 years down the line and again things are different – only this time in a good way. I still use insight and benchmarking to inform my marketing planning where I can – but I’ve learned other ways to convince the board of the importance of investing in B2B.

Fingers crossed you never hear the dreaded words: “The B2B budget is discretionary.”

But if you do, these seven tips will help you present the case that a healthy B2B budget is a must-have, not a nice-to-have.

Get closer to your business

Marketing shouldn’t be a silo. Get to know the various levers in your business – the things that influence the outcomes your business is trying to achieve.

For example, the marketing budget is an important lever as it influences how many leads are generated. The pricing of your product and the effectiveness of your sales team will influence conversions. While your customer relationship management will impact how long customers stay with you and how much they spend.

Understanding these levers will help shape your marketing strategy – and improve its effectiveness.

Know the magic number to ask for

It’s hard knowing what a realistic B2B marketing budget looks like, so it’s useful having some credible research in your back pocket. The CMO Survey Highlights and Insights Report 2017 from Deloitte, Duke University and the American Marketing Association found organisations spend, on average, 7.9% of their revenue on marketing and 11% of their total company budget. While according to the Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2017-2018, the number’s higher – organisations dedicate 11.3% of their overall revenue to marketing.

Understand buyer-behaviour trends – and make sure your spend mirrors them

Then you can justify exactly how you plan to spend your budget. Online is making its presence felt across every phase of the B2B buying journey – according to a study by Earnest and Imperial College London, it accounts for 49% and 58% respectively of the ‘research’ and ‘purchase’ stages.

No surprise, then, that we’re seeing an increase in digital marketing spend.

Check what you’re doing matters to people other than you

Do your metrics turn the heads of people outside of marketing? That stuff you’re tracking and reporting on – is it in sync with broader business goals and key performance indicators? Truth is, your board probably doesn’t care about the same things you do. So make sure your KPIs demonstrate your marketing is having an impact on the stuff they do care about.

Incorporate alternative measurement models

It may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s not all about directly attributing sales to your marketing activity. Assists matter too. If your content marketing strategy aligns with your customer journey, you can use your marketing automation platform to see how the buyer engaged with it in the lead-up to the deal.

Be proud of your results – you worked hard for them

Don’t hide your numbers away. Make a visually striking dashboard or scorecard that makes it really easy for your board to understand what you’ve achieved. And don’t forget to highlight where your marketing successes align with the wider business goals.

Use the lingo being used right now

More and more we’re seeing the marketing department being relabelled the ‘growth department’. Who knows, maybe next year we’ll be relabelled as a chief growth officer. Or head of growth.

But that’s OK, because marketers are good at growth. We grow brand engagement. We grow customer bases. We grow revenue.

So choose your words wisely because sometimes it pays to use the latest buzz word.

By Ruth Connor

Ruth Connor is head of marketing at Earnest

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Email marketing up 83% since 2015 as B2B marketing grows by 200%

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By Laurie Fullerton

Never underestimate the power of email – a cornerstone for both traditional marketing and consumer-facing market strategies that has seen an 83% growth in B2B and B2C markets since 2015.

According to new research released by Salesforce, who polled 3,500 global marketing leaders, at either a manger level or higher position for its fourth annual State of Marketing report, email experienced the largest surge in consumer-facing marketing programs, with email use by B2C marketers rising 106%. This surge indicates that marketers may be testing new channels in conjunction with proven ones to find combinations that work for their consumers. Marketers also report higher levels of awareness, engagement, and acquisition when combining email with additional marketing channels according to Salesforce.

The Salesforce report also found that video advertising has experienced the largest two-year growth in B2B marketing, with video use growing 204%. Email was the second-highest advertising channel in growth for B2C marketers, but trailed video advertising’s growth of 141%.

Video advertising was closely followed by SMS/text messaging, a channel that grew 197% in the B2B market. B2B email marketing, on the other hand, has only grown 56% since 2015.

A marked trend among high-performing marketers is that they are 12.8 times more likely to combine marketing efforts across channels such as email, mobile, and social. On average, marketing leaders today say that 34% of their budget is spent on channels they didn’t know existed five years ago and they expect that to reach 40% by 2019.

The reports also suggests that about half (51%) of the emails are identical messages to what they have broadcast in other channels. This is considered to be a missed opportunity for most marketers who may not be evolving fast enough between email and other channels based on customer behaviors or actions.

Additionally, 51% of respondents said their emails contain the same messages as other marketing channels, while 29% of email messages evolve across channels and customer actions.

As in previous report iterations, Salesforce analyzed the differences between self-identifying high-performing and low-performing marketers.

By Laurie Fullerton

Sourced from THE DRUM

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“If brands champion their people as their most valuable asset, why do they invest so little in understanding them?”

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Gemma McGrattan of Synergy Creative

By Michael Feeley

Gemma McGrattan of brand engagement agency Synergy Creative explains to The Drum Network why it’s time for large employers to treat employee comms with the same level of care and attention spent on marketing to customers…

Synergy refers to itself as a ‘brand engagement agency’ – what does that mean exactly?

We celebrated Synergy’s 10th anniversary last year, but we found our niche as an agency relatively early on. After a couple of years, we started focusing our expertise and our offering around internal communications and employee engagement. We began working on a lot of employee comms projects: rewards and recognition schemes , induction programmes, that sort of thing, usually based around HR-related comms. Over the years, that has developed into a real specialism for Synergy.

Our clients for this sort of service are typically organisations with 5000+ staff, operating a distributed network of outlets, such as Labrokes, Argos, ODEON Cinemas Group across Europe and various utlility companies, which tend to have lots of small teams and individuals working out in the field for the majority of the time.

What problems are large employers typically trying to address when they engage Synergy?

For that scale of organisation, it can become difficult to keep a large, fragmented, remote workforce fully engaged and up-to-date with the latest information from the company. We specialise in supporting those comms needs, supporting employees on their journey ‘from hire to retire’!

Ultimately, it’s about valuing your employees, encouraging them, motivating them, inspiring them. From a hard-nosed business point of view, there’s clear evidence that employee engagement can have a positive effective on productivity and profitability – Dale Carnegie research found companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202%. In 2017, more and more organisations are beginning to regard employee engagement as an ongoing strategic initiative, rather than a short-term tactical project.

How has the market changed in the time that Synergy has been focused on internal comms?

These days, it’s common to see job titles such as ‘Head of Internal Communications, ‘Engagement Manager’ or ‘Employer Brand Manager’. In the majority of instances, those jobs didn’t exist a few years ago. That’s significant as it indicates that employee engagement is being taken very seriously at board level now, which is a big change.

Also, various technology platforms have emerged, such as Yammer, Slack and Facebook Workplace, that make it easier than ever before to create an employee network without having to build your own secure platform from scratch. Big brands are now happy to make use of these secure third party platforms in a way they would have been unsure about a few years ago.

The biggest change is the increased recognition that the brand has value, not only to customers, but also to employees. Employers should treat employees as well as they would customers by giving them the opportunity to be listened to, collaborate and shape things within the business. We’re all more sophisticated now. Today, we expect a heightened level of interaction with a brand as consumers, so why wouldn’t we want that sort of two-way dialogue as employees? All the big brands are talking about ‘employee advocacy’, recognising the importance for would-be candidates to hear perspectives from existing employees via their own social networks. The idea here is that a peer recommendation is more powerful than messaging coming directly from the brand.

Who is doing this well at the moment?

A lot of this depends on the brand itself and how brave and forward thinking it is.

Odeon Cinemas Group in Europe has thrown itself whole-heartedly into improving guest experience and employee experience. As a result, they’ve grown hugely in the last two years and had a very successful sale to an American company. That’s a strong case study of the links between employee engagement and hard commercial success.

Virgin Rail has also been very innovative in this area. They recently moved their employee comms to Yammer and are beginning to analyse employee demographics in the same way as customer demographics to inform and shape employee needs.

There are good examples across the board, but the key is that you need to be brave enough to truly embrace it and facilitate the dialogue rather than every item of employee comms having to go through a 50-step approval process, which isn’t going to work.

What tips can you offer large organisations currently reviewing their employee engagement strategy?

Firstly, really understand your people. We think nothing of investing huge sums investigating our customers’ preferences but invest practically nothing in understanding our employees as a collection of internal audiences. You need evidence to get under the skin of that and treat your employer brand with the same kind of care as your consumer-facing brand.

Secondly, whenever you launch an initiative that requires the commitment of your employees to successfully deliver it, you have to be crystal clear about why the initiative is happening in the first place. Make the link meaningful to your people and help them to understand what the business stands for and where you are heading as a business. When employees fundamentally ‘get it’, they are on board all the way.

Thirdly, involve your people, don’t try to simply ‘run’ it. Become a facilitator and curator of the internal conversation rather than a leader or controller of it. It takes time for people to become comfortable on the chosen platform, but the more a workforce knows about each other, with plenty of opportunity to contribute, get involved and make a real difference, the better the chance of a high-performance culture.

And finally, continually reinforce your commitment to the value of internal comms and the employer brand. It can’t be a one hit wonder. The real effort, and success, is in maintaining the momentum.

By Michael Feeley

Michael Feeley is The Drum Network’s consultant journalist, advising and assisting member agencies on their editorial submissions and contributions to The Drum.

Sourced from The Drum

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