Brand Marketing Isn't Just For Strangers

How much time and energy do you spend on the content that goes out to people who have never interacted with your brand? Between advertising, PR, SEO, etc., my guess is that awareness tactics take up a significant portion of your resources.

Now, how much time and energy do you spend communicating with the people who matter most to your brand? When it's time to communicate a message to past customers, suppliers, distributors, other partners, and your staff, how much creativity are you putting into the content?

For nearly every business I've ever encountered, the equation is massively unbalanced in the direction of awareness. We say that our customers and staff are the most important people to our businesses, but we don't always show it.

This week Linkedin published a fairly comprehensive guide that they're calling "Turn Your Employer Brand into a Growth Driver" and I had two thoughts:

1. It's really good
2. Why aren't we all doing this already?

Here's the TLDR; brands producing content that positions themselves not just as a seller of things, but as an employer of people and a partner to others in the community, tend to have lower hiring costs, greater staff retention rates, and overall better market sentiment about the business as a whole.

Here's two specific examples I see a lot:

• Company X has a beautifully designed website. Their tone of voice is fun & friendly and they engage with their community on social media. Then, when it's time for that same company to hire, they publish a job description that reads like an HR textbook and wonder why people aren't lining up around the block.
• Company Y is about to announce its launch for the Spring season. It spends weeks, and plenty of cash, engaging creatives to build social content, a launch video, and a press release. When the big day comes, they make sure that the world knows by purchasing Facebook & YouTube ads. They figure their staff and suppliers should probably get a heads up too, so someone types up a Word Doc and sends a company-wide email titled: Q1 Product Memo.

In either case, what's the message that we're sending to our staff and partners? It's certainly not that they're our most important audience.

The Linkedin piece is filled with useful info, and the overarching reminder is that every message we put out as a business is an opportunity to reinforce our brand message and, I'd argue, the closer the group is to the core of our business, the more important it is that we walk the talk.

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting