Aligning Your Brand Promise with Your Internal Audiences to Improve Employee Engagement

When you are business partners with your wife, and you have two little kids, things can get a little crazy from time to time. We welcomed our second little one on Christmas morning. She’s perfect, and now our lives have a whole new vibe to it and we love it. Lot of pictures over on Shona’s Instagram if you are curious what the newest little Lepis is all about.

ALI Strategic Internal Communications Conference, Jan 28 – 30

We haven’t slowed down though, this past January we conducted a workshop at the ALI Strategic Internal Communications Conference in San Francisco on aligning your brand values to your with your internal audiences. Even with all the new trends, data, and channels you have to get to the heart of your message and who you are before you can roll out any five-star program. Below is a summary of the workshop. Download the entire presentation as a PDF or it’s also available on Slideshare.

Aligning Your Brand Promise with Your Internal Audiences to Improve Employee Engagement

Understand Your Company Values: Your employee values and externalvalues may be different in your organization. Either way, you need to understand what these values are, how they take life within your organization, and where you may need improvement. This will guide your strategy.

Define Alignment: In most organizations, the marketing department owns the physical brandand internal communications owns the behavior. Know the behavior you want, and now you have some guideposts to your internal communications strategy.

Audience, Channels, & Resources: Let’s all say this together, ‘you are not the target market’. If I can getour clients to realize just one thing in our partnerships, it is that. Once you get out of your own way (with your preconceived notions), you are going to do well. Audience segmentation works very well in consumer marketing so, let’s bring this practice to internal communications, ok?

Strategy, Plan, and Measurement:

Too few IC teams are guided by a clear strategy. In order for IC to be taken seriously, two important elements are vital:
1. It supports the organization’s goals and 2. Enhances business performance. When addressing measurement in your plan, remember to include the output (measurable metrics) AND outcomes (changes in behavior).

In the presentation, we included versions of the worksheets we use to conduct this work with our clients. Again, here is a link to my workshop slides on Slideshare or as a PDF.

The presentation was the first time presenting this content in a workshop format. I’m excited to continue developing this content and sharing. I’d love to know your thoughts, questions, or suggestions.