So you’ve nailed your tone of voice for your customer communications and your social media channels are thriving. Your website experiences high session durations, low bounce rates, and users really engage with your content. That’s great!

But have you considered how you’re nurturing the insides of your company? After all, employees are the lifeblood of your business, and without effective communication, the cracks could start to show to the outside world.

What are internal comms?

Internal comms are pretty much any communication that your company or a representative of your company has with your employees or stakeholders. This could be to communicate changes within the company, inform them of upcoming events such as a summer BBQ or be used to educate them.

They’re used for a huge range of communications and should be consistent, clear and reliable. But that doesn’t mean they need to be dull, dry and boring – creativity can, in fact, better help communicate your message and increase the likelihood of it sticking with your internal team.

Why does employee engagement matter?

Crafting more engaging communications for your employees, through getting creative, can ensure that your message is communicated in a way that is memorable and has a lasting impact. Although the message should be the core focus, finding a creative way to communicate it can improve how powerful it comes across.

By injecting vibrancy, and variety into the internal comms, you can improve your messages capability to stick. Taking the time to carve out a way to grab your employees attention will make your message stand out from all of the rest of the inbox noise and ensure it isn’t instantly resigned to the trash.

Rethinking your internal communications

There are a number of ways to re-energise your internal comms and the best part is you already know most of it. You can utilise most of the techniques you’ve used to create targeted and engaging content for your customers, adapting them to fit your internal requirements.

Personas

In the same way that not all of your customers are the same, neither are your employees. They all work in different areas of the business, with different functions and different skill sets.

Some have more time than others, some prefer to read the information, some prefer a quick video, and so on – there are so many variables that it would be silly to not create personas for each of your types of employee.

Visuals

Corporate emails don’t necessarily need to look corporate. They can be bright and engaging and can featuring interesting design to help communicate the messaging more effectively.

Don’t hold out on your employees when it comes to your internal communications and ensure the content aimed at them is as interesting as the content you use to engage with those you want to sell to or convert.

Multimedia

Hubspot study data revealed that 55% of people finish video that they watch, contrasted against 29% of people who read a blog through to the end.

Imagery and video can be exponentially more eye-catching and should be integrated into your internal comms to ensure you cater for everyone. Some employees will prefer to read through a piece of text whereas others may not digest information as easily this way or may be short on time, and a minute video is more effective.

Human

Your employees are representative of your business. As such, you should ensure that your internal communications are relatable and have that human touch.

Lose the robotic corporate jargon and speak to them as human beings. You should ensure that your messaging gives the reader something to care about, without this, you’ll likely lose their attention quickly.

This also means considering the information you share with each group of people internally, by not sending everyone everything, and only sending them what’s relevant, you can reduce the risk of finding your comms in the spam folder. After all, you don’t send all of your buyers every kind of offer for every product because that would be madness.

Values

Too many businesses have advertised ‘culture’ as a core component of how their business runs, but if you’re all talk, your employees will quickly lose patience with you.

If you claim to have certain beliefs, ways of working and ethics, then back it up. Include this within your comms and demonstrate it in the way you communicate with your employees.

If you claim to be a highly transparent company, then don’t keep your employees in the dark when changes come about, otherwise, you could see trust rapidly decline.

Showcase

One of the best ways to get people engaged is to put them at the heart of the content. By showcasing achievements, internal thoughts updates on changes and sharing ideas, you can make your internal communications that much more personal.

After all, your employees are going to be more inclined to read something written by one of their peers than someone they don’t really know at the top of the company. This offers more authenticity to the communications, an alternative point of view and allows employees the opportunity to express themselves.

Gamification

Internal communications aren’t always a one-way channel, sometimes you’ll need your employees to complete a task or engage with a piece of software.

If your communications are engaging and the method of engagement is interactive, you’ll likely be easier to encourage them to complete the task.

Gamification is the method of offering learning processes in a game format. This doesn’t need to be a AAA game title, but making training more engaging can ensure that the objectives are clearer and undertaking the training is less of a chore for your workforce.

Disruption

Lastly, you might want to take your internal communications right out of the box, using guerilla marketing tactics. In order to break through the status quo, you could consider a way of interacting with your employees that will be memorable and different.

This could be anything as elaborate as staging a surprise event or as simple intriguing posters in the workplace, to tease a new strategy or company announcement.

Ready to make it memorable?

We want to help you engage with your workforce to enhance your output, improve employee retention and ensure that your internal teams are clued up and representing your brand effectively. For more information on enhancing your internal comms, get in touch with us today.