Building Your Company’s Next Brand Ambassador

There has been a huge shift recently in how successful companies are realising that LinkedIn and other social media activity is actually a positive thing for your employees to be doing, which can massively improve your brand exposure as a leading market player. This is good news!

Take advantage of your employees’ online activity

It’s impossible to stop your employees from using LinkedIn or any other social channel, so the best thing is to instead use it as an advantage, rather than a threat.

With the right framework and encouragement, individual employees can become the best spokespeople for your brand. If they’re happy with their roles and shout out about the benefits of your company to their followers, this can have a hugely beneficial impact for the company’s reputation.   In our increasingly transparent and super-connected world, the stakeholders (employees, customers, service partners) of an organisation are the marketing department.

How to build brand ambassadors

1.      Encourage them

Create an environment where social media activity is encouraged, as long as it is on-brand and within reason. You don’t need to hijack their profiles, but simply let them know that sharing content related to their fields is a good thing.

This is so easily done when it takes two seconds for a CEO or a manager to share or like a post of a junior colleague, for example, to create a positive cycle of social media activity. If you simply ask your team to get out there and start engaging, you might be surprised by the results.

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The Role of Strategic Implementation in Businesses

In short, strategic implementation is a process that executes plans and strategies. It doesn’t really matter what these plans and actions are, as it is merely a pathway to making concepts and ideas a reality.

Many companies might have creative and skilled individuals who can dream of success and optimised customer experiences, but without strategic implementation, actually bringing this to fruition is difficult – especially when you are a new organisation.

What does it look like?

The strategic implementation plan is a set of steps recorded in a written document that usually details the steps and processes needed to reach specific goals.

As well as timelines and the individuals in charge of each step, it should allow for feedback and progress reports to ensure that the plan is moving forward. If you are in a new company, build an easy-to-use template that your team can follow.

What does strategic implementation achieve?

Strategic implementation is critical to addressing fine details of important plans and strategies. As well the end goal, it will look at the smaller targets that should be put in place. This could simply be larger sales volumes or a greater online brand presence. Each goal will need a map or pathway for reaching it.

It also focuses on the entire organisation rather than just one end goal, in isolation. For instance, if senior members are needed to offer feedback and involvement, then this will be included in the plan so that the momentum of progress is not affected. It involves assigning tasks to individuals and timelines so that no one person can jeopardise the project’s success.

Requirements

A basic implementation plan needs a project leader, such as the marketing manager or the CEO.  This person is responsible for communicating the relevancy and vision of the goal.  They also take an holistic view of the plan for the business to realise synergies and also to prevent any one function or goal assuming over importance.  They are also the “go to” person for anyone who is new to the goal or unclearto seek clarification.

Everyone in an organisation needs to be engaged with the plan.

Performance measurement tools are useful for providing tracking and motivation.

Implementation often includes a strategic map, which is sometimes a visual diagram, identifying the key ingredients that will direct performance.

THE ART OF IMPROVING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

How employees feel about their work and office environment is a significant driver of success for your entire organisation. Engaged workers are more productive, reliable and can become your greatest brand ambassadors.

Effective leaders know that employee engagement is a fundamental part of achieving success in competitive markets. Ultimately, it helps to increase productivity and achieve better quality work output.

We’ve outlined some essential ways you can improve employee engagement in your business and enjoy the many benefits that come from having employees who actually care about their job.

• Define and Measure Engagement

Engagement isn’t just about the most active or vocal employees in your Monday meetings. Engagement is defined differently in different situations and it is helpful to map out what it means for your business before you plan any future engagement initiatives.

It could refer to how active your teams are when embarking on sales and marketing activities, or how dedicated your creative team is to develop new concepts and briefs. Measuring current levels of engagement can also help identify what’s working for your company and where you need to improve.

• Build a Strategy

Once you have figured out what you want to achieve, create a strategy that recognises employee engagement. This can be part of the overall rewards or bonus program or tied into the individual targets of each employee. Whatever you do, focus on creating organisational alignment by matching other company initiatives with your employee engagement plans.

• Set Expectations

Some believe engagement comes down to how well employees understand the expectations of their role. If they don’t know what is expected of them, how can they possibly strive for excellence?  When the expectations have been set, make sure you recognise and celebrate when they are met and take prompt corrective action when they are not met.

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Encapsulating Culture and Values

Ultimately, company culture refers to the personality of a company. It encapsulates the culture and values of an organisation and defines the environment in which employees work.

Company culture includes a variety of aspects which come together to create the framework that all employees work within. It is the work environment, office atmosphere, company mission, value, ethics, expectations and goals.

Types of company culture

Different types of culture suit different types of companies. Some organisations have a culture that focuses on team building and high levels of employee participation across departments, while others follow a more traditional management style.

Some companies are young, cool start-ups with a passion for promoting fun activities within the workforce. Others priorities corporate excellence and linear management structures.

Learn from the best

Some companies have come to represent the very best in company culture, such as Google, which has a very clear, informal style which priorities creativity and productivity while providing its employees with all the freedom and resources it needs to progress.

Why company culture matters

Company culture is a crucial part of ensuring your business is integrated. As well as establishing your brand identity through internal processes and activities, it is important to employees because workers are more likely to enjoy their time in the workplace when they fit in with the company culture.

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Integrating core values into your company culture

Small businesses face many challenges and it’s easy to lose track of where your values and principles are as a business when you’re simply trying to survive and turn a profit. In order to make sure you get the marketing process right every time, it’s best to bake some quality business principles into the process from the very start. 

We’ve highlighted some ideas to help you integrate good marketing and overall culture and values into your organisation while it’s still young. By doing this, it will become second nature to nail your core services and processes every time. 

1. Harness social media

A last minute social media campaign cobbled together by your marketing intern isn’t going to get you the sales you need. To truly benefit from social media marketing, make sure it is a priority from the very beginning. 

If your team are too pressed for time, simply have your core staff maintain their own social accounts diligently, acting as brand ambassadors with something interesting to say about your business. You’ll be surprised how impactful this can be if you make the right contacts and say the right things!

2. Recognise the value of employee motivation

Employee motivation and integration is a crucial part of any small business. It is also at this time, when your number of staff is low, that you can truly dedicate some time to each member and help create a trajectory for their future in your organisation. These individuals can eventually become the leaders of your company, so time invested now can really help when you’re expanding and taking on junior staff to handle the work load. 

Every employee, regardless of title, position, or list of responsibilities should have clear objectives and a rewards program that will help to keep them on track and motivated.

3. Define who you are

Develop a clear, consistent, and concise value brand identity that tells your story. It doesn’t have to include very single detail about what your employees should be doing or how they should be acting, but it should provide an overall framework for them to work within. This will go a long way in creating a culture that your team and get behind. 

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The importance of brand identity

A huge shift has already taken place whereby commercial enterprises that want to survive and flourish must offer their customers a values-driven service that projects a consistent brand image. While some believe this is simply a brand’s name and logo, it is certainly far more than this.

A brand identity includes all the visual elements of a brand, but also the company’s values and purpose. All of this together makes up a brand identity and when this is done right, it can be incredibly effective at cultivating a positive impression in the minds of your customers.  

What is brand identity?

The are many individual elements that make up the brand identity. This can include things like the company’s name, its logo the colour scheme it uses in its visual communication as well as the tone and style of any marketing and advertising material. But more importantly, it also includes the company’s core values.

For this brand identity to be consistent throughout the company, it requires employees to be on board with the company’s values and approach to doing business. Many companies fail to execute their brand identity when their staff fail to project the kind of image that they want to stand for.

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Achieving Greater Employee Engagement in the Workplace

Improving employee engagement in the workplace can be a difficult task. Many businesses fail because they are too focused on their commercial goals when embarking on this journey. Ultimately, better engagement from your workforce can help to support your success as an enterprise, but to truly get people on board, you need to genuinely care about people and the roles they perform in your organisation.

If you have a strong team behind you who are happy and motivated, you can overcome any challenge that might face you. So, start with developing real relationships with your employees and finding out what motivates them. If you start from this position, you’ll find that improving engagement is much easier.

Allow flexibility

Being too rigid is a fatal management approach. It is obvious today, after numerous tests and surveys, that increased flexibility for employees results in greater motivation and commitment to work. If you give people the freedom to adjust their work schedules, they will be happier and much more likely to dedicate themselves to their work projects.

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What is Customer Experience Strategy?

Sometimes, you need to step back and consider the role that your customers actually play in your company’s success. It might seem obvious, but if you neglect to consider how they behave and feel in relation to your business activities, you could very quickly become distanced from your customer base.

To achieve success in any company, the customer must always be central to long term progress strategies. As such, developing an actual customer experience strategy can go a long way. But how does one do this?

At its core, a customer experience strategy is a framework that you can put in place to make sure the needs of your customer base are being met. From a demand for quality products and services to added value, it will act as a plan that makes sure no customer slips through the cracks and goes to your competitors.

Defining the Customer Experience Strategy

Each business interacts with customers on daily basis. And in total, there will be numerous exchanges and communications with your customer base, whether this is in the form of purchases, services, information or post-sale customer after care. Rather than letting these actions take place ad-hoc, a customer experience strategy tries to create an overall map that factors in each interaction under one umbrella that sits carefully under your brand and core values.

This can also include things like how your website is designed to make the customer experience smooth and easy to understand, as well as how your customer care team deals with complaints or inquiries. It should all be part of the same customer experience strategy.

What makes a successful strategy?

A successful customer experience strategy should take into account all departments, not just employees you typically consider to be customer-facing. By incorporating feedback and insight across the company, from your reception to your website maintenance team, you’ll be able to align your company’s behaviour with your brand identity, securing stronger relationships with your customers.