Traditional communications are becoming less and less effective by the minute. As a forward thinking person in HR, you know there has to be a better way. There is and it’s called content marketing. The concept of content marketing has been around for the last 20 years. Marketers use content marketing to increase their company’s brand, reputation and sales. It’s gain in popularity to a standard practice for most marketers is due to it being relatively cost effective to produce and creates great ROI.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the art of communicating with an audience without selling. Instead of pitching products or services, you are delivering information that makes your audience more intelligent or perhaps entertains them to build an emotional connection.
As of this writing, the Wikipedia definition of content marketing states:
Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses in order to:
- Attract attention and generate leads
- Expand their customer base
- Generate or increase online sales
- Increase brand awareness or credibility
- Engage an online community of users
By implementing content marketing, businesses deliver content to their audiences in the places they are looking for it. So it’s important for businesses to know where their audiences are looking for information online. It could be a social media site, a review site, a brand website and so on.
Why Marketers Use Content Marketing
Content marketing is a widely adopted tactic because it’s non-interruption marketing. It directly helps an audience solve a problem, become more informed or entertains them without pitching a product or service. When an audience consumes helpful, free content they can make better informed decisions. When deployed correctly, content marketing helps marketers earn the audience’s trust, grows the audience, boosts web traffic, generates demand and is generally is cost-effective to produce.
Earns trust. Trust grows with an audience as they consume information provided by your brand that will help them solve a specific problem.
Grows audiences. By offering credible information, your brand becomes a trusted resource that an audience will come back for time and time again.
Boosts web traffic. Search engines help people find content and will showcase good content first which helps grow organic traffic back to brand websites.
Generates demand. Great content will raise awareness about your brand and the services/products you provide, thus creating more demand for said services/products.
Cost effective. Typically content marketing is way less expensive than traditional marketing methods.
Content Marketing for Employee Communications
Consumers are used to digesting brand information through content marketing. Which means your employees, who happen to also be consumers, are already participating within the marketing tactic. Great communication strategies implement tactics that work in the marketing world. That’s because your employees are already used to consuming marketing content and will respond well to similar messaging and content given to them at work.
Let’s take the Wikipedia definition of content marketing and tweek it for employee and internal communications. It would look something like this:
Internal content marketing is a form of communication focused on creating, publishing and distributing content for employees. It is often used by HR departments in order to:
- Attract attention of current and future employees
- Expand employee education and understanding
- Boost enrollment rates
- Increase brand and culture awareness
- Engage an online community of employees
Internal content marketing is about focusing on your employees. It’s all about creating content that will inform, engage and elevate your employees. Content marketing will help you:
- Attract and retain top talent
- Inform employees
- Encourage and support healthier lifestyles
- Provide a better benefits experience
It’s not about you.
It’s about the employee. When you get into this mindset with the content you create, you will be blown away with the response from employees. The content will pull the employee in with personalized content rather than one-size-fits-all email blasts. You’ll find better open rates and response rates with personalized content that applies to the employee’s specific situation.
It’s personal.
Internal content marketing should be personal. When it’s personal it can create a two-way conversation rather than you sending an email and hoping the employee reads it. Personalize content by including the employees name in an email, only sending content that is applicable to the employee and inserting calls-to-action that will help the employee utilize the information in their work and personal life.
It’s not risky.
From an investment standpoint it’s low risk and offers a high return on investment because it’s easy to create, easy to update and easy to post. It’s also relatively cheap to create. If you don’t have the internal resources to create content, it’s easy to find freelancers to help write, design, film and edit your content.
It’s multiple pieces of content.
Internal marketing requires more than one piece of content. You have to offer different types of content in different channels to ensure employees see the content, understand it and take the required call-to-action. The great thing about internal content marketing is that HR already has a plethora of content just waiting to be reused for internal content marketing. Take the benefits guide book for example. Most employees won’t read it cover-to-cover. So throughout the year take snippets out of the guide book to educate or remind employees about specific benefits. You can turn the snippets into blog posts, infographics, videos and so much more.
It’s employee testimonials.
Employees who have had positive experiences with your company and the benefits you offer are a great asset to your internal content marketing arsenal. When you get employees talking about their experiences with their benefits you will get amazing content. Turn your testimonials into a video, newsletter article, or even a poster to hang in a break room. When you utilize employee testimonials for internal content marketing you can increase the awareness of your internal programs and boost overall perception of specific benefits.