Maybe you should.
Years ago Jerry Seinfeld did a bit on lemon juice. He talked about how the labels on the lemon juice in the fruit juice aisle at the grocery story said “imitation lemon flavor”. But, if you went to the cleaning supply aisle, the furniture polish labels touted “made with real lemon juice”. The punch line was “we’re spraying the good stuff on the furniture!”
The incongruence makes it funny, but the point is valid. Shouldn’t what you put in your body be of better quality than what you’d spray on your furniture? Of course it should.
This same metaphor can be used for marketing. We typically reserve it for prospects and customers. We study their wants and needs, their buying patterns and social media usage. We map their journey with our brand. We tailor our product offerings and promotions to best suit the needs of our prospects and customers. We care deeply about them.
The model for business success through marketing is clear: awareness and engagement with a positive brand experience leads to customer loyalty, profits, and business growth.
We believe it and we invest in it.
We dedicate entire divisions of our larger companies to marketing and fill them with the best experts we can find. And, they are entirely focused on turning target prospects into customers and customers into repeat and loyal customers.
But, what about your employees?
They are decidedly the most important customers you have. They are ultimately responsible for making the business successful. They need to be sold on the value of the business to them personally as well as to the customers. Their interactions with prospects and customers determine whether that brand experience your marketers work so hard to define actually plays out in reality.
The model for business success through employees is also clear: engaged employees deliver superior experiences to customers which leads to customer loyalty, profits, and business growth.
But, we don’t believe in this fully.
We let the notion of paying our employees cloud our view. We feel by compensating our employees we are doing all that is necessary and the rest is their responsibility. If we do research on our employees’ views, we often discount any negative responses as due to poor performing employees that “don’t get it” or poor leadership from our middle managers.
Maximizing business success requires putting the same marketing effort toward your employees as you do your customers, if not more. Make selling the business to your employees an important function:
1. Use the marketing discipline to define your target employee, map the experience, and determine the real value you deliver beyond compensation and benefits. Focus on the value the organization delivers to world and how the employees make that happen.
2. Develop communication to your employees with a tone and voice that matches your brand’s personality. Not just slogans and platitudes, but real dialog. Expand the conversation beyond the “rules” and delve into content that validates and inspires employees.
3. Hire marketing professionals on to your human resources team with the mission of turning target prospective employees into employees, and employees into loyal employees and brand ambassadors. Not ready to make that commitment to additional FTEs? Hire a consultant to assess your company’s employer brand and recommend some action steps to get started leveraging existing staff.
In other words, get started on spraying the good stuff on your employees.