Internal Branding Best Practices

Internal branding gives you a competitive advantage and gives your company a sense of consistency and reliability. It focuses on establishing your company’s core elements, such as its identity, culture, voice, and values. The goal is to unify your internal and external brand ideas and communicate your company’s missions to both employees and customers. 

Most importantly, internal branding is all about enhancing employee experiences, retaining them, and turning them into your company’s ambassadors. That way, it will position your company as trustworthy and attract top talent.

In this article, you will learn a few core principles of internal branding.

Define your Company’s Core Values

The goal of an employer branding strategy is to give your company a unique identity and communicate it with your employees. To help your staff identify with your company’s culture, you first need to define its goals, missions, and philosophy. 

Establishing your initial values and principles gives your staff a sense of consistency and purpose. It gets your entire organization to the same page and helps your employees understand what you expect of them. They will know what kind of behaviors and activities are acceptable and what to do to make the company culture even stronger.

By identifying with your organization’s values and missions, employees will be motivated, knowing they are contributing to something real and valuable. Instead of waiting for a paycheck, they will believe in what they do and be passionate about it. Most importantly, they will communicate your company’s values when interacting with customers.

Given these benefits, it is not surprising at all that companies with a higher sense of purpose outperform competitors by up to 400%.

Keep Engaging Employees

Employee engagement improves productivity in the workplace, reduces absenteeism, and enhances employee morale. Engaged employees are more satisfied and, therefore, they perform better than their disengaged peers.
 

Still, it seems that employers do not understand the value of employee engagement. According to Gallup’s State of the Workplace, 85% of employees are not engaged. 

Now, you can enhance employees’ engagement in multiple ways. Start by collecting their feedback. Create satisfaction surveys to keep your finger on the pulse of your staff and understand what they feel about your employer brand. You can even create anonymous surveys and polls for employees that are hesitant about voicing their opinions publicly. Additionally, hosting Q&A questions, building communities for employees on Slack, and creating focus groups will also engage employees and help you collect their feedback.

Personalize your Internal Brand

When I say “branding,” the first thing that crosses your mind is probably your company’s logo, fonts, typography, colors, mission statements, and tone of voice. While your external brand already has all of those elements, how much do you invest in internal branding? A memorable internal branding identity will help you build stronger relationships with employees and make their everyday roles more meaningful. 

The goal is to harmonize your internal and external brand identity. That way, you will ensure brand consistency and help employees understand how the two relate. 

Say your external branding is all about enhancing user experiences. If you teach your customer service teams to ignore support tickets and focus on generating new leads, that may create a massive gap between internal and external communications. This practice will only confuse employees. They will not be able to understand what your company’s real direction is. 

Recognize and Reward Employees

Most employers focus on attracting new employees. But, what happens once you onboard a top-notch employee? That is where most companies’ effort stops. One of the most common internal branding mistakes is the lack of employee recognition and focus. 

Employees want to get a pat on the back by bosses. They expect you to keep track of their performance and reward them. By incentivizing your staff members, you will increase their accountability, dedication, and leadership initiatives.

Studies say that 84% of highly engaged employees were recognized when they performed exceptionally, compared to only 25% of actively disengaged staff members. 

Sure, employee rewarding should not focus on the “employee of the month” approach that results in unhealthy competition among your employees. You should also reward employees who demonstrate an understanding of your brand, who are passionate about their jobs, or who are your employer brand’s true ambassadors. 

Most importantly, the rewards do not need to be monetary. For example, invest in an employee recognition tool to gamify user experiences, enhance the transparency of employee communications, and encourage peer-to-peer recognition. 

Ready to Build a Strong Internal Brand?

When building an internal branding strategy, remember that it is not one-and-done practice. 

To establish an employer brand, you need to set its core values and stick to them. Most importantly, you need to listen to your employees and find new ways to engage them. 

That way, you will keep them satisfied, increase their loyalty, and turn them into your brand’s ambassadors.

What are the core elements of your internal brand? We are listening!