Listen: growing your business doesn’t happen by accident.
And while your marketing team certainly plays a role, the act of putting your business out there is something that’s on the responsibility of all of your employees.
Look around at many of today’s biggest startups. One of the common threads between them is the fact that their employees are incredibly loyal and do the legwork in spreading their company’s message.
To squeeze more out of your team and expand your reach, tapping into your employees’ talents is a smart move. In addition, taking a conscious effort to get your employees more involved with your business will increase employee engagement in a day and age where many workers are burned out. Consider the following tactics below.
Empower Them to Conduct Outreach
Especially if you’re running a small team, encouraging your employees to conduct outreach and connect with customers directly is a smart move. This allows customers and clients to get more of a “flavor” of your company and its unique voice. Notice that many big brands are sending from employee accounts or at least presents their messages that way.
Tools such as GMass can serve as mass senders that can easily be adopted by just about any team-member. Working within Gmail, GMass’ Chrome extension allows users to create templates and schedule messages. For employees working directly with specific groups or teams, such as tool can save some serious time.
Let Them Boost Your Social Content
Employee advocacy was once heralded as the future of marketing but it’s clear that such a future has arrived in a big way.
How so? Consider that big brands are having employees publish their content, instantly expanding that content’s reach beyond their social accounts. Think about it like this: any given employee has hundreds of social followers across multiple platforms. Letting employees boost social posts is a no-brainer for your workers and new customers alike.
Encourage Them to Create Content
Undoubtedly one of the challenges of content marketing is the need for fresh, consistent content.
Even if you have someone in your organization creating blog posts or outsourcing to freelancers, think about how you can use your internal talent to create content as well. This isn’t a call to force your workers to wear too many hats, but rather give them a chance to sound off and share their knowledge
For example, letting someone on your sales team or HR department post on your company blog is low-hanging fruit for great content. Doing so not only lets them share their voice, but also give your blog some much-needed flavor and diversity. If nothing else, it gives such workers a platform to reach readers they otherwise never would reach.
Interview Them for Their Insights
On a related note, interviewing your employees is a way to create promotional content such as podcasts or interviews. For example, many brands do mini-interviews and employee profiles on Facebook and Instagram. This instantly shows that you’re invested in your workers and want them to feel like part of your team.
Have Them Attend Industry Events
In-person networking is absolutely booming right now given the popularity of meet-ups and conferences. Make sure that you get your workers involved in the experience and don’t limit in-person events to managers. Some key benefits of sending employees to conferences including creating a sense of camaraderie among your team while also inspiring them.
Collect Frequent Employee Feedback
Employees thrive when their higher-ups are empathetic. Understanding the strengths and challenges of your workers means asking them directly. Doing so allows you to instantly improve work conditions and create an environment where your workers can thrive.
Creating an employee engagement survey is a solid starting point for soliciting feedback from your workers. This allows an anonymous channel to pick your workers’ brains. Bear in mind that many employees are timid about bringing up issues either due to fear of judgement or even embarrassment. However, you’ll never learn what you’re doing right (or wrong) until you ask.
Give Them Ample Praise
On a related note, employees tend to perform poorly when they feel like they’re not receiving any sort of praise or acknowledgment from their managers. Whether during meetings or will small check-ins, make a point to say something positive to your workers on an individual level. This might seem like not seem like a big deal, but doing so can instantly signal you as a company worth sticking around with.
Providing your employees as much stake as possible in your business is a smart move to not only build a sense of loyalty, but ensure that their productive and invested in their work. From getting them involved with marketing to reinforcing your company’s values, any combination of these tips can help your workers feel like they have a place in your team.
