How to create a strong brand story telling from the inside out

Strong inside-out marketing strategies start at home with you and your team. Marketers tend to spend a lot of their time and attention on the outside world. After all, we want people to buy what is being sold here.

Because so much attention is given to outside audiences, it's easy to forget about our employees.

We must focus on the people at the core of our brand story if we want it to be a success. They are not only essential for business but also essential to providing a memorable experience for customers. These are some suggestions to help you get started.

Quick Takeaways

• Find your purpose first.
• This purpose should be explained to your team.
• Your people will be stronger from the inside out!
• Connect your team.

Find your purpose

It is easy to point fingers at a company for its poor performance in the economy or on competition. It's much more difficult to look inwardly for flaws.

Companies that outperform peers and industries consistently have one thing in common: a shared purpose.

Purpose is the foundation of brand storytelling. Companies must understand their business to ensure that purpose is clear. Theodore Levitt, a Harvard Business School professor, coined “marketing myopia” in 1960 to describe the blindness of companies when they focus too much on their products and services rather than looking at the bigger picture of what customers want. His students learned from him that customers don’t need a drill measuring quarts in diameter, but rather a drill measuring quarter inch.

Make sure your team ‘gets it'

Employees must be able to articulate their purpose and apply it in everyday life to help companies become more purpose-driven.

Marketers need to set a higher standard for what they expect from us in terms of our influence on employee engagement. It is a huge difference in the way that the stories we tell and the experiences we create are shaped by those moments of truth between customers and employees.

It's all fine and dandy, but how can we do it?

To build up your people, use the inside-out strategy

Leadership is what people and organizations see. There is often a huge gap between what the leadership believes to be the company's vision and what employees believe.

Levitt's point is that companies aren’t in business just to sell products, but to serve customers. To make that happen, marketers must tell a coherent brand story internally. Here are six steps to help you do that.

Step 1: Make it your priority.

Building relationships with employees and customers is the same thing as building relationships with customers. Just like external audiences, internal content production must be a top priority.

Get executive buy-in to ensure that you have the authority, resources and responsibility to centralize your practice. You'll be able to tell one consistent story, rather than multiple, inconsistent stories from each department.

A better working environment is only possible if you have a better working relationship with your employees. Chris White gave a TedTalk about how to create an environment that encourages innovation from within.

Step 2: Develop employee personas

You need to understand the motivations of the different personas in your organization, just like the buyer personas that you use for external content.

What does your customer care about what you tell them? Is your technical support team aware of customer problems that you blog about?

Your content for executives should not be the same as that of customers. Some are leading the strategy, while others are executing it. Look at the connections between your content and each persona.

Different needs will be required by different employees within an organization. Employees at tech companies are different than those working in oil and gas fields. If they aren't tech-connected, Slack, Microsoft and HubSpot will not reach them.

Let's take, for example, the implementation of a new communication technology within your organization to keep your employees connected. This program should be easy to learn for a millennial who works in IT. An older accountant, who communicates mostly via E-mail, may require more assistance to get used to the new program.

This is a great guideline to help you get started.

You'll be able get creative with how you grab their attention if you know your employees as well.

Step 3: Determine your starting point

Are you able to communicate with your employees regularly? For small teams, this could be as simple a cup of coffee and donuts each Monday morning or as complex as quarterly global broadcasts for large enterprises.

If you don't know the answer, then your starting point might look more like a baseline. You'll be a lot more successful if you have an onboarding deck that each employee received on day 1.

Knowing where you are starting from will help you determine how much education you need to give your internal teams about your brand story, what it means for customers, and their roles.

Step 4: Create a plan

Now is the time to bring your brand story alive for your employees. This template will help you plan your editorial strategy for every publication. This template shows who is helping to tell the story, including your executive leadership.

Let's face facts: If something is important to your leadership, it should also be a priority in the lives of all employees.

Step 5: Communicate strategically

You might find yourself needing to communicate with your employees more often than you currently do, but you should also remember that everything must be purpose-driven. Don't allow them to forget you.

This chart will help you to think about what you want and how you want it to come out. Some employees will be more successful at connecting the company's brand story to their work than others.

When you're developing your leadership strategy, think about these things: How can your brand story inspire employees? Can it help solve a customer problem instead of just selling a product? What is the experience they can create for their audience?

Step 6: Make it interesting

David Ogilvy once stated that “You can't bore people into buying your products.” This is also true for internal brand storytelling.

Customers have relationships with people and not companies, as we know. Marketers must be willing to share brand storytelling with others in order to make brand stories truly come alive through the experiences we create. This will ensure that everyone who represents your company understands what makes it unique.

You can get employees to be excited about your story and create a cohesive, cohesive team that is proud to share it whenever they have the chance.

Let me know, what can you do to get employees excited about your brand story and motivated?

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