5 Strategies to Navigate the Employee Revolution

Table of Content 

1. Define Your Culture
2. Build Your Brand
3. Use Digital Marketing
4. Invest in What Matters
5. Put a Measurement Strategy in Place

I’ve heard it hundreds of times, “I don’t need a marketing strategy. I have enough leads.”  The question now is do you have enough employees to get the job done? It’s time to embrace marketing as part of your recruitment strategy. Of course, supply chain bottlenecks, inflation, Covid 19 variants, and the Great Resignation were not part of your original vision.  The pandemic, together with the early retirements it brought about, has made it difficult for companies to attract and retain top-notch employees.

Workers have begun to reconsider where and how they work. They’ve taken bold moves to start new careers, and have focused on what’s really important to them, their quality of life.  Your company and the work they do for you?  Not so much. Today’s savviest companies understand they are fighting the battle for survival and relevance on two fronts.  They must provide the customer with the ultimate service experience while ensuring they are attracting and retaining the workforce necessary to do so.  To compete in the midst of an employee revolution, they must fully embrace the employee experience. The employee experience has become a consumer-facing issue, just as your brand, culture, reviews, and more are.   

Here are 5 strategies to help you navigate the employee revolution using a marketing strategy that aligns with your recruitment. 

Define Your Culture

One of the first impressions a person gets of a company is its culture. Culture is the character and personality of a company. It's what makes the company unique and is built around its values and beliefs. 

Positive workplace culture attracts the quality people and the talent you’re looking for. It drives engagement, impacts happiness and satisfaction, and affects performance. Your company culture is significantly impacted by leadership, management, workplace practices, policies, people, and more. A positive culture will not only bring in the talent you want, it will also keep them there, while a negative culture will easily drive them away.

The biggest mistake companies make is allowing their workplace culture to form organically without first defining that culture. If you’re a CEO, ask yourself what type of culture you want your workplace to have. Then be intentional in forming that culture. Ensure that the culture is not only understood by all in leadership and management but also put into practice. That is what it will take to ensure that everyone who comes on board will experience it and benefit from it.   

Your culture should be wrapped around things that impact the success of the employee. Some examples are:

• Establishing work-from-home opportunities
• Onboarding programs that reflect hybrid work environments
• Communications that accommodate a physically disconnected workforce
• Opportunities for success regardless of location
• Ensuring all employees have access to opportunities and what they need at every level in order to be successful

Build Your Brand

Defining your culture helps to define your brand. Take the strategic steps that will ensure that everyone knows what your brand represents, including your employees. When your employees are on board with the workplace culture and fully understand your brand, they become instrumental in helping to build it. They also become loyal to something they understand and take pleasure in helping to build. 

Building your brand doesn’t stop at the employee level. It’s important that your audience of consumers fully understands your brand. Branding a company takes time and reflection to know what to say and understand how to say it. The goal is to build a brand that is marketable to the customers you want to attract while showcasing your company’s values. Here are some strategies to do that:

• Ensure that every single employee (at every level) understands the company’s mission, vision, and purpose.
• Make sure the mission and vision are always visible to employees and customers.
• Use print and digital sources to display key messaging about what your company represents.
• Use messaging that helps to show how the company’s products and services stand out from competitors.
• Create brand marketing strategies so all your marketing works together, regardless of the medium used.
• Use multiple channels to display your messaging: web design, email campaigns, banner ads, video, and social media.
• Communicate a great value proposition and selling points, and address pain points.
• Build creative campaigns to launch your brand, introduce new services, or increase brand awareness.
• Ensure your employees always feel they are a part of the larger success and celebrate every little win they have along the way.

Use Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is an efficient way to market that will ensure you’re reaching all of your B2B audience. Digital marketing includes marketing through various digital channels online. Digital marketing can be leveraged to optimize keywords for SEO, in social media email marketing, and inbound marketing to connect with current and prospective customers. A digital strategy will increase brand awareness, generate leads, and increase sales. Digital marketing is used to:

• Create and share relevant information with your online target audience.
• Enhance your brand reach and visibility to buyers and talent.
• Leverage your CRM and marketing automation for account-based marketing tactics such as paid advertising, social media, and email marketing to B2B leads. 

Some examples of digital marketing include:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Rank higher on the search engine results page when people are trying to find you on the internet.
• Pay Per Click (PPC): Ensure you are found by promoting your site with PPC advertising. Promote your offerings on Google Ads and Bing Ads in formats including text, video, shopping, and banners,  specifically targeting your existing customers.
• Email Marketing: Promote everything from events to discounts through email marketing campaigns. Email marketing gives you the opportunity to create more quality leads while interesting your current and potential customers in your offerings.
• Content Marketing: Create relevant content in various formats: video, text, GIF, infographic, etc. to rule your market or industry, and add value to your customer’s purchasing process.
• Social Media: Be everywhere by posting and engaging on social media. Social media increases brand awareness, drives traffic, and generates more leads. 
• Inbound Marketing: Use digital marketing tactics to attract, engage, and delight your customers at every stage in their buyer journey by delivering what they need, at the right time, then keep them coming back for more. 

Invest in What Matters

To navigate the employee revolution, companies need to put their money where their mouth is. That means investing in what matters. For the employee, it will be their employment experience. The biggest influence on investment in employees is increasing wages. The minimum wage is increasing in many places, and companies want to ensure they aren’t beat out for the best candidates. The average mom-and-pop shop down the street is now giving potential customers something to think about in their increased wages.

Companies also need to make wise investments in technology. To ramp up digital marketing, invest in the tools and technology that will align with those marketing goals. CRM and marketing automation tools are crucial to monitor sales pipelines, close deals and improve existing customer relationships. Technology is crucial in providing the resources needed to develop your existing employees and recruit new ones.

Put a Measurement Strategy in Place

The good thing about digital marketing is, it makes measuring success more doable, but measuring success doesn’t just happen. Although the means are there, you still need a plan for measuring those successes. In fact, everything your company does should have a measurement plan associated with it. Having the proper tools in place to measure everything from the effectiveness of what you’re doing as a team to return on investment is essential. 

As important as employee performance plans are, other tools define the performance of the company overall. In essence, if the company isn’t performing well overall, there may not be a company for employees to work for. Measuring the health of your company assures your employees their jobs are safe, protected, and will still be there tomorrow. Use measurement plans to: 

• Measure the effectiveness, efficiencies, and scalability of your sales and marketing to adapt to the changing buyer behaviors.
• Measure the impact branding is having on your recruitment strategy.
• Measure the return on investment in new technologies.

Measure your data and drive your company’s goals. To make important decisions about your digital marketing, you need information about your campaigns’ performances over time and their success in leading to purchases from your business. Measure every aspect of your digital marketing: number of visitors per page, average time on each page, number of visitors that clicked on the page, and number of profitable interactions with your website’s links.

Measuring what you’re doing is crucial to your company’s direction and knowing what your goals should be. Using analytics shapes your marketing strategies to drive your business decisions, while maintaining a low-no monthly cost. That’s why it is critical to have a comprehensive measurement plan in place. Do your research, gather information, gather your resources, and determine how you will measure progress in a meaningful way.

Pulling it All Together

Navigating the employee revolution is no easy feat. It takes various initiatives to come together and ultimately keep the company on an even keel and favorable to employee retention. Defining your culture, building your brand, utilizing digital marketing, investing in technologies, and measuring the overall success of your company will combine to bring your company success on all fronts.