With marketing being such an integral part of growing business and revenue, it’s always heartbreaking to ask your marketing team to find ways to reduce costs. When faced with harsh cuts, how can you maintain the right balance between all your focus areas, and still maintain optimal operational efficiency? The uncomfortable truth is that companies will from time to time be forced to reduce their marketing spend – yet there are ways to do more for less, allowing you to deliver equally impressive marketing whilst keeping your finance team happy.

Cost efficiency is the name of the game, but even in hard times one shouldn’t forget the old adage ‘you have to spend money to make money.’ When you’re focusing on getting the most out of the money you do spend, the challenge is naturally to map out where and how it’s best put to use. A good place to start is understanding the direct challenges marketers face when they have to operate on a lower budget than expected.

1.Maintaining content production volume

A busy marketing department always has a lot of plates spinning at once. Brands have more channels available than ever before to engage with their audiences, build visibility, and grow their business. While some of them will be more relevant to your business than others, your strategy will undoubtedly include multiple channels, and taking full advantage of them traditionally requires a great deal of time and resources.

When budgets shrink, it becomes a real challenge for marketing teams to uphold the same level of production through conventional processes. Sacrifices have to be made somewhere, whether that is limiting the number of utilised channels or how frequently content is created for them.

Completing repetitive tasks is a constant necessity when producing content for marketing. This time-thief gets even worse in the face of budget cuts and reduced capacity for content production. If the workflow is clunky and assets are being created from scratch far too often, the time it takes for everyone to contribute, review the work and carry out the revisions can lead to substantial delays in sign-off times. Deadlines are missed, and so are timely marketing opportunities. Solving such bottlenecks can make a big difference for your marketing team’s agility and ability to respond to important trends in the market.

2.Less time to plan and strategise

You’ve reiterated to your marketing team that now is the time for action and getting material out to the market. Now everyone is immersed in their own tasks and projects to keep the marketing engine running, and less time is spent on coordinating and realigning. Before you know it, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. From there you can quickly end up with duplication of work, caused by lack of communication and planning.

Not only has precious time and resource been wasted at this point, you might even have frustration and discontent growing with the people whose work had to be cut, and perhaps with the team as a whole. The last thing you need in times like these is a team underperforming due to unhappiness and dysfunction. What’s more, the cost of replacing someone unhappy enough to leave will only increase the stress on your overall marketing budget.

This may be a slightly exaggerated example, but communication breakdown and lack of oversight and planning are serious obstacles. Left unchecked, they will negatively affect your marketing output. And the longer you leave it, the worse it gets for everyone involved. What you need is an easy way to get a bird’s-eye view of the operation, so you can be sure that every effort goes towards fulfilling the company’s goals – and no resource is wasted.

3. Powerful but expensive content types like video get shelved

There’s no question that video content is proven effective when marketing in almost any setting and platform. It’s eye-catching wherever it’s deployed, and provides a pleasant way for your audience to absorb information. Unfortunately, video content also tends to be expensive and resource-intensive to produce, compared to simpler forms of content. As a result, it’s often the first thing on the chopping block when managers are asked to find ways to reduce marketing costs.

Instead of putting all video projects on ice, it’s worth considering a more measured approach. While it might be best to hold off on the big ‘flagship’ videos with all the bells and whistles, there may be smaller areas where more simplistic video content can be very effective. You’d be surprised how far you can get with a phone camera on a tripod, a friendly face and some simple design and editing.

4. Display ads and social media takes priority

Keeping a good level of focus on social media marketing is always a smart decision, since it’s a relatively inexpensive and cost efficient form of marketing. It’s also the main channel where you can keep a finger on the pulse of your customer base, and follow market trends. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, social media platforms are the main avenues for building visibility, interest and traffic for your brand, and so it’s always worth spending time and resource to maintain and execute a good social media strategy.

For many brands, display advertising or banner ads is what gets people through the proverbial door. As one of the primary ways of advertising and driving traffic, they are often considered essential to marketing efforts. There is definitely truth in this, but display ads also tend to have a short shelf life, while being challenging to create. Reducing the time and resource necessary to produce these assets is sure to have an all round positive impact on your marketing team.

What separates social media posting from display ads, is that social media requires greater focus on presenting content that has real value if you want to get results. Creating engaging content is challenging in itself, and when you consider that you need a good frequency of posting on top, the issue is immediately apparent in the face of budget cuts. You may have a lot of existing content you can lean on and highlight, and making use of content that’s still relevant is a smart move. However, allowing your output of new content to stagnate is a huge risk to your growth.

5. Maintaining brand consistency under time pressure

Making sure that brand consistency is maintained in every asset and piece of content going out is a full-time job. If you don’t have a dedicated brand manager, odds are the job falls to the marketing leadership. When time is already limited, and your marketing heads are busier than usual, they will be hard pressed to make sure every detail is following brand guidelines in addition to handling their other spinning plates.

Research shows that you can increase your revenue with 23% if your brand is consistent. The economic impact of lost revenue is something you definitely don’t need on top of the external factors that are already having an effect on your bottom line.

This leaves marketing teams with a dilemma. Either you spend the time and money to maintain better brand consistency, at the expense of your output. Or you take the hit and spend it on other marketing efforts until you have the capacity to focus on it again. This is a tough decision to make. On the one hand you have to try to maintain as much growth as possible in spite of the market cooling down. On the other hand, putting your brand consistency at risk could have far-reaching repercussions that haunt your brand long after economic downtimes.

You can overcome the challenges – there is a better way

As evidenced by the challenges we’ve highlighted, Speed, finesse, volume and oversight is tremendously valuable to a marketing team’s day-to-day workflow. Optimisation of your processes is necessary to remain competitive, in both the good times and the hard times. If you choose to stick to the traditional ways of producing content and designs, getting approval and publication, there’s only so much you can do to plan around and alleviate the problems of working with less resources at your disposal.

Fortunately there is a better way to help your marketing team win back what they lose in capacity when brands have no other choice but to tighten their belts.

It’s time to make a change – read more in our free short guide.

There is a significant amount of value in your communications – but how do you determine how much?

Identifying the key corporate communication metrics that an organisation should be judged against has been an ongoing challenge across the marketing industry. During a PRWeek Breakfast Briefing in late 2018, Allison Spray, Head of Data and Insight at Hill & Knowlton Strategies, explained the situation quite clearly:

“I’ve worked across a lot of different (marketing) disciplines, particularly on the media-buying side, and when I look at how drastically they’ve moved in the past ten years compared to us, that’s when the gulf really becomes apparent”

While she was specifically referring to PR, this is arguably a constant across all forms of corporate communications. This is how your organisation communicates with its various audiences both internally and externally, from your employees and stakeholders to customers and the general public.

The days of evaluating the effectiveness of different communication systems on column inches and Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) no longer apply. But, it is still highly important that you are using meaningful corporate communications metrics to track its usefulness to your brand.

Why is knowing your communication metrics important?

But what is less emphasised is the importance of tracking how effectively it is fulfilling those goals, or how substantial the cost of poor communications can truly be. A survey of 400 multinational corporations in the US and the UK revealed that communication barriers cost an average of $64.2m in lost productivity.

Unquestionably, that is money that can be put to better use, as well as an illustration of the hours wasted by employees as a result of ineffective communications. In fact, according to research by Mitel, ineffective communication amounts to 1 DAY of working time lost per week. Their report also revealed that:

In addition, a survey by Hollinger Scott revealed that 41% of teams don’t have any means to track their corporate communications in relation to user activity and how much content is being seen and interacted with.

Just having a corporate communications strategy in place is not enough – measuring the effectiveness of communications is essential to ensure that this monumental part of your day-to-day life is functioning as efficiently as possible.

Why is measuring communications such a challenge?

While the ability to measure effective communication is crucial, that doesn’t mean that a settled way to track these metrics has been fixed in place. The Barcelona Principles have attempted to offer a benchmark for measuring communications, but it is not comprehensive.

That is largely because the aims of communications aren’t exactly definitive – it is all about brand perception. And while communications metrics like email opens, event sign-ups and the columns you receive in an industry magazine can indicate your strategy is delivering results, it is difficult to be certain.

This has led some to argue the necessity of tracking internal communication metrics in particular, as this is above all a role designed to drive behaviors to fulfill business outcomes. That can be difficult to quantify through typical marketing KPIs.

Other potential barriers facing teams struggling to track their corporate communications metrics include:

• Not having access to the right tools to measure relevant data
• Fear that bad metrics will put communicators’ job security at risk, even if these numbers aren’t directly caused by their actions
• Lack of time/resources – communicators cover so much ground that tracking results can feel like another burden on an already stressful job

But what corporate communications metrics and KPIs will signify if you’re reaching your targets or falling below expectations? As noted earlier, this is still a question which is yet to have a fixed answer.

Fundamentally, how you choose to measure effective communication within your organisation will depend on your specific business objectives. An effective approach to judging the quality of your communications is to place them in the context of what your business and its partners are looking for and judge against those, using these to identify any issues and barriers to these aims.

This places the measuring of communications at the doorstep of your senior leadership team – when both key executives and your communications team are in-sync in terms of what they intend to accomplish, it makes the job of tracking metrics far more straightforward. 

It could be that your company wants to foster a stronger sense of brand identity within your workforce? Or that there’s less dependence on email with a stronger emphasis on your intranet or social networking tools? It will depend on what you are seeking from your communications efforts.

However, we can safely say that in order to effectively assess these, there is a mix of quantitative and qualitative corporate communication metrics you should incorporate into your analyses.

Essential key performance indicators for corporate communications 

•  Employee awareness and feedback 
• Open, read and click rates
• Page visits and logins
• Peak times of staff intranet use
• Corporate video views
• Mobile usage levels
• Platform adoption rates
• Employee advocacy 
• Employee turnover
• Event and benefit sign-ups
• Media outreach and digital trends
• Speed and effectiveness of crisis communications

1. Employee awareness and feedback

Did you know that 74% of employees feel they miss out on company news and information? Establishing how aware your teams are to the communications processes you have in place or how knowledgeable they are of the content you’re putting out there is a critical internal communication metric to track.

Establish a benchmark and then survey and talk to your employees to gain a consensus on whether they’re receiving the communications you are sending out, and if not, why? By measuring awareness and interest, you get an understanding of where your communications might be lacking.

2. Open, read and click rates

Plus, incorporate elements like event sign-ups and other links onto your communications to help determine if employees are actively engaging with them. While they might open an email, this will allow you to track if people are following the actions you’ve suggested and truly engaging with your content.

While on their own these do not paint a complete picture of the effectiveness of your approach to communications, the open, read and click rates of your emails and other messages will illustrate if people are paying attention to what you have to say. With the average read-rate of company-wide emails sitting at around 37%, this will provide an indicator of the success of your internal communications.

3. Page visits and logins

Similar to email opens, reads and clicks, used as standalone corporate communications metrics visits to a company-wide intranet can only tell you so much. But tracking unique page views, how often employees log in to the platform, how long they stay on there, and so on, provides an indication of how valuable your staff view these and if a change of approach is required. Remember – only 13% of employees strongly agree that their company communicates effectively with them…

4. Peak times of staff intranet times

Alongside how often your employees are logging into and engaging with your intranet or shared company platform, it can also be valuable to identify the peak times they are using it. Knowing the times of highest traffic will indicate when’s the right time to schedule company announcements or news updates in the hope of getting the greatest engagement.

Across all forms of marketing, timing is essential – to attract the largest possible audience to your internal communications, it benefits you to release them when they’re most active on your platforms.

5. Corporate video views

Another quantitative measure. If you have one or several corporate videos on your site or as part of your communications, following their play-rate and view counts will inform you as to whether they are resonating with and appealing to your audiences. Gathering this and other data at regular intervals (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) will allow you to spot any trends and react to these in a timely fashion to protect your ROI.

6. Mobile usage levels

As well as how often employees and customers are engaging with your communications content, it’s important to determine where they’re coming from. With Brits spending in excess of two-and-a-half hours every day on their smartphones, knowing if they’re following this trend when engaging with your materials will highlight whether a mobile-first approach will appeal to your audiences more than focusing on an alternate avenue.

7. Platform adoption rates

If you’ve recently introduced a new social app for your employees, how many have downloaded it? Consider this if you’ve also introduced an employee recognition programme – how many people have actually signed up? Checking the adoption rates of these platforms designed to improve productivity and the effectiveness of communications will give an indication as to whether they’re actually providing a return, and also how well your communications are received overall.

It might mean that an alternative approach is required, or that the processes involved in setting up this platform are too complex or time-consuming for employees to get involved with. Again, it’s about identifying any issues early and reacting to them appropriately.

8. Employee advocacy

The power of transforming your employees into impassioned brand advocates cannot be overstated – it is a natural, sociable way to connect audiences to your company’s identity. Tracking how often your content is being shared, liked, and spread out by your team members is a powerful demonstrator of how connected they feel to your brand, as well as how familiar they are with your various communication platforms.

Identifying any issues with these corporate communication metrics will inform where, when and how you post content going forward, and hopefully lead to you utilising this powerful resource to its fullest.

9. Employee turnover

People who maintain a strong bond with their place of work are unlikely to want to leave it. And, judging how one of the primary reasons employees depart is due to a poor relationship with their manager, it stands to reason that your employee turnover numbers will be a useful communication KPI. The more turnover you endure, the less likely your staff are engaged with your company-wide communications.

 When employees feel informed and understand what is going on in their company, they feel a deeper level of respect and trust towards it. This leads to better productivity, efficiency and achievement. If your communications are not as effective as they could be, you stand to miss out on those benefits.

10. Event and benefit sign-ups

If your company has a benefits programme or regularly holds workplace events, tracking how many of your team has signed up to these, and how quickly they do so, will provide insight into how effective your communications are. If the benefit is useful and doesn’t require a great deal of employee effort to get involved with, if enrolments are still low, this corporate communications metric can illustrate your current approach isn’t reaching people, or engaging them properly.

11. Media outreach and digital trends

Both the number of press releases and other external communications your company is sending out and the response to them can be a strong indicator of how effective they are. If they are getting into well-respected publications and websites with high domain authority, you will gain a clearer sense of how strong your content is on these platforms.

Furthermore, whether it’s the trending hashtags page on Twitter or you’re featured on Google Trends, that is another (if not, aspirational) way to determine if your communications are having the desired impact.

12. Speed of crisis communications

Finally, often the effective measure of your communications team is how quickly they can respond and handle difficult situations. Crisis communications form a central component of your overall communications strategy, and so it’s crucial you are tracking how quickly this content is reaching your audiences, and if their response to this is as you’d hope for.

Staying on top of your corporate communications metrics

This is just an indication of some of the communication KPIs that you should refer to when you are judging how the value of your communications to your organisation. The all-encompassing nature of these messages and their relationships with your various audiences, both within and outside your company, places a high priority on whether these are working as effectively and efficiently as possible.

The bottom line is that the quality of your corporate comms directly affects your bottom line. The question is, can you afford to NOT be tracking the impact your corporate communications strategy is having? Hopefully, these 9 examples will help to point you in the right direction when figuring out how solid your approach is.

Modern brands understand the power of their influence on customers and audiences. Many have learnt lessons over the years and adapted dramatically as society’s views and expectations have become more refined. 

Investing in environmental and sustainability policies. 
Launching inclusive product ranges.
Making employee experience and workplace culture a priority.

It’s fair to say that brands and consumers have come a long way in the last few decades alone, and as the world follows a positive trajectory towards a more inclusive and sustainable future, it appears that things can only get better. 

But what about the brands that appear to have made unforgivable mistakes? Can a change of leadership and ‘new’ values really save them from the grips of irrelevancy? For Abercrombie & Fitch, having their past resurface in the social media age could leave them faced with big challenges. 

White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch was released earlier this year on Netflix, and detailed first-hand accounts of employee experiences working for the brand.

Not only did it shine a light on their (historically) unethical hiring practices, but it also shamed the general public into re-evaluating the marketing and brand strategies we were all heavily exposed to during the 90s and early 2000s, which all contributed to the brand’s ascent. 

As high school and college-aged teens from across the world were swept up by the allure of an all-American ‘aspirational’ fashion range, there were some very sinister events at play behind the scenes and right under our noses.

What can modern marketers learn from the A&F documentary?

Key takeaway #1 Leaders must take accountability

While much of the documentary focuses on select figures who once worked at the organisation, it took a surprisingly long time for them to be held accountable. Ensuring that accountability is incorporated into your company’s culture, and brand & corporate marketing strategies, will put teams at ease and prevent wrongdoing within the organisation. 

Key takeaway #2 Discrimination is never ok

Exclusivity in its commercial sense is making something ‘harder’ to attain to make it appear more desirable or aspirational. Abercrombie & Fitch went as far as to physically exclude people of a certain race, look and body type from their marketing and from working in their stores. They also intentionally didn’t create clothing for large body types up until the early 2010s. 

Key takeaway #3 You can rebrand but you can’t make customers forget

Not every brand has a squeaky clean past, and many have been able to partially erase their controversies from the minds of consumers with clever reinvention, marketing and investment into positive initiatives.

While one of the main culprits of the historic immorality at A&F left many years ago, with the release of the documentary, the hard work their new CEO has done to leave those days behind them could begin to unravel should new scandals surface. 

Brand lessons on: Diversity, ethnicity and inclusion 

Mistakes Abercrombie & Fitch made:

• They catered only to privileged Americans
• Hired employees based on race and looks
• Black employees worked night shifts or in the stockrooms rather than on the shop floor
• Discriminated against different races and body types
• Purposely used white, attractive, slim models in their campaigns

What did DE&I look like 10 years ago?

Cultural diversity within businesses and the workplace had only just started to become a big topic of conversation. Brands and employers began to wake up to the benefits of being inclusive, such as bringing in new insights and fostering a greater level of innovation.

Prior to the 2010s, we were much less likely to see diversity within advertising and marketing. 

DE&I now and in the future

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is now a big priority for large brands and corporations – within recruitment strategies, product and service innovations, advertising and beyond.

Even those that have inclusive policies in place today are continuing to do all they can to represent and accept people from all walks of life.Race, gender liberation, ableness and more are all so important for brand representation in a changing world.

In the future we expect to see: 

• More investment in CSR policies
• More accountability for brands through ESG strategies
• Widescale focus and evaluation of the impact of processes on the environment

Brand lessons on: Employer brand and employee wellbeing

Mistakes Abercrombie & Fitch made:

• Had a toxic culture
• Treated employees unfairly
• Objectified employees for their own gain 
• Had unethical recruitment policies 

What did employer brand and employee wellbeing look like 10 years ago?

While HR has always had a presence in the majority of companies, the candidate market has never been as competitive as it is today. Many employers were in demand simply because of their reputation as being a leading brand, or the salaries they were offering.

Employer brand and employee wellbeing now and in the future

Employer branding is now an industry in its own right. It has grown from being a seed of an idealistic idea to a globally embraced strategic concept used to attract and retain the best talent.

As education standards continue to rise, the uptick of talent is going to continue to make it hard for brands to stand out to candidates in the market. With different generations focused on very different needs, dedicated employer brand teams are going to become one of the most valuable assets any global company can have. 

Employees have a greater need for a sense of belonging, and if employers and brands can live up to this, workplaces will become more productive, and brand propositions will strengthen.

Brand lessons on: Exclusivity

Mistakes Abercrombie & Fitch made:

• Intentionally only used white models for the majority of shoots
• Didn’t create clothing to fit larger people
• Too focused on the brand and not customers
• Alienated employees and potential candidates

What did exclusivity look like 10 years ago?

Exclusivity in the traditional sense was a very attractive sales pitch for brands during the 90s and early 2000s, as consumers sought validation from brands and imitated the styles of celebrities they admired. But with the advent of social media, financial uncertainty and lots of turmoil in the world, brands soon realised that by making their marketing inclusive they could not only humanise their offering but also appeal to a wider demographic. 

Abercrombie & Fitch seriously overstepped the mark when trying to appeal to a specific audience. They did this by actively excluding whole groups of people from their marketing, advertising and photography. And for some, rather than being seen as an exclusive brand to aspire to, they became discriminatory in their practices. 

Exclusivity now and in the future

For the everyday person, exclusivity is no longer a motivator for driving purchase decisions. Brands that are intentionally inclusive and accessible to all are much more likely to appeal to Gen Z and Millennials, who place a high priority on diversity and inclusion when it comes to the brands they choose to interact with.

More diversity and inclusion from both a brand employee and customer perspective can help it evolve and develop new ways of working and thinking. 

Manage your corporate marketing and employer brand from one place 

BAM by Papirfly™ is a centralised brand portal that is home to 4 key tools.

Create: Teams can create infinite on-brand assets for their corporate or employer brand. Videos, social media assets, emails, digital, print and more. All created in-house by your existing team. 

Educate: A single place where teams can access brand assets, guidelines and education resources to keep your brand on track globally. 

Manage: Digitise reviews and sign-offs, plan, manage and track campaign timelines and measure ROI of your brand creation portal.

Store & share: A built-in Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, where you can store, organise and edit assets anywhere in the world. 

To learn more about BAM for Corporate Marketing teams or BAM for Employer Brand teams, get in touch with our expert team to book your demo.

Strong relationships are built on trust.

This is as true for a brand and its customers as it is for couples, friendships and work colleagues.

More than ever before, consumers want assurances over the products they buy, the services they use, and the companies they engage with.

However, trust is fragile; it’s hard to gain, yet easy to lose. Brands must consistently work to earn the trust of their audience – if they do, they are rewarded with a loyal, devoted following who will regularly return and urge their friends, families and acquaintances to join them.

To reap the benefits of a trusting, committed fanbase, many companies are placing a firm focus on transparency. By maintaining open, honest communication with customers and the wider world, these brands are being rewarded with meaningful relationships with audiences across the globe.

What is transparency in corporate marketing?

While an increasing number of brands are familiar with the term ‘corporate marketing’, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they put it into action.

Brand transparency is more than a buzzword. It is an organisation opening itself up to all internal and external stakeholders. 

Especially since the outbreak of COVID-19, there has been a growing urgency among consumers for brands to enforce honesty above all else. At a time when “fake news” and misinformation is rife globally, customers understandably want to know as much as they can about the companies they engage with.

A transparent company discloses information on all aspects of its business, such as:

• Company operations
• Goals and KPIs
• Core values
• Product information and sourcing
• Supply chain models
• Working practices
• Financial data
• Pricing

The Consumer Good Forum outlines three elements of truly transparent brands:

• Corporate practice: The brand communicates its policies and performance.
• Product proof: The brand communicates the processes behind its products and services.
• Brand purpose: The brand communicates its mission statements, values and beliefs.

Even information that could be considered highly sensitive, such as a company’s environmental impact and sales figures, are made accessible to anybody who wants to know more about their brand. What was once purely confidential is now showcased for the world to see.

And although this “age of authenticity” is still developing globally, several brands are already making strides to be completely clear with their audiences… 

5 brands with transparency at their core

Patagonia

True leaders in brand transparency, clothing brand Patagonia’s ‘Footprint Chronicles’ tell customers exactly how it sources the raw materials for their products, and the conditions of the warehouses they are stored in. By placing its supply chain in the public eye, it is showing their customers that they can trust their working practices.

Lush

Cosmetics company Lush translates transparency in a number of ways. From highlighting their policies and ethos throughout their company website, to sharing their products’ ingredient lists and results of their regular third-party audits, they communicate to their customers that they are a fair, ethical and cruelty-free manufacturer.

Buffer

Social media management platform Buffer believes transparency is crucial to the development of their brand. They achieve this in multiple ways, such as publishing each employee’s pay rate by name (from founders to content writers), and making all internal emails accessible to their entire team.

Warby Parker

Eyewear brand Warby Parker is incredibly open with their customers and shareholders when it comes to its financial information. It publishes data that reinforces its commitment to donate a pair of frames for every four pairs sold, as well as the standards that it holds its suppliers to.

Ben & Jerry’s

Rather than present a boilerplate response to global events, ice cream giants Ben & Jerry’s are always upfront about their efforts to combat climate change. They have actively supported climate protests held worldwide, and produced advertising campaigns built around the steps they take to ensure the sustainability of their practices.

The benefits of being a transparent brand

With consumers increasingly wanting to know more about brands, from how they source their products to what societal issues they stand for, this trend of transparency shows no signs of slowing. On the contrary – continuing to stick to standard confidentiality could lead to brands developing a negative reputation.

Here are some of the ways that practising brand transparency can make a meaningful difference to your relationships with customers:

Gain consumer trust

First and foremost, in a landscape littered with misinformation, and where data breaches and privacy concerns are hot topics, brands that are authentic and transparent will really resonate with audiences. In a world that feels increasingly unreliable, these brands can be the trusting voice that modern customers need.

Trust inspires loyalty, and customer loyalty means repeat business that your brand can rely upon through thick and thin. Remember – acquiring a new customer can be five times more costly than retaining an existing customer.

Spur business growth

Access to a loyal, dedicated customer base offers a brand competitive advantage. When consumers are fully trusting of a company, they will be more on board if:

• The price of products or services rises
• New products or services are introduced
• Former products or services are removed or replaced

If the company is transparent about the reasons for these shifts, it is much easier for customers to digest and continue to support the company, which can lead to further growth.

Show evidence of CSR efforts

There is a rising expectation among consumers that the companies they engage with are committed to pursuing positive goals for their employees, customers and the world as a whole. 

If your brand is engaged in these efforts, being transparent about this helps demonstrate that you practice what you preach. There are few things more potentially damaging to a brand’s reputation than talking about the values you uphold, but failing to follow through.

This is particularly true when it comes to sustainability. In fact, the word “greenwashing” was devised to define brands that invest more time and money into marketing their sustainability than in actual corporate environmental efforts.

By focusing on transparency within your business, you can give your audiences complete reassurance that the values you promote are genuine. This will show them that your values are aligned, and make them more willing to engage with your brand.

Elevate customer experiences

A customer experience covers every touchpoint between a customer and a company. From visiting their website or social media channels, to actively purchasing products at checkout, everything contributes to how consumers feel about your brand.

Brand transparency can improve these perceptions significantly. For example, if you are transparent about the pricing and manufacturing of your products, rather than leaving this shrouded in mystery, this helps customers feel more informed about whether it is right for them based on their budgets, needs and personal values.

This means that, even if that particular customer does not do business with your brand, this positive experience may encourage them to recommend you to friends or family members.

Recover reputation

When bad publicity rears its ugly head around your brand, it may feel natural to perform damage control in private and wait for everything to blow over. However, with mistrust among consumers at an all-time high, this activity could have a massive detriment on the trust that they have towards your brand. Now more than ever, they want brands to be accountable for their actions – good or bad.

By taking a transparent approach following a hit to your reputation – apologising for what happened, not making excuses and explaining how you intend to remedy the situation – this can reassure customers that you are taking ownership for what happened. This could help maintain the loyalty of many customers that may have walked away in other circumstances.

Take Ovo Energy as an example to follow. After an ill-thought-out blog post suggesting that people “cuddle their pets” to stay warm during the winter, they owned up to their poor judgement and created a rejuvenated article with more meaningful information for their customers.

Build employee engagement

Transparency doesn’t simply appeal to customers – it can also foster employee engagement and happiness. In a survey conducted by TINYpulse across 40,000 workers, transparency was named as the number one factor contributing to their overall happiness.

Whether it is making company-wide details more accessible to all employees through a newsletter or monthly meetings, or it is ensuring that working practices are made readily available to potential candidates, a more transparent approach to your employer brand can make a major difference to your ability to recruit and retain top talent.

Remember, happy, fulfilled employees are significantly more productive and engaged than unhappy employees.

3 tips to inspire brand transparency
1. Be honest and real in all communications

From an internal memo to customer-facing product descriptions, it is vital to ensure that everything communicated to your audiences is authentic and straightforward. Very little, if anything, should feel fabricated or illusory.

For instance, on the company pages of your website, don’t revert to stock images of happy workers. Instead, use shots of your real employees. When providing product information on your packaging, especially price, ensure this is accurate and verifiable. Integrating your content production with your PIM and ERP systems through Papirfly’s all-in-one brand management platform can be a useful way to maintain this accuracy.

Consider Everlane’s “radical transparency”. The online retailer incorporates the name of the factory a product was produced on their descriptions, with a link sharing information and images of the factory itself. This removes any concerns customers may have about unethical manufacturing processes.

2. Develop transparency webpages

If you are keen to make customers aware of the quality of your practices and products, or how you are following through on the causes that you promote as a company, create dedicated pages within your website to showcase this information.

For example, clothing company H&M include a page on their website outlining the sustainability of their supply chain, with facts and figures illustrating their clear commitment to this. This openness surrounding their approach reassures customers that they are truly focused on making sure they are ethical and sustainable in everything they do.

3. Promote honest feedback

Both customers and employees will ask tough questions about brands, and it is crucial that you do not shy away from these. Instead, you should welcome them, sending surveys and questionnaires to your audiences to gauge their thoughts on your company.

Even negative feedback can be positive in the long-run. If a customer or employee identifies an area that can be improved, being transparent about taking this feedback on board and the steps you will take to address this can illustrate to everyone that you listen and respond.

This approach will naturally garner people’s trust, and indicate that you are a brand that learns from and grows following missteps – this will help ensure they remain loyal even through testing times.

Keep your brand consistent with a brand management platform

The power of transparency and honesty is something that brands cannot afford to overlook in today’s landscape. We hope that this has informed you of the positive difference that this outlook can have on all aspects of your business, so you are better prepared to adopt it in your organisation moving forward.

But, building true transparency is not a one-and-done. It needs to be applied continuously and consistently within your company. Especially if you are transitioning from a more confidential approach, it will take time and effort to make customers, employees and others aware that transparency is now your default – and you’ll be rewarded with a more loyal, more resilient fanbase than ever.

Consistency is at the core of Papirfly‘s brand management platform. Our software empowers your marketing teams to produce perfectly branded content at all times, ensuring that wherever you communicate with your customers, it will carry your unique identity. No deviation. No misinterpretation.

• Fully bespoke templates lock down the core aspects of your branding, with set design, text and database parameters
• All brand guidelines, training videos and assets are accessible company-wide through a single online location
• Your employees gain the tools for total autonomy, where they can create materials in minutes without design expertise or experience

Discover the full benefits of brand management today – get in touch with our team for more details.

When social media networks began, they were a means for people to keep up with friends and meet others with shared interests. But it was never going to be long before brands got involved in the hopes of securing these same powerful connections with their target audience.

As much as it can infuriate us sometimes, we can’t escape the influence of social media. Internet users spend over 30% of their time online browsing through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and the numerous other social media platforms available to them. Time that brands can harness to create a connection.

But what exactly is the role of social media in business communications, both internally and externally? And how can organisations bring both together to reap the greatest benefits from this partnership? 

How has social media changed business communications?

In many people’s eyes, the use of social media for corporate communications has dragged the processes out of the dark ages and into the future.

Between January 2015 to April 2018, 64% of FTSE 100 companies used Twitter to communicate their earnings news and other prominent business news to their audiences, something that even just a couple of decades ago would probably be reserved to shareholders and an internal memo.

This is just one example of how social media has changed the game for business communications. Organisations of any size, industry or reach now are compelled to employ these social-sharing platforms to inform and educate their audience, in a way that they never needed to before.

Like it or not, social media is everywhere, making it a vital component of how companies not only reach their consumers, but their employees as well.

And that really illustrates the significance of social media in corporate communications. It is not primarily about promoting a company’s products or services in a sales-oriented manner; it is about aligning your brand with your audience.

95% of adults aged 18-34 are most likely to follow a brand through social networking. While many judge success on social media by the number of likes they’ve received on Facebook or the impressions on their Twitter page, in many ways its true value comes in illustrating how your followers engage with the content you’re sharing on these platforms. That allows you to tell if your values are hitting home with your target audience.

These platforms are now essential in how your customers and your employees keep up with the news and developments surrounding your organisation – the bond between social media and corporate communications is unbreakable.

Is the pairing of social media and corporate communications a good thing? 

This close connection between social media and corporate communications presents numerous benefits for businesses looking for an efficient, cost-effective way to engage their customers, employees and more with their brand identity.

Allow your audience to visualise your brand

Central to the importance of social media in business communications is how these platforms allow customers and employees to visualise a brand like never before. Most people absorb visual information in a more effective way than written directives. This allows a means for brands to translate information that would previously be communicated in quite a stale, formulaic fashion in a more creative, engaging manner.

By utilising imagery, videos, quizzes, emojis and other staples of social media communication, your organisation can help others identify and understand the qualities and values of your brand much faster and more effectively. As an element of your corporate communications, this is arguably the most valuable role social media can play.

Link employees and customers

While your external communications are more widely associated with your consumers and the wider public, it can improve the way you engage with your team members around the world as well. By using social media for your corporate communications with compelling content, you make them fans of your brand in the same way you intend to do with your consumers. 

That improves the sense of belonging your employees feel towards your brand, making them more motivated and connected to achieving your objectives.

Employee advocacy

Following on from the previous point, if your employees are fans of the social media posts you’re putting out, they are more likely to become valuable brand advocates. Let’s face it – most people don’t want to be sold to, especially when they’re browsing social media. But, they are more likely to build trust and form a connection with a brand if other people show enthusiasm for it – even if those people work for that organisation.

Social media is an avenue for employees to celebrate, promote and emphasise their brand, which in turn boosts employee engagement, makes your brand more appealing to prospective recruits, and enhances how consumers view your organisation.

Improve collaboration

Finally, the ‘social’ aspect of social media in business communications makes these platforms useful tools for collaboration. Innovations like Workplace by Facebook and other social chatting tools like Slack mean that employees across all locations can share events, news and stories relating to your company. 

A more connected workplace is a more motivated, more productive and more informed workplace. By harnessing your social media platforms effectively, you can spread your business communications more effectively to those within your teams. 

Drawbacks of using social media for corporate communications

However, as always seems to be the case, social media acts as a double-edged sword. While it has immeasurably improved how efficiently and effectively brands can engage with their internal and external audiences and build better relationships with both, it also can cause significant damage to its reputation if not handled correctly.

Social media offers everyone a voice and an opinion, and that opinion might not always be favourable for your brand. One wrong step on social media or an ill-advised campaign can spiral out of control in a hurry, like when Doritos’ poorly-visioned development of ‘lady-friendly’ versions of their crisps. Within hours their Twitter timelines were ablaze with criticisms. 

Then there are examples like the Kendall Jenner Pepsi campaign, which was a not very well-considered attempt for the brand to be socially responsible. The combination of social media and corporate communications can be an effective way of illustrating your CSR work as a company and your commitment to causes your audience cares about. But it must be authentic and executed well, otherwise it can have a severely negative impact.

Staying on top of this constant, unrelenting stream of digital media is a challenge for even the largest global organisations, and can lead to an argument suggesting that social media hasn’t been the most positive innovation for business communications teams to contend with.

Nevertheless, the ties between social media and corporate communications are too robust now to cause a break, at least for the foreseeable future. So, it is important that your organisation accounts for this as part of your overarching corporate communication strategy in order to maximise the benefits these platforms offer your company while minimising the drawbacks.

Maximising the role of social media in your corporate communications

Here are a number of techniques and approaches to consider to amplify the value of your corporate social media:

Invest in social listening tools

By dedicating time and resources to monitoring and tracking what audiences are saying about your brand, you gain a deeper understanding of what communications they are interested in receiving in social media, as well an overriding sense of how aligned they feel with your organisation.

Join up your teams

Integrate your corporate communications team with those responsible for sharing your social media content. The prevalence of these platforms and their immediate responsiveness makes it crucial that your communications strategy is clearly understood by those producing and spreading materials across these channels.

Choose channels wisely

While Facebook is still the most dominant platform by a considerable margin, that might not correlate with your audience or the messages you intend to send out. Make sure you spend time deciding on channels that will most effectively fulfil your social media and corporate communications objectives, and experiment with these over time.

Entertain, educate, engage

As alluded to earlier, your use of social media for corporate communications should prioritise content that brings people closer to your brand, not as a direct sales tool. Focus on delivering value and information, enhancing your brand reputation and increasing its share-ability throughout your audiences.

Incentivise employee advocacy

Whether it’s by developing effective internal communications that engage your employees or actually introducing an incentive package for staff to spread your content through their personal profiles, encourage and motivate your team to broadcast the benefits and positives of your workplace to a wider, receptive audience.

Customers are the bedrock of any business. Large or small. Global or local. Startup or established. Your customers drive revenue and lend credibility to your company’s offerings.

Few would disagree with this statement. So, it is odd that numerous marketing teams tend to overlook the value that their customer service team brings to the table.

There should be no questioning the significance that strong customer service offers to an organisation:

• 96% of customers consider customer service a key component of their loyalty to a brand
• Increasing customer retention by just 5% can lead to profits increasing 25%
• 72% of customers will share positive experiences with 6 or more people
• 67% of customers would pay more for better customer service experiences
• Investment in customer experience can increase employee engagement by 20%

But, its value doesn’t just extend to helping people and fostering better customer relationships. These teams can bring valuable insight to marketers and companies overall.

In a landscape that is increasingly guided by data, and appears keen to understand customers on a more detailed level than ever before, who better to provide this perception than those directly interacting with customers on a daily basis?

However, to help them acquire this insight, and to enhance their ability to build their brand’s reputation through strong customer support, they need to be properly equipped. Below, we highlight eight crucial brand tools to maximise the benefits your customer service team brings to your business.

1. In-depth knowledge base

Particularly in extensive global organisations, your customer service team can’t be everywhere at once. So, it is vital that customers have a way to serve themselves if they are in need of information. A robust, regularly updated knowledge base should be at the heart of this.

From a range of blog posts, FAQs and other resources on your website, to extensive sales collateral to inform your internal teams, a good knowledge base is a cornerstone of a successful customer service team. With this knowledge base, you are better-placed to:

• Keep customers happy and informed
• Consistently deliver support when your customers need it
• Proactively respond to your customers’ concerns
• Limit the amount of time devoted to phone calls, emails and other messages
• Build your reputation as an authority within your industry

2. Empathy maps

When it comes to directly engaging with your customers, your customer service team is on the frontline. They have access to first-hand information about what your customers enjoy about your brand, what they don’t like, what they would like to see improved and what their pain points are.

Unfortunately, it is all too easy for the flow of that information to begin and end with a customer service rep. An empathy map can help ensure that the right data is gathered to guide the content your marketing team develops day-to-day.

Through these maps, you gain a categorised, clear layout of your audiences’ thoughts and feelings, including:

• What problems they are looking to resolve
• What their biggest fears and concerns are
• What their goals and ambitions are
• What content or support they would like to see from your brand
• Where they are engaging with your brand
• What they do, see hear, and say on a daily basis

With this knowledge collected by your customer service team and laid out during strategy meetings, your brand is better positioned to address your consumers’ needs and wants through your marketing.

3. Persona profiles

It is also important that your customer service team has a good understanding of your brand’s “ideal consumers”. Without this, they may be left in the dark about how to respond to a customer’s request or issue. Messages will need to be escalated up the chain of command, hindering your efficiency.

Creating persona profiles based on your insight into your preferred audiences – something your customer service team can help you gather – will give these teams a stronger sense of how to handle those who reach out to them.

Of course, every customer is unique, and personalisation is important. But these profiles can give your representatives a starting point to best guide this interaction. This can result in faster, more focused responses to messages, improving your customers’ experiences.

Download the full whitepaper

To explore our complete list of brand tools that help unlock the true potential of your customer service team, click here to get hold of our latest whitepaper.

Amplify the power of your customer service team

Equipping your customer service team with the right tools unlocks their true potential, not only in how they support your audiences, but in how they steer your marketing strategy.

The insight that these professionals offer on how your customers think, feel and act can be invaluable when harnessed properly. We hope that by emphasising these tools above, you too can get more value out of this important strand of your company.

Of course, a comprehensive platform such as BAM by Papirfly™ can help you take a massive step towards fully equipping your customer service teams with the resources they need to best perform their role.

For more information about the full capabilities of BAM and how it can positively influence every aspect of your marketing efforts, get in touch with our team, or book your free demo.

The corporate communications team are an integral cog in the well-oiled machine of any organisation, but sometimes the full scope and effort of what they deliver can be misunderstood or underappreciated.

In the last couple of decades, we’ve seen an explosion of choice in available marketing channels and with increasing competition, the need to maintain a rock-solid reputation across your customers, employees and the general public – the role of communicators has never been more important.

Consider the typical functions and purposes of a corporate communications team:

• Maintaining and translating the company’s brand to their various audiences
• Handling media relations, including press releases, interviews, panels and more
• Monitoring various marketing teams to note any mention of their business and respond to any misinformation
• Playing a role in highlighting a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR)
• Influencing their company’s website and social media presence
• Managing crisis communications if serious issues emerge
• Encouraging collaboration across your teams and connect employees to the brand

That is a significant amount of responsibility placed on one department. It is no wonder that the communications industry is valued at £14.9 billion as of the close of 2019, and that the size of these teams is increasing overall.

However, like any strand of your company, without clear goals and objectives, your corporate communications team might lack the focus, understanding or direction needed to fulfil this ever-growing list of responsibilities.

And that is the aim of this article – to establish the importance of corporate communications in all organisations, and present 5 potential goals that will help yours perform at the levels needed to support your company’s reputation.

What does a corporate communications team do?

Above we’ve already highlighted some of the key functions a corporate communications team will be expected to fulfil. But beyond that, this team is responsible for defining how people inside and outside your business envision your brand. For keeping a credible reputation in an ever-fluctuating world.

These obligations can be further divided into external and internal communication tasks:

• Your external communications team is centred on the messages that are going out to people outside your organisation, chiefly customers, the media and the wider public. Their work is crucial in the reputation of your business locally, nationally and globally, and helping you reach people in a positive, beneficial way. 

• Your internal communications team is more concerned with the messages shared within your organisation, between management, employees and shareholders. This is with the aim of ensuring everyone is aware of important updates and is brought together under a united brand identity.

Communication leaders and their teams have a lot to juggle, and achieving under this pressure is a challenge that is only becoming greater with the rise of social media and the immediate spread of information. At this point, only 9% of these leaders believe they currently have the ability to shape company culture, which is especially challenging in a multi-location organisation.

With this constant pressure being applied to corporate communications teams across the globe, establishing well-defined objectives early is essential to maintain focus and direction.

An important aspect to note here is that it should align your overall business strategy – giving your Director of Communications direct access to your key executives is vital to ensuring everything their team delivers is in accordance with your brand vision and guidelines.

Here, we outline our 5 top tips for goals to support your team and drive results.

Measuring how well you are achieving these aims has been a challenge for corporate communications teams over the years, as there are many variables that play a role in their aims. So, underneath each overarching goal we’ve identified several corporate communication metrics you should factor in when judging if your team are fulfilling each objective.

5 communication goals for your team

1. Progress the reputation of your brand

At the heart of your communication team’s strategy is building the reputation of your brand in the eyes of your audiences. Setting this in stone as a goal from the get-go is key to ensuring that this focus never wavers, and is central to every message and asset that goes out.

Metrics to track

• Brand mentions on social media
• Google trend patterns relating to your organisation
• Number of press releases being picked up by external websites
• Checking reviews and responses to these

2. Improve employee engagement

Primarily, one of the objectives of your internal communications team should be to increase employee engagement in your organisation and brand. Engaged employees are motivated employees, and are more likely to perform at their very best when they feel connected to their company.

Metrics to track

• Employee retention rate (though there could be many reasons why this fluctuates)
• Open/click rates for company-wide emails
• Responses on employee surveys and feedback forms
• Attendance to company events, CPD sessions and after-work social activities

3. Encourage wider employee advocacy

Another aim of your corporate communications team should be to inspire wider employee advocacy. It is no secret that people are more likely to listen and respond to the testimony of people over brands. Therefore, a communication goal should be to inspire your team to readily share company news, successes and more on their personal platforms. 

Metrics to track

• Number of brand mentions on social media
• Number of posts incorporating employees and company activities
• How often posts are liked and shared

4. Increase traffic and leads for your company

Fundamentally, your corporate communications team should be making some impact on your ability to attract leads, spur traffic and generally build interest in your brand, products and services. Whilst they certainly won’t be the only members of your organisation responsible for this, setting goals such as these will ensure they are aligned with your overall business and marketing strategies. 

Metrics to track

• Website traffic numbers
• Number of marketing/sales-qualified leads
• Growth of email database
• The overall amount of your websites analytics’ goals attributed to the corporate communications team

5. Speed up crisis communications

A final goal for your corporate communications team to consider is gradually improving the efficiency of your crisis communications. The span of social media allows for negative stories to rapidly spread and cause damage to your reputation, and these can come from customers or employees. How quickly your team can respond is a clear priority that is more crucial than ever. 

Metrics to track

• Response time between recognising a problem and sending a response
• Reception to the response provided

Ensuring effective team communications 

We hope that this breakdown of how a corporate communications team functions and the goals that they should be achieving will help your team realign and give your employees clarity of what success looks like. 

This department will only continue to become more relevant and significant as marketing platforms evolve and companies expand worldwide. Giving your team clear objectives from the outset will make them aware of the areas they’re looking to impact, so they can pursue this with direction and purpose. 

Of course, the difference between having these goals and realising them is having the right tools and processes in place.