Automation is the future. As we continue to refine how we can increase efficiency at work, improve people’s work-life balance and minimise human error, automation will be a constant presence in achieving these aims. There’s no turning back, especially in the world of marketing:
75% of marketers say they use at least one type of marketing automation tool
The artificial intelligence market is estimated to be worth $16.06B by 2022
Innovations are emerging to streamline and automate previously long-winded, manually-driven activities that cost marketing teams time, money and energy. A burgeoning example of this in action is brand automation.
What is brand automation?
While brand automation software falls into the wider category of marketing automation, it applies to the unique tasks and processes behind promoting your brand. At its most basic level, it takes your company’s brand and marketing assets and applies it to templates to accelerate the production of future assets. A central resource to control all aspects of your branding.
This makes brand automation platforms a crucial component in our Brand Activation Management systems. It enables brand marketing teams to develop a substantial volume of high-quality, on-brand content in a short space of time, without specialist design expertise.
Brand automation is also considered a key aspect in the evolution from DAM to BAM. With the need for marketing teams to be reactive to changing trends and opportunities, they need more than just a library to store their brand assets. Brand automation is that next step.
This is more than just slapping on your logo or colour palettes – it is a way to produce an abundance of brand assets with a minimum of effort and manual intervention. Using your distinct visual identity, tone of voice and brand vision, brand automation exists to enhance the way you spread your brand message to your various audiences.
Yet, brand automation as a term is still infrequently used among marketing teams worldwide. While it remains in its infancy, there’s a real opportunity for organisations to get in on the ground floor and utilise brand automation systems to make a noticeable difference to how your company operates, and how your audience engages with your brand.
Here, you’ll discover 6 of the standout advantages of brand automation, and how it can change your business, your processes and your life.
1. Enhanced efficiency
The goal of brand automation above all else is to eliminate the wasted motion associated with creating, cultivating and consuming brand assets. Brand management teams worldwide all have to work to tight deadlines and turnaround content – whether that’s emails, social posts or videos – for their consumers, but outdated, manual processes often prevent them from achieving the efficiency they’re after.
Did you know that productivity issues and poorly managed leads are estimated to cost companies a combined $1 TRILLION+ every single year? Try to imagine that amount of money each year being wasted as a result of outdated practices.
Professionals in all industries, but particularly in marketing, waste an excessive amount of time digging through files to find the resources they need, or implementing all their branding elements from scratch onto their upcoming campaigns.
By providing intelligent, well-crafted templates and access to a wealth of on-brand resources, brand automation platforms reduce the time it takes to brief work in, produce assets, gain approval and disseminate it out to your various audiences. In essence, you produce more while putting in less, allowing your brand marketers to achieve a much greater return on investment.
2. Empower your team
One of the most impressive aspects of brand automation software is its capacity to make every member of your team a brand marketer. Not everyone has an eye for design, or has the familiarity with bespoke design software, and in the formative years of marketing automation tools, it would still require a specialist to manage these effectively.
Brand automation goes a long way to removing that barrier, putting parameters in place to ensure all materials are aligned to your brand.
Through smart templates, every team member is enabled to create collateral that embodies your brand identity, with no deviations or difficulties. While a level of training is to be expected (less than an hour with Papirfly), the reduced manual involvement allows anyone to drag and drop elements into their designs in a matter of minutes.
As well as enhancing the capabilities of your team, brand automation empowers your local markets to capitalise on opportunities and faster turnaround on-brand assets, without having to wait on requests or approvals which could arrive after the moment has passed. Brand automation software closes the window for error, and allows global teams to become more self-sufficient in how they engage their audience with your overarching brand messaging.
3. Achieve complete brand consistency
A perennial problem for global brands is the fear that their identity will become distorted over time or across national and cultural boundaries. Revenue on average increases by 23% among companies who present their brand consistently when compared to those who don’t.
An effective brand automation strategy and platform eliminates the concern caused by inconsistency by containing your branding in a fixed, regulated framework. This reduces the risk of design and content straying too far beyond the bounds of your brand.
With a single point of truth providing the basis for all brand assets, your employees feel confident that they will produce work that fits your identity. This allows you to better manage content across your multiple channels – video content, social media, digital displays, etc. – to ensure everything follows your specific brand guidelines on each platform.
4. Improve customer experiences
It’s essential for brands to engage with their audience on a personal level. A powerful way to accomplish this is through personalisation, but through traditional, manually-driven means, this can be excessively time-consuming and costly.
Brand automation and marketing automation tools help remove this barrier by cutting away the time it takes to create content, and allowing team members to quickly produce collateral aimed at a select group of customers, be it based on their demographic or their location. Instead of spending separate hours to develop this unique, personal content, it can instead be created in a short window of time.
Linking your brand automation systems with automated emails, for example, can allow you to instantly send behaviourally-triggered content to give your audience a more personalised, familiar and effective brand experience.
5. Reduce time to market
Without access to effective brand automation software, your teams will often spend a long time collaborating and adjusting content with your internal and external parties before it can go live on your chosen channels. This means you miss golden opportunities to engage your customers at the ideal time, reducing the effectiveness of your brand marketing and wasting time and money.
By giving your teams the ability to quickly create on-brand marketing materials to react to new trends and events, you significantly cut down the time it takes to get your brand messages in front of your audiences. In a digital, social media-led age where being ever-present in your customers’ minds is crucial to establishing your brand, being able to get content to market quickly and regularly in a cost-effective way is essential.
6. Gain space for strategic thinking
As discussed, a key advantage of brand automation is it helps eliminate those repetitive, mundane and time-consuming elements in the brand marketing process. While it can’t directly impact your audience’s brand experience, it allows you to develop content at scale that can more frequently and effectively reach your customers.
Then, with the time you save, you give yourself more room for sensible strategic thinking. While brand automation systems are a real asset for any marketing team, they will only reap results if your brand strategy and identity is truly connecting with your audiences. With more space to think, analyse available data and get creative with ways to meet their needs, you help your teams unlock their potential to improve their return on investment.
Building on the benefits of brand automation
While the phrase ‘brand automation’ is currently seldom heard in the marketing landscape, we are in no doubt that it will be firmly established in the next 10 years as a must-have initiative for teams worldwide.
And now you have an insight into the life-changing advantages that brand automation platforms provide, you can get in on the ground floor to increase the efficiency, frequency and effectiveness of your brand marketing.
If you are ready to start taking back time spent on repetitive tasks and empowering every member of your team to connect your audience with your brand identity, discover BAM by Papirfly™ for yourself. Like brand automation, it could very well change your life for the better.
12 corporate communication metrics you should be tracking
Papirfly
8minutes read
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.
14 reasons why you’re losing good employees to competitors
Papirfly
7minutes read
When you’re in charge of a business, regardless of size, industry or location, a feeling that you quickly get used to is losing good employees.
Research has shown that 43% of all Millennials in employment plan to leave their current role within 2 years, while only 28% plan to stay past 5 years. With future generations expected to share similar tendencies, the employee turnover trend shows no sign of slowing.
Of course, it would be naïve for any company to believe that they can achieve a near-100% retention rate; statistics collated by LinkedIn in 2018 suggest that a 10.9% turnover rate is approximately the norm (although this varies from industry to industry and role to role – e.g. the hospitality sector experienced a 90% turnover rate in recent years in response to Brexit).
And, in many cases, these are the result of reasons not caused by their company itself:
A change in their personal life
They are looking for a different challenge
They received a better offer
They feel they’ve achieved all they can in your team
Again, losing talented employees is something that will happen invariably. However, numerous reasons behind top talent quitting come as a direct result of them being unhappy with aspects of their work.
If you are concerned that your company’s turnover is unwantedly high, here are 14 notable causes why you may be turning off top talent from staying with your organisation.
Why companies lose good employees
1. Lack of trust/autonomy
Few people enjoy being micromanaged or working in a restrictive environment due to management’s lack of faith in them. Top talent will typically thrive in atmospheres where they feel trusted to deliver their work to a high-quality standard. Placing too many oversights and barriers in the way of their autonomy is a dangerous path to a high turnover of staff.
2. You lack a competitive offer
While money isn’t everything to all employees, it will likely be a key factor in their decision to stay or move on from your company. Employees need to know that they’re valued for their hard work, and whether it’s an increase in their salary or other incentives, if you fail to give them compelling reasons to stay, they may have their heads turned by your competition.
3. You don’t have an onboarding strategy
The process of retaining employees to stay starts from day one. If you don’t have an established onboarding strategy or process, it can result in new members of staff feeling disorientated and unwelcomed immediately. First impressions count as much for the hiring company as they do for the person just hired – leaving a bad taste in the mouth from the get-go could leave people thinking about the exit in a couple of months time.
4. They feel underutilised
If your employees don’t feel that their distinct skills and expertise aren’t being put to good use in their current role, they will start to look for a company that will. The moment they feel they are not being utilised effectively is when good employees stop caring, hurting your productivity and increasing the likelihood of high performers leaving your team.
5. They feel underappreciated
If your best talent produces great work, it’s important that you tell them. Employees whose work is hardly (if ever) recognised will feel more disheartened and disillusioned in their role. It will potentially lead them to question why they’re working as hard as they are if they will never receive recognition or reward. By failing to appreciate the great talent available to you, you risk losing them over time.
6. They feel disrespected
Similar to the above reason, your employees don’t want to come to work and feel that they aren’t respected or valued. This extends to their good work being recognised to the overall workplace culture – if their fellow team members are not treating them fairly or kindly, this will motivate them to find somewhere else to work for the sake of their own wellbeing.
7. They are poorly managed
Over a third of UK workers plan to leave their company imminently due to not feeling any kind of inspiration or motivation from their employer. Poor management is a powerful indicator of dysfunctional employee turnover – without clear direction, guidance and encouragement from the top, employees will lack the structure and impetus to perform effectively and progress in their career.
8. There’s little communication
Communication is key to whether you lose good talent or not. Employees will want to feel comfortable bringing issues to their manager or co-workers and receive a fitting response. If that communication is lacking or is practically non-existent, your talent will feel unsupported and that their suggestions aren’t meaningful. When people spend much of their day at work, most would prefer not to spend it in silence.
9. An unhealthy company culture
A poor company culture will quickly turn away your top talent. Whether that is a structure that is too rigid, one that lacks drive and passion, or simply an atmosphere that is overwhelmingly negative and toxic, if an employee doesn’t feel comfortable or welcome in their workplace, they will be encouraged to actively find one that is more suitable.
10. They don’t connect with your company values
Your employer brand plays an increasingly powerful role whether you retain or lose good employees. A brand that is consistent, authentic and built on strong values will minimise the risk of employees quitting. Conversely, if your workers don’t buy into your goals, missions and principles, they won’t form a connection to your organisation and won’t feel a compulsion to stay when another opportunity comes along.
11. There’s no room for growth or development
One of the core reasons people look at alternate job opportunities is to advance in their career. If your company does not present a clear path for promotion or development, your good, ambitious talent will find chances to take on more responsibility somewhere else. Leaving little room for career progression within your workforce loses engagement, loses motivation, and eventually loses talented employees.
12. They feel overworked
Stress is something that comes in most workplace environments, but an excessive amount can be a strong motivator to leave. If your top employees feel like they are being burdened with too much to do with little support or recognition, work will become incredibly uncomfortable for them. At that point, they might decide to choose their own wellbeing over their employment, and look to find somewhere more conducive to their needs.
13. You don’t consider their work-life balance
Did you know 22% of UK workers have changed company or departments in pursuit of better flexibility? Especially as employees become older and develop responsibilities outside of work, priorities shift towards a better work-life balance. If you lack the flexibility to accommodate their wider needs or operate in an “all work, no play” culture, you will lose top talent looking to avoid burnout.
14. They see other good employees leaving
Finally, witnessing other talented employees leave your company can make people question their own position and happiness in your organisation, often regardless of the reason behind their departure. Losing talented employees can damage the overall culture and atmosphere in your workforce, and cause others in your team to consider their own future. If you already have a high turnover, this can be an even more pressing concern.
What is the cost of losing good employees?
While the answer to this question varies from company to company, a great deal of research has gone into the costs of losing employees. Studies by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) predict that it can cost anywhere between 6 and 9 months’ salary of the departing team member to replace their role.
For example, let’s consider someone earning the average annual salary, estimated to be £27,271. To replace an employee on these wages would cost between £13,600 and £20,500, a significant amount for any organisation to dedicate to recruitment.
Considering that 41% of employers have reported difficulties in filling vacancies over the previous year in CIPD’s Labour Market Outlook Report (Spring 2019), the cost of losing good employees can be even dearer.
And that is only the immediate financial impact. Losing top talent in your workforce would cause any business to struggle short-term without their expertise, input and familiarity with your company, and longer-term if they bring their skills to support your competition.
Having too many experienced employees walk away can damage your productivity and overall company culture in a significant way, and require a substantial investment in time and money to train people up to fill the void left by these departures.
How to retain a good employee who wants to leave
Now you have greater clarity over some of the key reasons why good employees leave companies, your next step is to implement techniques and approaches that heighten your ability to retain your top talent and prevent them from moving to your competitors.
Here are a few initiatives you should consider incorporating:
Regularly check your employees’ wellbeing
Whether this is through frequent employee reviews or discussions with their supervisors, regular communication with your employees helps them realise they are connected and supported at work, and allows you to spot and address any signs of discontent early.
Encourage their desire to learn and grow
For good talent that wants to develop and harness their skills at every opportunity, provide them with the chances to improve both inside and outside of work. And, when they do excel and show signs of progress, recognise it and celebrate it.
Provide a flexible working environment
Flexible working is quickly becoming the norm, and those that don’t adapt to these circumstances risk losing a high turnover of staff. By giving your workforce flexibility, they will likely be more productive and reassured, as well as less likely to suffer burnout.
Work on your employer branding strategy
Your employer branding strategy can play a big factor in not only the way you recruit new talent, but keep your existing team members around. Foster a collective culture behind your company’s values, one that allows your workforce to develop a deep, meaningful connection to your brand and its unique identity.
Train your management teams effectively
As a bad relationship with management is a primary reason why employees choose to leave their company, take time to develop your management team to welcome and support new and existing talent. This minimises the risk of culture clashes and encourages employees that they are being supported.
Demonstrate clear paths to career progression
Finally, with most employees not content to stay in one place or role for their whole lives, you need to illustrate that your organisation can support their ambitions beyond their current responsibilities. For high-performance employees, this will motivate them to climb the ladder in-house rather than seek greener pastures.
Avoid losing good employees with strong employer branding
Working with Papirfly directly supports your organisation’s ability to retain and recruit top talent. Whether it is empowering team members to take initiative and produce high-quality marketing materials with little training, to help producing effective employer brand assets and communications that project your company values across your global teams, we help you maximise the power of your employer brand.
Discover BAM by Papirfly™ today and unlock your ability to create, educate, manage, store and share your brand like never before.
How to maintain brand consistency on a global scale
Papirfly
6minutes read
As more and more companies seek to make their mark in front of an international audience, knowing how to maintain brand consistency has never been more critical.
If you are unsure why global brand consistency is so important, the following statistics provide a fitting answer:
20% – the increase in worth attributed to companies with consistent brands over those with an inconsistent identity
23% – the growth in revenue among companies that present a consistent brand across all channels
10% – the rise in salaries paid by businesses with poor company-wide branding
90% – how many consumers expect a consistent brand experience
5 – how many more times consistent brands are likely to achieve strong visibility over inconsistent competitors
Maintaining global brand consistency directly affects what your audiences (both external and internal) think about your company. In many ways, it’s your greatest difference-maker – the path to developing a tangible trust and loyalty between your customers and your business, its products and its services.
Understanding the value of maintaining brand consistency
A consistent brand identity achieves significant benefits:
It demonstrates that your brand is professional and driven to achieve its aims
It establishes that you are authentic in your vision and ambitions
It clarifies what your company stands for and what you offer to your audiences
It bolsters the trust and familiarity between your audience and your brand
It gives your global teams a shared identity and direction to move toward
It helps build up your brand equity against your competitors
It makes things simple and prevents misinterpretations of your brand
However, how you maintain brand consistency is easier said than done. With so many channels being utilised to communicate content, and the capacity for all employees to share your brand on these same channels, inconsistencies can naturally creep in if you’re not careful or lack a clear brand strategy.
Remember – on average it takes 5 to 7 interactions with a brand for a customer to develop a familiarity with it. This depends on the message being consistent throughout, otherwise it can create a disconnect or lead to confusion over what your company stands for. Needless to say, these are not traits of a strong brand identity.
This can be problematic for a small, domestically-focused business – when you expand to a global scale, the risk of brand inconsistency increases dramatically. There are naturally differences in culture and language that need to be accounted for, which if not handled correctly can result in your message being mistranslated or causing a risky faux pas.
You might be familiar with some of these precise examples of poor brand consistency:
Braniff Airlines incorrectly translating their “fly in leather” slogan into “en cuerno”, which for their Spanish-speaking audiences was slang for “fly naked”;
KFC’s first forays into the Chinese market resulted in their “finger-lickin’ good” slogan being presented as “eat your fingers off”;
And when the Jolly Green Giant was marketed in Arabic, he became the “Intimidating Green Ogre”
And while mistranslations and cultural appropriations stand to damage your pursuit of global brand consistency (and your reputation in these markets), they are just the tip of the iceberg. Marketing to a global audience means creating more and more assets than ever before – the greater the volume, the more likely it will be for inconsistencies to appear in your various markets.
Whether this is the result of human error, miscommunication, poor planning or the interpretations of the agencies you work with internationally, it can result in your messaging in one or more markets being distorted. And, with the world more “global” than ever before, inconsistency in a single market can have a glaring impact on your worldwide reputation.
So, with the stakes as high as they have ever been, how can companies maintain brand consistency on their global stage?
How to maintain brand consistency – your brand consistency checklist
1. Assess your existing brand materials
First, it is critical to assess the current brand materials you have circulating at present. What do they say about your business? Do they present the colours, fonts, patterns, messages and more that you associate with your brand? If not, where do they differ?
This is the initial step in identifying whether you have an existing problem presenting your marketing assets consistently to your audience. While that doesn’t make the remainder of our steps less important to follow, a visual representation of where your brand identity is departing from what it should be.
2. Develop brand guidelines
Establishing brand guidelines as part of your overarching brand strategy is essential, as it defines exactly what you want your company’s identity, vision and personality to be. Incorporating important elements like:
Brand mission
Logo application
Brand colour palettes
Tone of voice
Iconography
Above all that, your brand guidelines will be vital in keeping your entire team on the same page, and subsequently ensuring audiences worldwide receive a consistent impression of your brand through your content.
3. Make guidelines accessible to all
Of course, in order for your brand guidelines to have the desired impact, you need to make them readily available to your relevant employees. Whether you have a specific branding team in place or you want to inform the entirety of your teams worldwide, this educates your staff on what your content should make customers feel about your company.
Failing to get your employees on board early with these new guidelines, or restricting access to just a small number of staff in HQ, makes it increasingly likely that they’ll not follow the instructions, leading to inconsistencies emerging.
4. Synchronise internal branding
Brand consistency is not merely a customer-facing term. It requires employee participation and buy-in to ensure that consistency is maintained across all markets. To achieve that, making both your internal and external branding compatible makes it more likely that your messages remain consistent and authentic, two crucial attractors for consumers.
This can be achieved in several ways, from aligning your onboarding and training programmes with your brand values, to developing internal brand collateral across your buildings and departments to frequently educate employees on your brand’s missions and ideals.
5. Empower employees to champion your brand
As mentioned earlier, brand consistency requires a concentrated team effort. In order to ensure inconsistencies don’t occur, your employees should be enabled to follow your set brand guidelines and create materials, motivating them to be part of the process and achieve the best results.
That is one of the key features of our approach to Brand Activation Management – employees are given the freedom and tools to create high-quality brand assets and quickly get these to market, while remaining contained and managed by working with intelligent templates and guidelines established by your HQ.
Examples of brand consistency done right and done wrong
The good…
1. Dropbox
The beauty of Dropbox’s approach to maintaining brand consistency is in its brand’s simplicity and minimalist nature. Through this, Dropbox conforms to its brand personality of being anything the user wants them to be, and appealing to a wide range of incomes, ranges and needs. This simplicity reduces the likelihood of inconsistencies, and ensures that their internal teams quickly come to grips with what their company stands for.
2. Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo’s brand identity has not deviated significantly over the years from their commitment to putting customers first. This is present across their branding across all channels, primarily focusing on content that highlights those they work with and their target audiences and putting those people front-and-centre, alongside a tenured font, colour scheme and layout.
3. Dove
People’s familiarity with the Dove brand is largely a result of the strength of their messaging and their complete consistency across their packaging and marketing communications. Everything carries the same logos, colour schemes, layouts, shades and other creative elements. As soon as people spot their items on the shelves, they immediately associate it with Dove.
The bad…
1. New Coke
Did you know that the Coca-Cola logo is recognised by 94% of the world’s population? This makes their short-lived decision to develop “New Coke” in response to a Pepsi marketing campaign a famous misstep in their history, as it damaged their own powerful value proposition. Fortunately, this error was soon corrected with the smart move back to “Coca-Cola Classic”.
2. JCPenney
When JCPenney’s new CEO Ron Johnson joined in 2011, he had numerous plans for change, including a move away from constant sales and coupons to simply offering lower prices. This might not seem so bad, but for the established JCPenney audience, the move away from coupon-hunting led to a drop-in business, demonstrating the impact of deviating from core brand ideals, which can apply both at home and abroad.
3. Mercedes-Benz
When Mercedes-Benz entered the Chinese market for the first time, they decided to rebrand their cars in that market under the name “Bensi”. In another example of how dangerous mistranslations and altering your brand identity can be for an organisation, this translated to “rush to die”, which certainly isn’t ideal when trying to market fast, powerful cars.
These are just some of the examples out there of how maintaining brand consistency can help or hinder a company’s fortunes. The good thing is that we can learn and grow from mistakes and emulate those championing consistency to ensure we stay on the right path.
Helping you maintain brand consistency
Hopefully, this insight into the importance of maintaining brand consistency will help you in your attempts to ensure your brand identity is constant across all your markets. With upholding a consistent presence across all channels and markets more relevant than it’s ever been, these tips will go a long way to preventing deviations from creeping in.
We can also support you to achieve this aim through our sophisticated, easy-to-use all-in-one brand management platform. Empowering your teams worldwide to consistently and frequently promote your brand to your local markets, the Papirfly Platform enables you to create, educate, manage, store and share every aspect of what makes your brand unique.
Discover the ultimate support for your brand identity today.
13 steps to developing your employer branding strategy
Papirfly
13minutes read
As a company, you’re always looking to uncover, recruit and retain the best talent out there. People who will work to achieve your goals. Fit into your culture. Have that drive for success.
But there’s a problem – your competitors have the exact same aspiration. And with the reputation of a company more visible than ever before, be it through a jobseeker’s Google search or reviews on comparator sites like Glassdoor and Indeed, presenting a powerful, compelling employer proposition is more crucial and more challenging than ever before.
With a finite pool of truly exceptional individuals that can make a difference to your organisation, it is essential that you can stand out from the crowd in attracting the talent that’s out there, as well as keeping hold of the people you already have.
That is where your employer branding strategy comes in. It sets you on the journey to locating prospects that fit with your organisation’s ambitions and clearly demonstrating why they would feel right at home in your teams.
Here, we’re going to delve into greater detail on what your employer branding strategy is and outline thirteen critical steps to developing one that connects you with the best talent available.
What is an employer branding strategy?
At its core, the definition of an employer brand strategy is a documented, universal approach to translating your organisation’s values, approaches and personality to your audience. It’s a comprehensive offering of everything you have to offer as a workplace to benefit your most important asset – your employees.
It’s how you project your employer brand – how you are viewed by your current workforce and people you hope to one day recruit. Your employer branding strategy needs to transparently and consistently promote these aspects to both your existing team and those you intend to recruit in order to achieve three salient goals:
Positively distinguish your offering from your competitors’
Demonstrate why someone would want to work in your organisation
Illustrate how your brand is developing and strengthening over time
Not all employer branding strategies are created equal, and creating one that ticks all the right boxes requires clear thinking, total buy-in from your team members and refinements over time. By utilising the following best practices, you’ll find yourself in an ideal position to attract the talent that can drive your brand forward.
How important is an employer branding strategy?
As mentioned earlier, Glassdoor and Indeed are just two examples of platforms that highlight your company’s culture and processes. There’s your website and other marketing channels to consider, and word of mouth from employees spreading on forums.
If your negatives outweigh your positives, or you are not dedicating the same attention to your employer branding strategy as your competitors, you stand to miss out on top talent, and even losing current team members in the process.
Developing a brand that appeals and connects with today’s increasingly web-savvy job candidate is vital, and can result in numerous benefits, including:
Improved employer attractiveness to talented individuals interested in working in your industry
Greater motivation among your existing employees by feeling more connected and in-sync with your brand values
Tangible drops in the costs associated with hiring new talent and retaining them long-term
A workforce that actively advocates and promotes your brand, extending your reach to other candidates and customers
A clear, unified vision for your organisation to move towards, with all people associated with your company pushing it in that direction
13 steps to best practice with your employer branding strategy
Effective employer branding strategies can be the difference-maker in an ideal candidate’s decision to join your organisation over the other options available. Following these best practices gives you greater control over the messages you project, and the ability to influence how these individuals see your brand.
1. Audit the perception of your brand
Before developing your employer branding strategy, it is important you have a clear understanding of how people view your company initially. Otherwise, how will you know what adjustments are required?
A thorough audit of your current brand perception, both through the eyes of your employees and your external audiences, lets you understand if your current messaging and reputation is projecting the values and attractiveness you are aiming for. Especially in organisations with teams spread across the globe, it is easy for your values to be mistranslated, or be in needing refinement to connect with local audiences.
There are a host of places you should be examining, including:
Employment review sites – most candidates will be researching these in detail before making a decision on their next employer. What are people saying about your company’s processes and culture? Do you get rated five stars? Do you come across as an attractive brand? Are there negative reviews? If so, have you addressed them effectively?
Social media – investing in social listening tools can help you track mentions of your organisation over social media, so you gain a deeper insight into how people view your brand.
Employee feedback – conducting internal surveys or having open meetings with your teams helps you identify problems that might be affecting your ability to attract and retain talent, so they can be rectified as part of your unified employer brand strategy.
Google alerts – like on social media, it is important to closely monitor the reputation your brand is presenting on Google and other search engines, and determine if this is in line with your objectives.
2. Build your employee persona
Who is your ideal candidate? Without a clear answer to this question, you are in no position to effectively develop an employer branding strategy that targets a person with the personality, aspirations and skills to seamlessly join your teams.
Dedicate time to breaking down the qualities your target audience possesses:
What are their main personality traits?
What causes do they care about?
What motivates them day-to-day?
Where do they research for information?
What roles and responsibilities do they want?
Who influences their decisions?
This is just a sample of the line of questioning you should be asking about what constitutes the right employee for your brand. Of course, these qualities will differ according to the specific staff role and location you are marketing to, but at a fundamental level there must be a template that helps you craft branding that appeals to the right candidate.
Furthermore, by clarifying your ideal candidate, it is more likely that their transition into joining your team and growing within your organisation will be more satisfying and fulfilling.
3. Establish your company’s differentiators
Knowing what makes your company unique goes a long way to crafting your brand story.
It’s your organisation’s mission statement. Its values. Its social responsibilities. Its culture.
This feeds into your employer branding strategy by determining why someone would choose to join or stay with your company over X competitor. To effectively establish your differentiators or USPs therefore, it is important to reassess your own values and compare these with potential alternatives for recruits.
What issues do you stand for that others don’t? What aspects of your work culture can you promote that others aren’t? Where does your brand excel and stand out against what your competitors can produce? The answers to these questions will define the unique characteristics your company has to boost your attractiveness to recruits.
86% of HR professionals believe recruitment is now on an equal footing with ‘marketing’. In the same way your marketing efforts are geared to set your products and services apart from the crowd, your employer brand strategy needs to working just as hard to keep you in the minds of candidates and improve your current teams’ sense of belonging.
4. Determine and utilise your primary marketing channels
How are you going to reach your prospective recruits, or best engage with your existing employees worldwide?
As part of establishing your audience persona, you should have a clearer understanding of what channels are going to connect with the candidates you’re seeking. But it is vital to have these defined as part of your employer branding initiatives, and that consistency is maintained across all platforms you choose to utilise.
By choosing the most effective channels, be it through a careers page on your website, paid media campaigns, or taking your employer branding to social media, you are in a position to tailor and target your audiences far more successfully. Ask employees how they first encountered your brand. Research the most popular platforms and forums for people working in your industry.
Once you’ve identified where you will engage with, use these platforms to frequently translate the inclusivity, vision and development of your brand and your employees. These images, blogs, testimonials and more across the most popular channels for your audience will drive a clear connection with what your brand stands for.
However, it is essential that your collateral feels in no way forced or fabricated. Authenticity is essential in truly appealing to your target audience. Without this genuine aspect, people will see through your attempts and will likely distrust you going forward.
5. Create your Employer Value Proposition
Your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) is your promise to current and future employees. It’s what you offer that will make them passionate about being part of your team, and as such is a lynchpin of your employer branding strategy.
At the centre of your EVP should be your employee – their motivations, their interests, their goals. Ideally your proposition will cover everything they are looking for to connect them to your company in a positive, fulfilling way. To this end, you should consider what matters to staff:
Professional development?
Holiday allowance?
A thriving workplace culture?
Healthcare benefits?
Flexible working opportunities?
A strong work-life balance?
Bonuses?
A comfortable environment?
Unique perks like gym memberships and social outings?
Charity work and corporate responsibility initiatives?
Most employer branding strategies should contain an assortment of these. But on top of these perks, you also need to consider the core values of your business. How highly your employees are valued. How committed you are to being the best in your industry. How much you care about supporting your customers.
Your Employee Value Proposition is central to how attractive your brand is to recruits, and how effectively you can retain the staff you already have on board. It should be kept transparent and in easy reach of any member of your organisation at all times to reinforce these messages, which is why our BAM by Papirfly™ solution’s capacity to ‘educate’ employees allows our clients to house core brand documents that can be accessed at any opportunity.
6.Develop your brand guidelines and assets or review your existing ones
Your company already likely has overarching brand guidelines, assets and logos – but what about your employer brand? Has this been properly defined?
In order to effectively implement your employer brand strategy, you need to have assets in place that sets your employer brand apart and the resources available to create and complement your campaigns.
This includes anything from country-specific guidelines, culturally appropriate imagery, colour palettes, logo variations, audience breakdowns by country, dos and don’ts for different territories and anything in between.
7. Invest in your current team’s development
One of the core reasons behind bad employee retention is a lack of career development and learning opportunities. Without a feeling of progression or investment in their growth, it is likely a member of your team will seek greener pastures to achieve their aims.
Remember, employees who feel they’re progressing are 20% more likely to still be at their companies in a year’s time. By presenting these training and development opportunities to your team, you’re demonstrating you’re committed to helping them realise their ambitions as part of your brand. This not only provides you with a more highly-skilled and motivated workforce, but a workforce that is engaged and appreciative to your organisation.
On top of this reduction in workplace boredom and increase in motivation, staff that feel more in-tune and connected to a brand are much more likely to become brand advocates. They will share your marketing materials on social media. Tell friends and family about how positive your environment is. Actively encourage people to join when vacancies become available.
With that, you are in a position to harness powerful employee branding that increases your trustworthiness and attractiveness to both potential recruits and customers.
8. Internal review and alignment
Anything you plan to implement in terms of strategy, particularly initially, should have buy-in from all appropriate stakeholders. This may include HR professionals in the business, internal recruiters, management and more. You may also want to get opinions from existing or new employees to make sure what you have developed fits in with internal perceptions.
Likewise, you may pick up on an insight internally that you may not have had access to without holding these conversations. Once everyone is happy on the direction you are taking for the employer brand strategy, you can begin developing the tools and resources to educate the wider teams and make sure everyone is on the same page moving forward.
9. Assess your strategy’s success
Finally, once you have your employer branding strategy in place, it is important that you are regularly assessing, fine-tuning and adapting it as your business and your industry landscape evolves. It is rare anything this important is nailed first time around, so it is critical that you over time analyse the results of your efforts and see where improvements can be made.
Examine the success of your employer branding initiatives against your pre-defined KPIs, which may include:
Time-to-hire
Cost-per-hire
Number of applicants to each vacancy
Improved brand reputation
Frequency of employer brand marketing
If any of these are falling short of your aspirations, it is time to reassess, correct the course and tweak your approach until you see the results you’re looking for. Your employer branding strategy should never feel set in stone – as your overall business strategy changes to reflect new trends, patterns or requirements, your employer brand strategy should follow suit.
10. Talk to employees regularly
An employer brand strategy is never completely finished. This is because not only does the internal workforce demands evolve so rapidly, but as a brand grows so does what it’s trying to portray.
By having regular meetings or focus groups with a select few people you can ensure you don’t become subjective and stay rooted in what really matters to employees. Particularly if you are responsible for campaigns overseas, don’t rely on conversations with employees in your own location.
Ideally, teams would be looking after their own materials in their own country, but this isn’t always possible, so ensuring you get relevant, on-the-ground insight will be critical to your success.
11. Invest in video
Whether it’s for organic or paid for advertising, video is a powerful medium to get across your company’s true values. Potential candidates can read handbooks and website pages until their hearts are content but the truth is only video or a face-to-face visit can truly convey the experience of working somewhere.
This is particularly important for larger businesses, whose success has seen them become so vast that potential candidates may perceive them as a faceless corporation. Hearing from real people with real stories helps to humanise your brand in ways that written content can’t always achieve.
12. Create advocacy internally
If your existing employees don’t believe in your employer brand strategy, how can you expect prospective candidates to feel anything? Having members of the workforce on board is one thing, but having them actively promote your brand and company as a positive place to work can be more powerful than many other methods.
There’s an element of authenticity that candidates connect with. As long as your content isn’t forced or dishonest, the genuine passion should shine through. And if it does, you could be on to a winner.
13. Work out the logistics of your localisation
Working across multiple territories can be a nightmare to navigate. Having processes in place to ensure that any culturally sensitive content or translations are up to scratch is important for maintaining consistency and retaining a decent reputation, both internally and externally.
Anything deemed insensitive would not only ruin your chances of a successful recruitment campaign but also demoralise employees working in that region. It’s important that no matter in the world where they are, they feel connected and represented as part of the brand.
6 companies that have nailed their employer branding strategy
We’ve discussed the key steps to building an employer branding strategy, but what do these mean in practice? Below we discuss several companies across the globe that are maximising their potential to attract, recruit and retain the best talent available through their messaging, and what lessons you can pick up from them.
Vodafone
Vodafone is a prime example of a brand that felt it was doing everything right, but after careful analysis determined they were lacking in some areas. They quickly rectified this by conducting a thorough survey across 40,000 people to find out how people felt about the Vodafone brand.
This feedback became the heart of a new employer value proposition, which has proven far more effective in appealing to new and existing talent. At the core of this is something called the “two-way deal”, which promises team members that they will get as much out of their career at Vodafone as they’re willing to put in.
We’re proud of the role that our BAM solutions have played in supporting Vodafone’s employer branding strategy, helping them deliver greater campaign materials on a global scale.
Unilever
Another of our clients, Unilever, has built the strength and success of their employer brand through their status as a leader in their industry. By focusing on materials that emphasise their notable reputation in their employment brand strategy, they present an aspirational image to potential recruits, as well as improve the motivation of their existing employees.
Plus, Unilever in recent years adopted an approach of responding to every testimonial left for their company on Glassdoor, positive or negative. This willingness to respond to employee concerns and use their reviews to improve conditions has consistently kept the company among the “Best Place to Work in the UK” rankings.
L’Oréal
L’Oréal back in 2013 demonstrated the value of placing your employees at the centre of your employer branding strategy. After passing 300,000 followers on LinkedIn, they used this as an opportunity to highlight the stories and skills of their team members across the globe, emphasising the opportunities available at their business to potential jobseekers.
As it’s well-established that people trust other people over brands, L’Oréal’s approach was an effective way to build confidence in their brand through the voices of their own employees.
Zappos
While many fashion brands utilise their social media accounts for their products, Zappos pairs this with content demonstrating the benefits of joining their team. On Instagram in particular they share a substantial amount of CSR work, employee stories and company-wide events to help their brand feel more appealing to both jobseekers and the wider public.
Furthermore, their Insider Program has been a great innovation for their employer branding strategy. This allows anyone interested in joining their team one day access to information relevant to the company, allowing Zappos to source from the best available talent.
Hubspot
When Hubspot came under increased scrutiny after being named one of the Best Places to Work in 2018, this investigation simply shone a bigger spotlight on their commitment to listen to their employees and take their feedback and suggestions on board.
This extends to Hubspot’s social media presence, where they have regularly encouraged followers to leave comments that can act as jumping points for future content. It also champions its dedication to a fun company culture, with flexible work hours and tuition reimbursement.
Heineken
Pushing a strong visual element to their employer branding strategies, Heineken in early 2019 launched their “Going Places” campaign, focusing on celebrating the stories and development of 33 of their employees across the globe.
After conducting research into the values their brand represent, the company honed in on three pillars: authenticity, transcendence and longer-term brand management. These were combined into the campaign, inspiring their existing workforce and encouraging prospective employees about the potential they can unlock at Heineken.
The future of your employer branding strategy
We hope that this insight into the best practices of employer branding strategies will help guide your way to presenting a more attractive, comprehensive proposition to prospective candidates, as well as keep your current team members engaged with your brand.
The importance of employer branding can never go understated in how it drives the future of your organisation, and establishes a workforce that is motivated, committed and inspired to be part of your company. Achieving this on a global scale is far from straightforward, but through our market-leading BAM software, your team is able to efficiently execute your employer brand strategy.
What does company culture look like? It’s much more than an office bar and quirky team photos on your website. Culture is something deeply embedded at an organisational, managerial and individual level – it’s a mindset and an effective way of working.
There are always going to be barriers in our working lives, the unremarkable and the unpredictable, waiting and ready to pounce and descend our effectiveness into chaos. Projects don’t always go to plan. Resources aren’t always available and budgets are often stretched or limited. Sometimes we run out of coffee. We adapt and we overcome.
But when a business is continually faced with the same problems day in, day out, shouldn’t it be in the best interest of the team to invest time in unearthing a solution? If an issue affects even one person in a department, it has the potential to disrupt everyone down the line. Deadlines are missed. People get stressed. Nobody has a simple way of getting stuff done.
Most intelligent software has been born out of taking an everyday problem and providing a solution that simplifies – Xero for accounting, Slack for project management and HubSpot for sales to name a few. But what about marketing? How are marketing teams supposed to keep up, create campaigns and take hold of their rightful market share?
Well, there is a way for marketing teams to work smarter, not harder. What we at Papirfly would call, the better way.
Such an agile industry like marketing calls for an agile system. But when design needs to be governed from a brand consistency and creative perspective, can simple-to-use design software ever be truly agile?
The short answer is yes.
Our vision as a company for nearly 20 years has been to challenge the status quo and simplify the everyday. We understand creating marketing materials can be expensive, time-consuming and – let’s face it – an absolute nightmare to deliver on a global scale. Traditional methods of delivery just can’t keep up.
What our web-based software does is bring branding control, consistency and creativity into the hands of your team – without specialist expertise or support. It harnesses smart templates, which are programmed to give your team freedom to create what they need within a specified framework. Every format, every size, every type of asset they could possibly need – and they have the power to create it.
The designs are to an agency-standard, restrictions are in place to ensure brand identity is never compromised and it’s incredibly simple to use. Businesses can embrace new opportunities because teams are quick to react to market demands, rather than miss the boat due to restrictive budgets or turnaround times.
Of course not having to engage an agency every time you need something saves money, which is incredibly valuable. But the resources, stress and strategic thinking time it saves is priceless.
Does the better way mark the end for agencies?
Absolutely not.
If anything, the role of agencies is to become even more significant. When clients become more self-sufficient, budgets are freed to be reinvested. That money can be redistributed into more strategic work, high-level campaign planning and driving the brand forward.
The role of Papirfly is to ensure that when this incredible thinking reaches all corners of the globe, nothing has been misused, diluted or gone rogue.
Does the better way mean a change of culture?
For me ‘The Better Way’ is much more than a slogan, more than a call to action that agencies, retail marketers, employer brand teams and marketing teams can rally behind.
I believe it looks to redefine the culture of businesses, to show on a grander scale how platforms and systems like Papirfly are bringing about a change to the mentality of work and helping everyone achieve greater all-round balance in their lives.
It’s an investment into business sustainability and your employees.
When work becomes easier to execute, more gets done. Employees are more productive. Management is satisfied and everyone feels appreciated.
It would be contrived to say that a single piece of software can change the world, but what I can say is that it will change everything for your teams, for you and your brand. Having a local or global brand strategy is one thing – having the ability to deliver it is another, and having the ability to deliver it with ease is the reality you get with Papirfly.
When teams become more collaborative, more empowered and start producing amazing work, great things can and will happen.
People start to take full lunch breaks. Smile more. Leave on time. Have more space for thinking. Become better at their jobs. Are happier at home. Live more fulfilled lives.
And stuff still gets done.
Global governance is the better way.
Freedom to create is the better way.
Trusting and empowering your teams is the better way.
There IS a better way. You just need to be ready to embrace it.
Corporate, Corporate communications
Demystifying the corporate creative
Jessica Chambers
3minutes read
There is a legend about a mystical creature. It cannot be tamed, no one really understands it. It can’t be touched and it strikes when you’re least expecting it – maybe during the night, or during your shower.
That creature is creativity. And it’s one of humanity’s most desired skillsets.
But the myth remains that creativity can’t be understood, can’t be learned and that it is just something that’s born with its claws already in you.
It’s time to demystify this creature.
What does it mean to be a creative?
Being a creative is something not to be sniffed at. Inspired ideas. Insightful concepts. Masterful creations. Art, fashion, campaigns, food, performances and more. Each uniquely manifested from a thought sparked by any number of internal and external influences. Something so exceptional, they say you’ve either ‘got it’ or you haven’t.
But what exactly is ‘it’?
And is our perception of what ‘it’ is, the very thing that’s holding us back from achieving our full creative potential in the workplace?
While having the right talent in the right seat is incredibly important, perhaps even business-defining, has putting creative skillsets on a pedestal somewhat restricted the inner visionary in each of us?
Often when people think of a creative they picture a designer or artist. It’s a visual thing.
But a piece of web code that creates a new function is creativity.
And the way that code is built into a website is all part of a creative process.
Even the colour coding on the spreadsheet that’s managing that website build is creative, granted on a smaller scale.
Creativity is there at all different levels in everyday life and in business. It’s about connecting things. Finding solutions. Looking at something in a new light. And often, it’s just a matter of unlocking it. Or recognising it. And then nurturing it.
One thing’s for sure – creativity is a product of imagination, so it’s free to anyone who has one. Which means everyone.
Are constraints holding back corporate creatives?
Constraints are actually a big part of creative thinking. Coming up against barriers forces you to draw from areas you wouldn’t normally go to – it’s called global processing. Many creative types cite constraints as a big influence on their final output.
That begs the question whether, if physical constraints were removed, could marketers deliver their campaigns more effectively and without specialist support?
Time. Budget. Resources. Ability.
These are the barriers that control creative output every day. Things are done a certain way to achieve a consistent result and reduce mistakes, which means opportunities for creativity are not always built into the process. How can we ever encourage creativity if we don’t provide the tools to support it?
Now consider these four areas, identified as key to the successful implementation of creativity in the workplace:
Motivation
What do employees really want to be doing in terms of creativity? How much freedom do they seek? What drives them? Putting tools in place to help with the creative process, giving employees autonomy and sharing the vision of the company are all ways to help motivate teams to approach their day-to-day with a different way of thinking.
Inclusiveness
When there’s a platform to openly share and discuss ideas, creativity thrives. Listening to problems, finding solutions and welcoming all ideas to the table – even if they’re not right, it could spark something.
Creative thinking skills
When an employee has a problem, encourage them to think of solutions. Even if they’re not right or possible, it will encourage them to start seeing things differently, not just seeing barriers but the ways to overcome them.
An environment that supports creativity
The tech revolution allows for more people to be involved in shaping a brand’s creative message. Digital platforms and software make it easier than ever for us to automate parts of the creative process. Empowering teams to deliver the marketing materials needed without having to engage a designer or writer sounds impossible, but with smart templates from Papirfly, creativity is encouraged while keeping output governed.
The creative renaissance: how do corporates embrace it?
Einstein said if you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. It’s likely he knew that everything starts with an idea, and the way to foster ideas is to feed them – read more, go to the theatre, take a walk, take a break, have a shower.
Creativity can stem from anywhere in life, but people often forget the role it plays in businesses. Retail marketers can be creative about the ways they utilise their window spaces. Corporate marketers can find new and engaging ways to make their internal comms as exciting as their external comms. Employer brand teams can make sure that every piece of marketing material embodies the values of a brand, and then some.
No two businesses’ needs or employees are the same, and in order to nurture the hidden talent which remains unrecognised, we need to shed our archaic perception of what being a ‘creative’ means and recognise that there’s one in all of us. And it’s time we embraced it.
Customer brand equity and understanding Keller’s brand equity model
Papirfly
10minutes read
Today more than ever before, it is difficult to underestimate the value of customer brand equity. It is what separates a generic local soft drink in your supermarket to Coca-Cola and Pepsi. It’s the value that a brand adds to comparable products.
Customer brand equity (also referred to as Customer-Based Brand Equity, or CBBE) relates to how your customers’ attitudes towards your brand influence the success of your business overall. If customers recognize, understand and connect with your brand, performance goes up (provided experiences are positive).
It appears a straightforward concept to understand, but building customer-based brand equity isn’t anywhere near as clear-cut. It takes a lot of effort and nurturing your audience, but the rewards for getting it right can make a big difference to your business prospects.
Plus, measuring CBBE can offer valuable insights into your company’s performance and play a key role in guiding your marketing strategy.
Here, we dive deeper into customer brand equity and why it’s so valuable for companies to strive towards. This includes a breakdown of Keller’s brand equity model, and techniques you can apply to enhance your brand equity moving forward.
What is customer brand equity?
As noted earlier, customer brand equity represents how much the success of your brand is directly related to the attitudes of your customers towards it.
It’s no shock that loyal customers play a vital role in the success of any brand or organization – without them, it would be impossible for these to get anywhere. But their influence extends far beyond simply how much they’re buying into your products or services – it is as much about how they perceive your brand.
If customers have a positive association with your brand and use it regularly over your competitors, this will naturally have a positive effect on your business. Conversely, an overall negative perception of your brand – or if you remain unknown and not even on customers’ radar, this will have the opposite effect.
Today, people can publicly review and critique a brand’s quality of products and service within seconds. Paying attention to the strength of your customer brand equity is as crucial as ever.
In essence, customer brand equity plays a vital role in depicting brand loyalty towards your business. As acquiring a new customer is 5 times as expensive as maintaining an existing one, having a strong CBBE is likely to benefit your bottom line.
Plus, having loyal customers that understand and resonate with your brand will help generate new leads more naturally. Brand-loyal consumers are more likely to act as advocates for your services to loved ones and friends – especially valuable considering 90% of consumers claim a word-of-mouth recommendation is a leading influence on their purchase decisions.
This makes the value of your customer-based brand equity essential to the strength of your company as a whole. If this is managed well and harnessed effectively, you can make a big impression on how successful your business is operating.
Equally, an understanding of your customer brand equity can provide insight if your brand is not connecting with consumers in the way you anticipated. Identifying this can encourage a change in strategy or approaches that develop a stronger, more positive association between your target audience and your brand, leading to repeat business and loyal advocates.
Brand equity vs customer equity
Brand equity illustrates the worth of the brand, i.e. the value added to a product by branding it. Customer equity relates to lifetime values that are important to consumers.
Both are linked by a strong focus on customer loyalty, and the value of having a dedicated customer base in determining the overall worth of a brand. But, what makes customer brand equity a key focus is its direct connection to the financial impact customers have on an organisation as a whole.
Therefore, building customer-based brand equity achieves the critical aims of raising the value of your brand, while also giving insight into what your customers want and expect from your company.
The Keller Brand Equity Model
The standout CBBE model was developed by Kevin Lane Keller, a Professor of Marketing, in his 1993 book Strategic Brand Management. Through this model, Keller looked to illustrate the journey of customers’ relationships with brands – from recognition at the bottom, through to resonating with the brand at the peak.
As depicted in the above image, Keller identifies 6 components that contribute to customer brand equity, and thus how customers think and feel about a brand overall:
Salience
Performance
Imagery
Judgements
Feelings
Resonance
Here, we’ll cover these in greater detail and the role each plays in creating customer loyalty towards a brand.
Who are you?
At the foundation of the brand equity pyramid is salience, which represents how aware people are to the existence of your brand in general. This is the essential first step in building customer brand equity – if people don’t know about your brand, it will be hard for them to form an opinion about it one way or the other. This section carries the weight of the rest of the pyramid.
Of course, this stage is about more than ensuring people have some recognition of your brand; it must be the right recognition. At this first instance, it’s important you give people a clear, consistent and accurate depiction of your brand’s identity, as without this they will have little chance of progressing further up the pyramid.
To make the biggest positive impact on your customer brand equity at this level, you should conduct thorough research to get a clear understanding of your target audience, and what they are looking for out of a company that provides your products or services. How do they decide between your brand and another competitor?
Once you have established this, it is important that your awareness efforts:
Hone in on the pain points/interests that matter to them
Are placed on a platform that they interact with often
Are consistent across all channels you choose to market o
What does brand salience mean for your marketing team?
The people inside your organization must live the brand first, in order to help your audience recognize, trust and remember it. A brand portal becomes essential, acting as a single source of truth.
With a well-structured showcasing of your brand identity includes ready-made campaign assets, tone of voice guidelines, or any content creation templates they can use. Everyone can visualize and represent the brand – employee, partner or stakeholder – with 100% brand consistency from day one.
What are you?
The second level of Keller’s CBBE model is divided into two segments – performance and imagery. Performance covers the actual features and capabilities of your products/services. This encapsulates:
Functionality
Reliability
Style/Design
Price
Durability
Customer Service
Customer Satisfaction
Consequently, if your product delivers on the promises highlighted in your brand awareness campaigns, then it should lead to positive experiences which, in turn, drive customers further up the brand equity pyramid. If it doesn’t deliver on their expectations, then you risk them falling away altogether.
This is why authenticity is more than just a buzzword when it comes to customer-based brand equity – it is central to encouraging loyalty and establishing long-term relationships.
Alongside performance is imagery, which is more about how your brand meets your customers’ social and psychological needs. Think of your brand as if it were a human – what would they be like? Is it strong and tough? Is it sensible and sophisticated? Is it quirky and exciting?
Brand imagery is what people think when they see your brand. It is about how happy they would be to be seen associated with your products as a result of its reputation.
How effective this proves for you will come from initially discussing your brand values and which you consider relate to the interests of your customers. How important is the environment for them? Do they care about their local community? Finding the answers to these and other questions will help you project an image customers can get on board with.
How can your marketing team show customers your brand meaning and brand features?
Ensuring every visual, message and asset reflects who you are as a brand – consistently and without compromise – requires fast and reliable access to the right materials, tailored to their roles and regions.
A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is key to making this possible. It centralizes all approved assets in one place, making it easy to locate, share, and use brand materials that align with your identity and values. When your DAM reflects your brand’s meaning with structure and clarity, your teams are empowered to deliver content that will resonate with audiences and is the starting point to evoking an emotional response.
What about you?
The third strand of the customer-based brand equity pyramid is also split in two, covering both judgement and feelings. These both relate to what people feel towards your brand, and the impact this has either positively or negatively.
First, judgement is about the opinions that people form about your brand. This could be good, like if someone considers your products reliable or handy. Or it could be detrimental, as in somebody judging them to be cheap or ineffective. And while you might disagree with their assessment, they still carry a great deal of weight.
Typically, the judgement of a brand breaks down into four segments:
Quality – the brand’s actual/perceived quality
Credibility – the brand’s reputation
Consideration – the brand’s relevancy
Superiority – the brand’s status against competitors
Plus, someone doesn’t have to even experience your brand first-hand to be affected by judgements – they can form an opinion simply through word-of-mouth.
To combat the potential problems of negative judgements, it’s essential your company is responsive to any complaints or issues that customers may have. Having access to software that can quickly turn around relevant marketing materials is extremely helpful in these circumstances.
Also, if these persist, it gives you just cause to reassess your brand and if it is delivering as it should be.
The other half of this equation is feelings, which unsurprisingly covers how people feel about your brand. According to Keller’s brand equity model, there are 6 positive brand feelings that companies should be aspiring to:
Warmth
Fun
Excitement
Security
Social approval
Self-respect
While your brand might not appeal to all the emotions listed here, it should focus on at least one and make sure customers feel that when they interact with or consider your brand.
Associating your brand with positive feelings and judgements is crucial for building customer-based brand equity – it grows trust and helps form a strong, lasting relationship between your company and your customers.
Remember – eliminating negative feelings and judgements is a tall ask once they’ve planted roots, so trying to instil positivity from the outset is very beneficial.
How can marketing teams quickly respond to affect how your brand is perceived?
Perception can shift in moments. Reacting to a crisis, capitalizing on a trend or addressing customer sentiment – the ability to act fast is non-negotiable.
When perception is shaped by how fast and authentically you show up, having the tools to act with clarity and control gives your brand a critical edge, such as flexible design templates. You need your frontline teams to create marketing content that can be localized, while fully on-brand in look and feel, with your brand’s tone and values in tact – reinforcing credibility and trust in real time.
What about you and me?
Finally, we reach the ‘Holy Grail’ of customer brand equity – resonance. This is the stage where customers are more than just aware of your brand and buying what you’re selling – they are advocates for your brand. These are the customers who go out on your behalf to introduce others to your company.
It is unquestionably the most difficult level to reach, but it comes with the greatest benefits. In Keller’s model, he breaks resonance down into 4 categories:
Behavioural loyalty – how habitually a customer buys from your brand
Attitudinal attachment – the love and connection people feel towards your brand
Sense of community – the bond that customers feel towards others who use your brand
Active engagement – how engaged people are with your brand even when not purchasing from it (e.g. social media follows, marketing events, online chats, etc.)
Achieving resonance with customers is a tall order, but there are numerous incentives that you might want to consider to encourage lifetime loyalty with your audience:
Exclusive offers for customers who have signed up for emails
Loyalty cards
Points-based rewards
Free/limited-time experiences
Shareholder potential
Community forums
Charitable donations/events
These are just some suggestions of what you can do to achieve this rarefied level of relationship with your customers. As highlighted, it doesn’t take many people to reach the summit of the customer brand equity model to make a significant difference to the strength of your brand and your business as a whole.
Measuring, managing and perfecting customer brand equity
Now you have a deeper understanding of what customer-based brand equity is and what Keller’s model represents, you can start to consider techniques and approaches to track this information and help move people onto the pyramid and up the tiers over time.
Conducting regular research into the changing trends and feelings of your audience, as well as distributing feedback surveys, can help you determine whether your brand is leaving a positive impression on your audiences. Alongside this, when measuring customer brand equity, you should turn attention to your:
Financial metrics
Brand ‘buzz’ metrics
Consumer metrics
These will give you a clearer sense of how your brand is perceived, and the impact this is having on your business prospects. By keeping tabs on these insights and focusing on the four tiers of Keller’s brand equity model, you can make a significant uptick in customer loyalty and subsequently expand your company’s bottom line.
Beyond that, it is simply a case of delivering branded materials frequently, authentically and consistently. Each of these characteristics is crucial for enhancing your customer brand equity over time, so finding ways to make this seamless and straightforward for your company should be a top priority for your marketing teams.
Explore how to build brand equity. Step by step.
Take control of your content and help your teams resonate with every customer. Explore now.
In-store advertising and your retail marketing strategy
Papirfly
3minutes read
Every retail marketing campaign has several steps in place to generate leads, grab the attention of customers and make the final pitch for a potential sale. Understanding the importance of every step and how to properly execute each separates businesses with the strongest bottom line from the rest.
If you run a physical brick and mortar facility, in-store marketing makes up a key component to the final step in your marketing campaign. It should function as the closer for the advertising team.
However, before you dive headfirst into in-store marketing specifics, you need a wider understanding of your marketing strategy and identify how each step leads consumers to your doorstep.
The varying steps of a full marketing campaign
In any great marketing campaign, there are several steps in play. You need to wow customers with a product or deal, promote them into visiting your store, and then close the deal by presenting the consumer with an item they simply can’t live without. With all of these important steps, how can you possibly cover it all in a single advertisement? You can’t.
Each of these different steps should receive attention in varying stages of the marketing campaign. The wide advertising net you cast initially, whether it’s social media, Google Adwords, on local television stations or even billboards, should showcase a product or service you wish to sell. You may also decide to include extra incentives for consumers to visit your store by mentioning your special offers.
The final stage of your marketing strategy should focus on customers inside of your store. The previous steps of the wide advertising approach have brought them into the store, you now need to close the deal using in-store marketing.The customer is already interested in what you have to offer, after all.
How in-store marketing is used
The customer is interested in your product. It’s why they are inside the store. So what should this final bit of advertising do to secure a sale? Realistically it should do whatever it takes to just nudge them over the edge. This may depend on your key demographic and what is important to them.
However, there are a handful of commonretail marketingstaples you can pull from in order to make sure each of the varying demographics finds what they are looking for using retail advertising.
Nearly every retail outlet will see at least some share of thrifty shoppers. These are individuals who only purchase discounted products or extreme deals. They will not necessarily spend much time looking for the specs of an item or what it can offer. Instead, they just want a great deal. While other consumers are interested in saving money, these individuals will only purchase the product if the deal is greater than usual. In-store advertising is needed to direct these shoppers to deals with attention-grabbing signage.
Other shoppers want the decisions made for them. They don’t want extreme choices as it may confuse their shopping ability. Due to this, highlighting the best of all available products is beneficial. For those shopping for gifts (someone shopping for someone in your key demographic), make it easy for them to understand and point out why the target audience likes the product.
Testing marketing posters
In-store advertisements, such as marketing posters, should be rolled out on a small scale initially to see what draws the attention of customers and boost conversion rates.
Be mindful of lighting, positioning and viewing angle. Does it catch the eye from where your customers will be passing? People who are looking for a deal are using their eyes to orient themselves so make it as easy as possible to identify and interpret your offer. Will they quickly understand which product is advertised and what the deal is?
How would you measure poster campaigns? The simplest way is to look at the sales figures for the relevant products before and after you make the change, but ensure all other offline and online campaigns are stable. This ensures the data is clearer to compare.
Also, training is key to maximise the benefits from anin-store campaign. The people in your store obviously need to be aware of the campaign but also know how to respond to customers who are interested in the deal you are proposing. They may also need to be ready to answer questions such as how long the offer lasts. Interacting with curious customers is also a good opportunity for upselling and add-on selling and by being aware of all current campaigns the salesperson can help the customer add more good deals to their purchase.
When you run a physical storefront, retail posters make up a key component to the strength of your campaign. By implementing storefront posters as not just a way to attract already interested consumers but as a means to closing sales, you’ll unlock the true power of retail advertising.
So keep in mind the full breadth of your marketing campaignand use each detail as a building block towards improving the foundation of your advertising presence.
Imagine the potential of a workplace where employees are more confident to make decisions; a place where they are more accountable, more satisfied and where problems are resolved much faster. It might seem like a corporate pipe-dream, but these outcomes are just some of the benefits of a successful workforce empowerment model.
While the idea of employee empowerment is considered a current trend, the concept is not new. And these days many businesses realise that its staff is their company’s biggest asset. Having the right people in the right seats is priceless. After all, a business is only as good as the people running the day-to-day.
What’s more, front-line staff are the only ones who truly understand how most company processes work. Working closely with customers, for example, gives these employees unique insight into how the company operates in a real-world situation. They’re often well-placed to benefit business decisions.
So what do unempowered workplaces look like?
High staff turnovers, low morale and unhealthy levels of stress can all stem from a lack of empowerment. If employees aren’t trusted to deliver their responsibilities without the need for micromanagement, or conversely are tasked with delivering beyond their capabilities, they can begin to feel dissatisfied and disengaged.
A 2019 study by CENSUSWIDE revealed that more than a third of employees interviewed felt undervalued and would not recommend their current employer to friends. If those employees had felt more empowered in their workplace, would this number be so high?
Often the usual command and control style of management sees an employee waiting to be given empowerment by a manager.
But proper empowerment means an employee is self-directed and has control of the areas of responsibility for their job role. They’re trusted, they understand the business goals and they have the tools to deliver successfully. This devolution of power makes employees more accountable for their work and workloads, ensures problems are resolved faster, and for both managers and employees, time is freed up.
Saving time means increased output, which could equal a positive impact on the business’s bottom line.
Embracing empowerment – how to deliver a happy staff
True empowerment comes from the individual’s ability to exercise authority within their job role… but only if management gives them this opportunity. This can only come about through significant change, which needs to happen at three levels – the organisational, managerial and individual.
At organisational level
The vision and purpose of the company must be communicated. If managers and individuals don’t understand where the company is going, they will never truly know what they’re working towards. Managers and individuals should also be consulted during the decision-making that affects the way they work. If sweeping changes are made and they were never consulted – how can they ever feel empowered?
At managerial level
Important company information needs to be shared with individuals, autonomy within roles needs to be created, and managers must be prepared to listen, digest what is happening and decide on the next steps. What are the recurring problems? What would help the team be more productive? Working together, determine the tools, resources and processes they have and need in place to overcome the barriers they’re facing.
At individual level
The employee needs to feel they have the ability to exercise authority within their job role. They need tools in place to deliver their job effectively. Whether that means having a team around them, software that automates part of their job or KPIs to work towards, tools can take many forms.
Why managers have the biggest role to play
When you’re the one that has the day-to-day responsibility of ensuring teams deliver, it falls to you to give them what they need.
And because empowerment isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, each distinct role is going to require something different. Speaking to your employees is always the best place to start, but there are some things you can do right now to start making a difference…
Loosen the boundaries
Trust is an important thing. Trust your staff and, little by little, they will grow in skill and confidence. Find what someone does best and let them do it their way. Your success depends on it.
Listen, listen, listen
In some cases, many grassroots staff have more knowledge of day-to-day processes than senior executives. That’s not to say they will have all the skills to solve the problems they bring to you, but they will understand what and why they’re being slowed down
It’s also important to remember that listening also means checking with employees that they’re comfortable with any extra responsibility. If what you’re asking of them doesn’t align with their personal goals, the result could be negative…
Give positive feedback
Everyone likes being told when they’ve done well. And a job well done needs praise. A job done not so well needs constructive feedback too, but remember to allow for mistakes that aren’t crucial. Learn from them. Put things in place to stop them from happening again.
Time and space
Give employees time to experiment and time to learn.
Micromanagement, the polar opposite of workplace empowerment, is nearly always received negatively, even if it’s practised unintentionally. The outcomes for staff working under a manager with this trait are feelings of demotivation, being stifled and a general focus on the wrong priorities. Another perhaps overlooked element of a micromanager is the toll it can take on the health of the manager themselves. Space to breathe is a win-win for all.
Employee empowerment works, so why aren’t we all doing it?
In the fast-moving world of business, the need for quick decisions and actions can easily get in the way of creating an empowered environment for employees, even when managers believe it’s the right thing to do.
It’s not instant, and it may not feel tangible at first. But over time when teams feel empowered, employee output is increased, they feel happier, and morale rises.
If implemented correctly, managers will see increased confidence to complete tasks over time. Any problems will be addressed and likely rectified a lot sooner, allowing projects to move forward at pace. Furthermore, if employees are enabled to solve their own problems, it will allow managers more time for high-level business areas such as strategic thinking.
But even better for an organisation is that a fully empowered staff is more likely to attract the right kind of employee in the first place. Empowered employees radiate competence and happiness, and that’s a fantastic message to send out to new recruits.
Many businesses today recognise the potential of workplace empowerment and its effect on staff motivation, happiness and corporate profits. But to truly be successful, empowerment must be embraced company-wide – at the organisation, manager and individual level. Sometimes we need to work together now in order to achieve more autonomy in the future. There’s definitely no ‘I’ in team, but there sure is power in empowerment.
