14 reasons why you’re losing good employees to competitors
Papirfly
7minutes read
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
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 across all channels
Papirfly
4minutes read
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
In today’s connected world, more brands are stepping onto the global stage – but with international visibility comes greater complexity. That’s why maintaining brand consistency across platforms and markets isn’t just important – it’s essential.
The 2025 brand consistency numbers speak for themselves:
Companies that maintain consistent branding across all channels see up to 23% revenue growth compared to those with inconsistent identities. [Source: Amra & Elma]
About 33% of businesses report that consistent presentation of their brand has driven revenue increases of 20% or more. [Source: Shapo]
Around 68% of organizations experience 10–20% revenue growth directly linked to prioritizing brand consistency efforts. [Source: Capital One Shopping Research]
Brands that maintain long-term consistency achieve twice the profit gains of those with frequently changing messages. [Source: Funnel.io]
A striking 90% of consumers expect a seamless and consistent brand experience across all marketing channels. [Source: We Are Tenet]
Global brand consistency directly influences how people perceive your business – externally and internally. It strengthens trust, builds brand awareness, and helps you stand out in increasingly competitive markets.
Why brand consistency counts – and what it delivers
Gives your global teams a shared identity and direction to move toward
Makes it easy for people to follow and interpret your brand
However, maintaining brand consistency is easier said than done. With so many employees sharing content across so many channels, inconsistencies can naturally creep in if you’re not careful or lack a clear brand strategy.
This can be problematic even for a small, domestically focused business. Expand to a global scale and the risk of inconsistency increases dramatically, especially when you factor in differences in culture and language.
You’ve likely seen some of these famous missteps:
Braniff Airlines translating their “fly in leather” into the Spanish slang for “fly naked”
KFC’s “finger-lickin’ good” slogan becoming “eat your fingers off” in China
The Arabic translation turning “Jolly Green Giant” into “Intimidating Green Ogre”
And while these examples highlight how easy it is to get brand messaging wrong, they are also just the tip of the iceberg. So, with the stakes as high as they have ever been, how can companies maintain brand consistency on their global stage?
Your global brand consistency checklist
Here are five key steps to maintaining brand consistency worldwide:
1. Audit your existing brand materials
Start by assessing what’s already out there. Do your marketing materials reflect your true brand identity in terms of color, tone, imagery and brand messaging? Or are there inconsistencies?
This audit helps you pinpoint gaps and get a clear picture of where alignment is needed.
2. Develop brand guidelines
Clear, accessible brand guidelines are your brand’s north star. These should cover:
Brand mission and values
Logo usage
Color palettes
Brand messaging and tone of voice examples
Iconography
Your brand guidelines will be vital in keeping your entire team on the same page – and helping to ensure you show up in a consistent way through all your content and in every market.
3. Make guidelines accessible to all
Having great brand guidelines is one thing. Making them easily accessible is another. From your marketing team to local employees to agency partners, everyone needs to be able to work from the same brand book – because if people can’t find or follow your rules, you can’t expect consistent results. A brand portal is the perfect way to achieve this.
4. Align internal and external branding
Consistency starts from within. If employees aren’t aligned with your brand values, it’s difficult for them to deliver your message authentically to the outside world.
From onboarding and internal training to office signage and internal comms, reflect your brand identity inside as well as out.
5. Empower your people to create, with control
Your people are closest to their local audiences. Giving them the tools to create high-quality assets is a powerful step on the way to building brand equity – as long as you can ensure everyone stays consistently on-brand.
At Papirfly, we know maintaining brand consistency globally is a complex task. That’s why we’re committed to giving organizations the power to showcase, manage, create and share digital brand assets – across every market and every team.With Digital Asset Management and templated content creation at your fingertips, you can equip global teams to act locally without ever going off-brand. And that really matters – because when your brand speaks with one voice, people listen.
Does everyone create content that’s on‑brand, every time?
Find peace of mind with better brand governance.
Does everyone create content that’s on‑brand, every time?
Why is brand consistency important for global companies?
Brand consistency builds trust, drives recognition, and boosts brand equity. Globally consistent brands are 5 times more likely to be remembered and can see up to 23% more revenue growth by aligning messaging across all platforms.
What challenges do brands face when trying to stay consistent across platforms?
Achieving brand consistency across platforms can be challenging due to the complexity of maintaining a unified brand presence in diverse formats, channels, and teams. These challenges increase when you have decentralized teams and inconsistent access to brand guidelines.
What are the essential elements of brand guidelines?
Brand guidelines should include your mission and values, logo rules, color palettes, tone of voice examples, iconography, and usage standards. These ensure teams present your brand in a clear, unified way across channels.
How can companies make it easier for teams to follow brand guidelines?
Make brand guidelines easily accessible to all teams, partners, and agencies by using a Digital Asset Management system or brand portal. This ensures the right people can always find and apply the latest brand assets and guidance.
How does templated content creation support brand consistency?
Templated content creation empowers teams to produce local, personalized content while keeping key brand elements locked in. This enables scale and flexibility without compromising brand compliance.
13 steps to developing your employer branding strategy
Papirfly
13minutes read
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
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.
Customer brand equity and understanding Keller’s brand equity model
Papirfly
10minutes read
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
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 guarantee brand consistency and 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.
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.
Digital Asset Management software 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 of performance or company ethics.
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 – including through analytics and reporting – 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.
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
In this modern, competitive landscape, a brand’s identity needs to be unique, clear and consistent in order to set itself apart. A big part of making this successful lies in effective corporate communications.
Learn more about how corporate communications showcases your brand’s personality to those within and outside your organisation, and how ensuring strong visuals and messaging across campaigns help to strengthen your image in the long term.
What are corporate communications?
Corporate communications is an incredibly broad field, which means it can be difficult to strictly define. At its core, the definition of corporate communications is the variety of ways a business or organisation communicates with its various audiences, both internal and external. These audiences will likely include:
Customers/leads
Employees
Stakeholders/investors
Partners
Suppliers
Media
Government bodies
The general public
Managing your corporate communications is an all-encompassing task, and one that is more important now than ever before.
Because, fundamentally, your corporate communications policy means more than just how you send messages – it is about fostering a unified brand identity. This ensures that your business speaks to a particular audience with one voice across all its available channels, with complete consistency of messaging and tonality, and effectively influences your audiences’ attitudes and actions.
As such, your corporate communications plan should first and foremost align with your corporate objectives.
What is the vision for your company?
What image do you want to project to each audience?
And of course, as the brand grows and evolves over time, your corporate communications strategy will too – it is a symbiotic relationship where a change in one directly influences the other.
The importance placed on corporate communications has resulted in blurring of the lines between this department with those responsible for marketing and PR. The head of your corporate comms team’s core function is to translate your brand’s identity to both your internal and external audience. To ensure this is maintained across all aspects of your work, this requires complete collaboration between these departments to avoid contradictions from creeping in.
Consider the functions that a corporate communications department nowadays is expected to fulfil:
The sheer enormity of what corporate communications covers is an indication of how pivotal it is to both forming and expressing your unique brand identity. It’s not an advantage to have a corporate communications strategy in place – it’s a necessity.
Maintaining this level of consistency across the vast number of channels you use to communicate is a challenge that often goes unappreciated, but it’s essential to maintaining how your brand is viewed by those who matter most to you.
How important are your corporate communications?
The importance of effective corporate communications cannot be understated. Your strategy plays an essential role in cementing the personality of your brand and influencing both current and prospective audiences to buy into your products, services or ideas.
This is true even in the midst of a global crisis, as maintaining communication during COVID-19 has been crucial in keeping employees, customers and the wider public engaged and informed with how businesses are managing the situation and supporting their audiences.
This is imperative to how you, as a brand and as a business, move forward for a variety of reasons, including:
Fostering employee engagement
Nobody wants to hear information second-hand, and this rings true for your employees. Employees that feel out of the loop or disconnected from the events taking place in their work will grow dissatisfied over time, decreasing productivity and the overall company culture. Remember, it is estimated that disengaged employees cost the UK economy up to £340 billion annually, and is one of the leading causes of staff churn.
Corporate communications go a long way towards keeping team members engaged with the big picture. From weekly newsletters informing your global teams about the latest developments for your company to regular evaluation meetings, your internal corporate communications play a big role in making employees aware, informed and included. The more engaged and involved your employees feel at work, the more productive and satisfied they will feel.
Furthermore, as consistent and strategic corporate communications trickle down from the executive-level to other employees, it will encourage greater two-way communication between employees and their managers. Having a greater understanding of the brand and what it stands for will spur engaged employees to make suggestions on how things may be improved, making corporate communications a great source of innovation from within.
Encouraging brand advocacy
Following on from keeping employees engaged and in-sync with your brand objectives, strong corporate communications also play a vital role in brand advocacy. With 2019’s Edelman report revealing that 63% of consumers trust what influencers say about a brand more than what the brand says about itself, having willing, active advocates for your brand – be it your employees or customers – can be a powerful advantage in attracting today’s audiences.
A particularly strong way to achieve boosted brand advocacy is by employees resharing content on your social media channels. When employees are feeling satisfied in their understanding of the direction the brand is moving, and feel involved in it, they will be more willing to share content with their friends and other followers, increasing the reach of your brand in a more natural, personable manner.
Improve customer loyalty and trust
Your customers are one of the most important audiences your corporate communications will engage with on a daily basis. And they expect authenticity through these in order to build trust with your brand and become loyal followers. As your marketing nurtures and connects with them through your various touchpoints, staying consistent and genuine with your messaging is crucial to developing this trust.
When your communications presents these qualities, customers become advocates. They evangelise your brand. Like and share content on your social channels. Let their family and friends know about the quality of your offering. All this stems from a corporate communications strategy that promotes your brand values coherently and frequently.
Building brand reputation
Your marketing activity needs to work hard to build and maintain a positive brand reputation. Social proof is a key indicator for employees, customers and the general public that your company is doing good things and following through on your brand values. Projecting these through your corporate communications is a powerful way to enhance your reputation.
Whether it’s a press release highlighting your annual earnings, or a social post about your work in the local community, communicating your core values, positive reviews and examples of your CSR work indicate to your audiences that you are a reputable organisation. And this reputation can act as a powerful factor in a customer or recruit choosing you over a competitor.
Furthermore, your corporate communications don’t just play a role in growing and reinforcing your current branding – it also plays a key role in cementing a corporate rebrand. This is a difficult change for any company, particularly one with locations spread across the globe. Your communications strategy can be crucial in detailing the rebrand both internally and externally, so you can quickly familiarise people with the alteration and minimise any backlash or confusion caused by this change in direction.
Limit fallout of crises
Crises often cause an unexpected blow to brands, but if your teams are well prepared, they can control the damage before it gets out of control. Turning to your corporate communications plan helps you swiftly respond to potential crises, be it a factory shutdown, loss of a member of staff or something mistakenly being published.
A crises plan will give guidelines and terminology to use in the event of these unfortunate circumstances taking hold, and outline how to prevent issues from escalating with a set of actions for your comms team.
What is your corporate communications strategy?
Now we’ve established how important corporate communications is to your overall brand identity, it is time to discuss how you put that strategy into practice.
Fundamentally, your corporate communications strategy should be tied to your overall business strategy and objectives. If it doesn’t have this foundation in place, teams will struggle to understand what’s being communicated and why it’s important. Objectives come first, followed by your strategy, followed by execution.
Aligning your corporate communications plan to your overarching brand objectives means that when your objectives change, your team can adjust your messaging too. It’s essential that the person at the helm of your corporate communication department – be it a specified Communications Director or another member of your staff – has a defined presence at boardroom level. The person in charge of comms is responsible for communicating the ethos developed at an executive level, so it’s important they hear the vision directly from the source.
When this is established, the production of your corporate communications strategy should incorporate the following to ensure best practice:
Identify and prioritise the goals of executives – this could involve a deeper dive into your organisation’s values, strengths, weaknesses and more
Clarify the audiences that will need to be engaged with – clearly defining the audience your communications are directed at, be it a group of employers, one of your target markets or your shareholders, is crucial to establishing the tone and information that needs to be incorporated to secure their attention
Conduct both internal and external corporate communications audits – this will help you to better understand what your audience wants from this aspect of your business – employee surveys, customer comments, supplier feedback, etc.
Craft your core communications messages, starting from the initial ideas and objectives – this is vital to establishing the tone of voice you wish to project to your various audiences, and removing any terminology you aren’t comfortable with
Develop the graphical details of your corporate communications – your strategy should think beyond the terminology you use, ensuring your various communications use the right logos, fonts, layouts, signatures, design elements, and more, ensuring consistency across the board
Identify the various tools and channels you’re going to utilise – consider conducting an audit into the various avenues you use to communicate your messages to discover what’s working and what isn’t, and use this information to create a plan of action into what channels and techniques are best placed to project your values to your audiences
Evaluate and amend your corporate communications strategy over time – remember that is an ever-evolving plan that should support your business as it develops – as your company changes, so should your communications to ensure they remain consistent with your objectives and in-line with the attitudes of your audience
The goal of your corporate communications strategy is to present a unified, coherent picture of who your organisation is, what it stands for and why it exists to your audiences. If you’d like to learn more about how we help global businesses achieve this level of uniformity across their range of communications,
What are the types of corporate communications?
At its most basic level, corporate communications break down into two categories:
Internal corporate communications
External corporate communications
While internal and external corporate communications are often unique to the audiences they talk to, they in many ways coincide. Especially following the rise of employee advocacy, brand ambassadors and social media platforms, the lines between the two have become increasingly blurred. They remain distinct entities with unique goals, but both work towards the unified goal of communicative consistency and increasing brand reputation.
What are internal corporate communications?
Your internal corporate communications are how your company connects with those within your organisation. From the personnel in your head offices to your workforce spread across the globe, your internal communications are crucial to engaging each individual in your company with your brand messages.
At a time where just 13% of employees worldwide are considered truly engaged with their company, having an internal corporate communications strategy is paramount to getting employees, from new recruits to stalwarts, in-sync with what your brand stands for. It’s focused on fostering a collective culture and identity among your employees with your organisation, ensuring staff fully understand where it is heading.
As mentioned above about the important benefits of following best practice with your internal corporate communications, nobody likes to be left out of the loop. This breeds disillusionment and disengagement, which can have significant detriments to their motivation and productivity levels.
Instead, by effectively, openly and consistently maintaining communications with your workforce, they become more familiar and engaged with your brand identity. If staff feel that they are being kept informed and that there are communication channels that work in both directions, it creates an environment where staff feel they have a voice and that their opinions carry some worth.
Examples of internal corporate communications
How can you achieve consistency across your internal corporate communications?
Here are a few techniques to achieve best practice with your internal corporate communications:
Encourage the free flow of information
Investing in a branded tool that allows staff to communicate frequently, be it a straightforward messaging app or collective workflow, helps create unity between team members and encourage sharing information, which is valuable to keep your company progressing.
Repurpose your marketing techniques for your workforce
When you create a marketing strategy, you will develop audience personas for your target markets. Why not do the same for your employees? Develop a deeper understanding of their motivations, needs and barriers, and repurpose content already going out in line with these to support your work comms.
Develop branded internal documents
Whether it’s employee feedback forms, staff handbooks or email signatures, make sure your brand values and design elements are consistent internally, so teams quickly become familiar with the tone and personality of your brand.
What are external corporate communications?
External corporate communications are how you choose to share your brand with the world outside of your company. This covers a lot of ground, from how you communicate with your current and prospective customers, to your relationships with government bodies, the media and the wider public. It’s a big part of how your brand identity reaches the masses.
The strategy you implement helps shape the way your audience and the public perceive your company and influences them to interact with your brand on a deeper level.
As such, it is essential that your external corporate communications strategy is well-planned and meticulously followed in accordance with your brand objectives. With such a wide range of channels encompassing these forms of communications, achieving total consistency becomes incredibly difficult without one coherent plan.
Without a unified plan, your external corporate comms can quickly become disjointed and off-piste, painting a confusing picture to your customers and your wider audiences. While how you talk to your customers could differ greatly to how you communicate to your suppliers or investors, these should maintain some distinct similarities in branding as both are founded on your organisation’s objectives.
In essence, your external corporate communications should be geared to support how you:
Inform and educate your customers, media and stakeholders about your brand
Maintain long-term, consistent relationships with your external audiences
Engage customers, partners and more with your brand personality
Market your products and services to customers more personably
Grow your audiences and connections under one, united identity
Examples of external corporate communications
How can you achieve consistency across your external corporate communications?
Like with your internal communications, brand consistency is critical for your external corporate communications. Realising this isn’t always straightforward, even with a coherent strategy in place, but it is crucial to project a uniform, unambiguous message to audiences outside of your inner circle.
Here are a few techniques to achieve best practice with your external corporate communications:
Segment your audiences
While you are likely already doing this as part of your employee marketing efforts, you also need to consider your shareholders, partners, suppliers and other external parties. Creating unique personas for each audience will help you adapt their unique motivations to your overarching brand ambitions, ensuring they never steer too far from your central message.
Saturate markets with messaging
Though we all like to innovate, you should learn to sometimes revel in the repetitive. Focus some of your energies on learning to explain the same things in different ways to make the messages accessible to a range of audiences, while retaining the same core information.
Be responsive
Corporate communications are a two-way street. Listen to how your external audiences are reacting to your communications, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Make sure the decision for amends comes from an executive level, preventing further inconsistencies or team members breaking brand guidelines in a bid to better communicate with customers.
What is the role of your corporate communications department?
Depending on the size and reach of your company, your communications department could be an entire division of your organisation or a role performed by one or two members of your team. However, its significance doesn’t vary whether you’re a start-up or a global brand.
The head of your corporate communications department, be it a manager, director or Chief Communications Officer, should have a seat at the boardroom level of your organisation. Their primary role is to translate your brand’s objectives, news, innovations and developments to both your internal and external audiences. It’s imperative that this is received first-hand to avoid any contradiction or confusion caused by second-hand information.
As well as your executive level, your corporate communications department must be closely connected to other areas of your organisation. It acts as an interpreter for your team, facilitating clear, on-brand communication from top-down as well as bottom-up.
Being in tune with the goings-on across all aspects of your business is vital in maintaining this consistent communication, meeting audience needs and working in collaboration with teams to perform their various responsibilities.
In today’s environment, your corporate communications team must be included in several key functions affecting how your business engages with people both inside and outside of it, including:
Management of your websites and social media channels
Being involved in the planning and creation of blogs and other social content
Organising and hosting networking events
Writing and distributing press releases and maintaining best practice policies for how your company interacts with the media
Representing the company in public settings, or preparing executives for presentations and news conferences
Managing and overseeing marketing materials and campaigns
Sourcing and communicating with relevant parties for advertising opportunities
Handling crisis communications in a swift and effective manner
Overseeing internal company communications, including meetings, training, evaluations and other employee events
Corporate communications and social media
The explosion of social media use in the past decade has completely changed the game for corporate communications. It is both a blessing and a curse for corporate communications departments. It doesn’t cost anything to post on social media, making it a cost-effective option to communicate with your various audiences.
However, the primary drawback is the effort required to keep up with demand. Social media channels present an unrelenting stream of information to users. Delivering fresh, up-to-date content to engage your audience is a time-consuming and often costly task, and maintaining consistency across all these channels when faced with these pressures.
The impact of social media on corporate communications is a double-edged sword, making it critical for brands to consider as part of their strategies. The following approaches can help you stay ahead on your social networks:
Invest in trusted social listening tools to make sure any mention of your company, products or executives is tracked and reacted to where necessary
Bring your corporate communications department into your social media teams, so both sides are united on the messages sent out being in-line with your universal strategy
Focus on social media content that is less sales-orientated, and more focused on delivering value and information, enhancing your brand reputation and increasing its share-ability
Experiment with different media formats and channels, helping you communicate your central brand messages in different styles for varied audiences
If you are seeking support maintaining total consistency across all your social media platforms, we can help you find the solution. Speak to our team today.
How do you measure corporate communications?
With the rise of digital media, the days of measuring the success of your corporate communications policies on column inches and the Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) are a thing of the past. Instead, there is a greater focus on tracking digital metrics and online engagements as a measure of success, but even these do not paint a clear picture to measure the effectiveness of your corporate communications strategies.
It is unquestionably important to test your messages across your various channels and gauge the responses to these. Impressions, interactions and conversions on your website and digital platforms can be a good indicator of how effectively your communications are connecting with your audiences, as can open and click-through rates for your email campaigns. These can highlight patterns about your messaging that you can learn from and take forward.
However, the goal of corporate communications is something that is difficult to accurately assess – brand perception. Despite the Barcelona Principles helping this industry move away from AVEs and other output-oriented measures, there are still problems with how corporate communications teams can determine how well they are performing.
At this point, there is still no hard-and-fast answer as to how you should effectively measure your corporate communications. Hopefully, as technology evolves and a greater appreciation of how these initiatives help businesses operate is fostered, it will become more straightforward for brands to determine if their corporate communications department is delivering value.
We hope this article has given you a greater understanding and appreciation of the importance of your corporate communications on your overall brand identity. In this increasingly competitive landscape, your brand is what sets you apart – it’s the culture among your employees far and wide, the layer of trust your customers look towards and the motivation that keeps you evolving and moving forward.
If you take anything away from this piece, it’s the importance of achieving brand consistency as part of your corporate communications strategy. Your brand is unique to you, and it’s crucial that its messages, visions and characteristics are maintained across everything you communicate, whether it’s a far-reaching press statement or a meeting between your employees. Every element of your communications should be geared to presenting the ambitions and nature of your brand in accordance with your objectives.
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
Effective internal communications is about more than just information sharing – it’s the foundation of a strong culture and unified brand.
When teams understand the company’s direction and feel part of its story, engagement rises, collaboration strengthens, and the brand thrives. But when communication breaks down, so does connection. Deadlines slip, morale falls, and culture becomes fragmented.
In this internal communications guide, we look at how to develop an effective strategy, including the core types, proven best practices, and the role it plays in reinforcing your brand identity. Need support with external as well as internal comms? Read our Digital Asset Management guide.
What is internal communications?
Internal communications is how people within your organization share information, ideas, and goals. It’s the bridge between leadership and employees and the channel through which strategy becomes shared understanding.
Unlike external communication, which shapes how the world sees your brand, internal communication shapes how your people live it. Its purpose is simple: to build a connected culture grounded in your company’s mission, values, and ambitions.
When employees don’t know where the business is heading or how their work contributes, they disengage. Clear, consistent communication and internal brand asset management ensures everyone feels informed, valued, and part of something bigger.
7 main types of internal communication
Strong internal communication is multi-layered. It combines different approaches that serve distinct but connected purposes:
Top-down communication – Leadership updates that align teams with business goals and values.
Change communication – Clear messaging around organizational updates, from new policies to structural shifts.
Information sharing – Equipping teams with the tools, training, and context they need to succeed.
Crisis communication – Fast, transparent updates that maintain trust during disruption.
Two-way communication – Encouraging ideas and feedback to shape company culture collaboratively.
Peer-to-peer communication – Enabling teams across locations to collaborate and share expertise.
Culture communication – Recognizing achievements, celebrating success, and building a shared identity.
4 key benefits of internal communications
When done right, internal communications strengthen every part of the business, from productivity to employee experience. Here are four key benefits of effective internal communications:
1. Keep people informed and engaged
Open communication replaces rumor with trust, building loyalty and aligning teams around a shared vision.
2. Drive motivation and productivity
Engaged employees are 20–25% more productive (Source: McKinsey Global Institute). Celebrating success and progress keeps morale high and people inspired.
3. Invite collaboration
Two-way channels empower teams to share feedback, solve problems, and feel heard.
4. Protect brand consistency
With clear brand guidelines, you can ensure every internal message reflects and strengthens your brand values. Worried about privacy and consent requirements? Learn more about Papirfly’s built-in DAM GDPR compliance.
Best practices for building your internal communications plan
A strong strategy doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built on intention, consistency, and understanding what your teams need most.
1. Assess your current communication tools
Identify what’s working – and what’s not. Which channels resonate? Where are messages being lost? This insight helps streamline your approach.
2. Involve your leadership team
Executives set the tone. Their active participation ensures communications reflect company priorities and values.
3. Know your audience
Your employees are your internal customers. Understand their preferences, motivations, and challenges. Tailor communication styles and channels accordingly.
4. Set clear objectives
Define what success looks like—whether that’s stronger engagement, improved consistency, or faster feedback loops. Keep goals measurable and aligned with broader business outcomes.
5. Establish your tone of voice
Your internal voice should reflect your culture—clear, human, and encouraging. It’s not corporate jargon; it’s communication people want to read.
6. Choose the right channels
Go beyond email. Use intranets, video updates, social collaboration tools, or workplace displays to meet people where they are—especially in hybrid or global teams.
7. Align internal and external communications
The story you tell your people should match the one you tell your customers. When both align, authenticity grows and your brand becomes stronger from the inside out. The best Digital Asset Management platforms help you create a single source of truth, delivering brand assets (both internal and external) to the right people at the right time.
Internal communications guide to measuring success
Measuring the success of your internal communications comes down to one thing – real engagement.
Start by tracking open and click-through rates across digital channels to understand what resonates. Regular employee surveys can reveal honest feedback, while monitoring participation in events and initiatives shows where your messages are inspiring action. Reviewing turnover and engagement trends helps you spot shifts in culture before they impact morale.
Together, these insights create a clear picture of how effectively your teams are connecting – and how you can refine your tone, timing, and channels to communicate with greater impact.
The future of internal communications
The world of work is evolving – and so is how teams connect. Here are some of the key trends that will shape internal communications in the future:
Board-level buy-in – executive teams are becoming increasingly focused on internal comms and its ability to create a collective identity.
Joined-up messaging – The gap between internal and external storytelling continues to narrow, as organizations look to combine the powers of their teams and their brand.
Visual storytelling – Video and rich media drive far higher engagement than text alone and will play an increasingly prominent role in internal communications.
Mobile-first communication – With millennials and Gen Zers making up the majority of tomorrow’s workforces, teams will expect updates wherever they are, in real time.
Personalization at scale – Modern employees only engage with information that feels tailored to them, so relevance is key.
Bringing it all together
Internal communications are not just a business function – they’re the heartbeat of your brand culture. They connect people to purpose, ensure consistency across borders, and turn information into inspiration.
For global organizations, this connection is crucial. When every employee understands and embodies your brand, you achieve true global brand alignment.
Discover how Papirfly can help you strengthen internal communication through Digital Asset Management software, brand portal software, and templated content creation tools.
What is internal communications and why is it important?
Internal communications is how information, ideas, goals, and approved digital assets are shared across an organization. It connects leadership and employees, ensuring everyone understands the company’s mission and direction. When communication is consistent and clear, engagement rises, productivity improves, and culture becomes stronger.
How do internal communications guide and support brand consistency?
Every message your teams see internally influences how they represent your brand externally. Consistent internal communication – anchored by brand guidelines and centralized brand assets – ensures your people understand your brand values and apply them in every interaction. This alignment drives stronger brand adoption, brand identity and trust.
What are the main types of internal communication?
There are seven key types: top-down, change, information, crisis, two-way, peer-to-peer, and culture communication. Together, they create a well-rounded framework that keeps employees informed, engaged, and connected to one another – especially across global teams.
What are the biggest benefits of a strong internal communications strategy?
An effective internal communications plan keeps people informed, motivated, and aligned. It improves collaboration and increases productivity while supporting messaging consistency, reducing misinformation, and strengthening brand governance. Ultimately, it helps create a workplace culture where everyone feels valued and part of something meaningful.
How can organizations measure internal communications success?
Success is measured by engagement, not just activity. Track open and click-through rates, run employee surveys, and monitor event participation and retention trends. These insights reveal what resonates, where engagement is strongest, and how communication can be improved to have a greater impact.
What does the future of internal communications look like?
Internal communications are becoming more visual, mobile-first, and personalized. As organizations embrace real-time updates, video storytelling, and tailored messaging, employees will expect faster, more relevant, and more human ways to connect. Executive involvement will also grow, making internal comms a central part of brand strategy.
An effective strategy for your retail marketing plan
Papirfly
21minutes read
This content has been automatically translated and may include minor variations.
The world of retail marketing is fast paced and ever-changing. Whether it’s at the store or head office level, marketers in this industry often deal with very limited time constraints, constant adaptation to trends and increased pressure on resources. In order to introduce more effective ways to manage campaigns for retail marketing, we must first understand exactly what it is…
What is retail marketing?
Retail marketing is the tactics and strategy of promoting your business and products to consumers.
The traditional retail marketing definition – a product, at a price, being promoted and then sold from a place of business – has given way to a more consumer-focused model. And the retail marketing strategy has changed to keep pace.
Now technology sees an ever-evolving shift in what products are made available and how they’re sold, delivered and promoted. In-store marketing has become more inclusive. And retail brand marketing has developed into a dominant force.
But how do you develop a brand? And get that to market in as crowded a space as retail? Here we look at retail marketing objectives and strategy in more detail.
Why retail marketing is important
Why is retail marketing important? Because quite simply, people want products. Your role as a retail marketer is to get your products to your audience, and how you market them goes a long way to achieving that aim.
You’re not waiting for the consumer to find you. You’re bringing the product to the consumer. And in an increasingly competitive landscape where consumers are spoilt for choice over virtually every product – if you’re not marketing your products effectively, they will find alternatives.
But there are other reasons why retail marketing is valuable for your brand beyond the long-established cycle of buying and selling:
1. It helps you connect with consumers and close the sale
Consumers tend to need multiple touchpoints with a brand, and a decent understanding of the value the product brings to them as an individual before making a purchase. Retail marketing allows you to speak to consumers on a variety of levels, at different stages of the buying cycle. The awareness, education and decision stages can all be directly influenced by campaigns at different touchpoints.
2. It helps categorise products for the consumer
Marketing, like Point of Sale and digital signage, help purchasers find and buy what they need. A customer may not even know what comprises the entire range of products and accessories relating to their needs. Often they’re looking for a solution, sometimes, to see if one exists at all. Categorising products helps satisfy the problem-solution issue, and delivers the options of the right product in an easy way for consumers.
3. Provides a service to the customer
As mentioned earlier, people today can choose from a variety of places to find the goods they’re looking for. Part of what makes retail marketing important is how it presents convenient information and incentives to consumers as to why they should choose you and your products.
4. It improves the standard of living
By making a variety of goods and service available to the people at a reasonable price it improves the standard of living.
Beyond the important part retail marketing plays for individual retailers, it also plays a valuable socio-economic role. From the employment opportunities available to retail marketing managers and similar positions, to the impact the retail industry as a whole has on a country’s GDP, retail and therefore retail marketing is a powerful force in today’s world. That’s why there are university degrees in retail marketing.
Retail marketing creates a constant flow of information between the market, consumers and manufacturers. Each helps encourage the other to produce higher quality and better fitting products and services.
What is a retail marketing strategy?
Traditionally, the core of a retail marketing strategy started with the four Ps. These aspects created the foundation for your future retail marketing efforts and put a heavy focus on your products and your organisation as a whole.
The four Ps
Product:
What is the product you want to sell? The two main types are soft goods (fashion, paper products, etc.) and hard goods (household items, tools, electronics, etc.)
Price:
Pricing is key to any retail strategy. You need to cover the cost of the goods, and weigh these against your potential overheads, such as staff and shop rental. Developing a pricing strategy for your products price will typically involve discount offers and competitor analysis.
Place:
Where will you sell the product? You could operate through a distributor, online or in a catalogue. When deciding this, first understand where your customers will feel most comfortable purchasing from.
Promotion:
This is where you define how you will market your product. Technology has opened up countless new opportunities to promote a product, so it’s essential to understand your objectives and choose the right mix of channels.
That was the traditional approach. However, as time has passed, retail strategy has evolved beyond the four Ps into the four Cs. Where the Four Ps centred around the product and how to get it to market, the four Cs approach instead concentrates on the consumer.
The four Cs
Consumer (Product):
Whereas once the focus was on the product, the focus changed to the needs of consumers. Manufacturers would ask what products do people need? They built products around consumer needs.
Cost (Price):
The basics of cost are the same as in the Four Ps in that you need to cover the costs involved in bringing your product to market. But now you need to consider the customer’s perceived value of what they’re buying matches their expectations. Cost also considers how much it will cost them to switch to a competitor.
Convenience (Place):
The internet has changed what convenience means forever. You can buy online and have something delivered the same day or pick it up from a nearby store at a time that works for you. But you need to be offering your customers options that suit them.
Communication (Promotion):
Instead of one-way advertising – ‘here’s our product. Buy it because it’s great…’ – promotion becomes about having conversations with your customers and building loyalty to your brand. Customer conversations can inform brand and product development and are crucial for a long-term retail marketing strategy.
Overall, developing a well-orchestrated retail marketing plan helps provide a greater return on investment, while attracting more potential customers.
But once you have this strategy, it is vital that it evolves over time in response to the economy, new products and innovations, consumer trends and more. Many of the most enduring and celebrated global brands survived by adapting their strategies and branding over time, be it a change of slogan or logo on their various offerings to customers.
Next-day delivery becomes same-day delivery. Partnerships are created to expand existing sales channels. Your retail marketing strategy must be malleable and capable of adjusting to new behaviours, patterns and developments in order to achieve long-term success.
What are the types of retail marketing?
An extensive range of marketing channels for retailers is available to be utilised, each presenting different advantages in line with your goals. Each should be considered in relation to your means and your overarching retail marketing strategy, particularly when it comes to where your target markets are most likely to see and engage with it.
Here are some of the most common types of retail marketing:
Online and digital marketing
The mix of online marketing tactics includes everything from optimising your site for search engines (SEO), automated abandoned basket emails and utilising social media with organic posts and paid adverts to pay-per-click adverts, affiliates and content marketing.
Direct marketing
Any marketing that is designed to elicit a direct response. This is usually a sale but could be a showroom visit or a request for more information. Direct Marketing includes letters through the post, flyers and email newsletters too. Television ‘infomercials’ are even considered a form of direct response marketing.
Point of sale
In-store promotions such as posters, shelf talkers or samples are known as point of sale. You are grabbing the consumer’s interest at the point of sale.
Public relations
PR relates to managing the perception of your brand, and making positive associations and stories to your company. Digital and traditional PR work to ‘spin’ stories that put your brand in a position of authority, maintain relationships with small and large media outlets and provide expert comment on your industry.
Experiential marketing
If you want to promote your product or brand give consumers a taste of what it’s like in the real world. Samples and test drives are a good example of this, but some marketers have gone to incredible lengths to promote a product. Remember Red Bull’s record-breaking skydive from the edge of space?
Limited-time discounts
Discounts are a common tactic to get shoppers to buy. They’re also a good way to clear stock. Add a time limit to increase the sense of urgency and the fear of missing out.
Catalogues
A catalogue is great for allowing people to browse in their own time. Not only can you present products in an idyllic real-life situation, if they leave your store without buying, just hand them a catalogue on the way out. It maintains that connection, for when they are ready to buy and showcases your entire range.
Word of mouth
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful marketing tools. A good recommendation often leads to a sale, or at the very least a highly qualified lead. As well as great products, deliver great customer service and a strong brand. It will help people spread the word.
Some companies formalise the word of mouth strategy with a referral scheme known as refer-a-friend. These deliver rewards for both referrer and referee.
TV and radio advertising
The more traditional channels of television and radio advertising are still useful in an overall marketing mix. Television adverts are often mirrored online through sites such as YouTube, while some companies choose to create ‘television’ adverts purely for YouTube alone.
Television sponsorships are frequently used too.
Partnerships
These are a good way of reaching another potential audience and might take the form of a promotional flyer that another company inserts into its current orders when they are sent out. Or a fast-food chain might partner with a cab company to provide a door-to-door delivery service.
We’ve looked at some tactics and below are the most common outlets for your retail marketing strategy:
Department stores – these offer high levels of customer service alongside a wide range of products and possibly a shop-in-shop model, where other brands sit within the same area of the department store.
Prices typically vary over time, and discount sales are common. In these environments, a customer has the convenience of many products in one place.
Supermarkets – once the main outlet for food, drink and groceries, the supermarket has diversified into banking, insurance and homewares.
In a competitive industry, supermarkets have huge buying power and will sell at low prices, in exchange for volume.
Warehouse retailers – usually in a no-frills environment, warehouse retailers keep overheads down and can sell a wide range of goods at competitive prices.
Speciality retailers – here expert knowledge is backed up with premium prices. Speciality products are added as part of an added value experience.
Ecommerce retailers – also known as etailers. Products are sold online via a website. These are highly convenient and can pass overhead savings, for example not having a brick-and-mortar store, onto customers. Most can ship products anywhere in the world.
Convenience retailers – smaller localised stores, often found in residential areas. These offer a smaller range of products, but at higher prices due to the nature of convenience.
Discount retailers – a variety of discounted products with low prices. Discounter retailers buy less fashionable and overstocked branded products from a range of suppliers and resell at discounted prices.
All or just some will fit your strategy, depending on where your customer is.
How to develop your retail marketing plan
Now we’ve established the basics and importance of retail marketing. To get your brand, products and services out there, it is important to consider the steps to develop an effective, feasible and unique strategy to achieve this.
Below we’ve incorporated some aspects of retail marketing best practice to consider when constructing your plan.
Develop your brand
Create your brand story and qualities
Align this with your business objectives
Develop the assets needed to communicate your brand
Define your position
Examine what your competitors are doing
Assess your place in the market – where do your products fit in the landscape?
Use customer surveys for feedback
Identify your target market
What are the demographics of your customers?
Where and how do they prefer to shop?
What needs and wants do they have that you can resolve?
The benefits of your product
Determine the USPs of your product against the needs of your customers
Develop your messaging around these key advantages your products offer
Detail your tactics
How will you promote your product?
Which retail marketing channels will you use?
Will you use advertising?
Build a schedule
Create a budget for your retail marketing campaigns
Plan out when the various aspects of your campaign will be delivered, and through which channels
Alongside these best practices, you might also want to consider these other features of effective retail marketing strategies:
Begin with a story
Every great marketing campaign begins and ends with a story.
It’s a hook designed to grab the audience and pull them in and ideally connect with a very personal emotion. When building your story focus on an individual who looks and fits into the organisation’s key demographic.
Highlight the problem, and show how your product can fix it. The stories do not need to be complex, but are there to showcase the unique advantages of your products and your brand’s distinct personality.
Understand the marketing channels available to you
There are dozens of marketing channels, ranging from social media and internet paid advertising to blogging, TV spots, internet video and word of mouth. You shouldn’t be hasty in determining which one is best suited for your ambitions.
You need to understand the particular channel before using it. The better you understand a marketing method, the stronger you become in this particular ecosystem as you learn how to best utilise the benefits offered by the marketing method.
You may decide to go with a specialist advertising firm to assist with this, or you may bring in a professional who knows the ins and outs. Either way, you need to understand the channels you’ll be working with ahead of time.
Unite your messaging
When you advertise across multiple marketing channels and in numerous locations, it’s crucial to have a strong unifying message. Your messaging needs to be consistent down to the individual product level.
How you position your products across all your marketing channels needs to be consistent with regards to pricing, brand logos, technical specifications, as well as additional text and images.
In this connected world, customers will find you out fast if you can’t keep consistent.
Let branding do the selling too
It’s best to focus on branding, and connecting customers with the brand, as well as selling the product. By telling a good brand story too, you’ll be in a stronger position and you’ll get more engaged and loyal customers in the long term.
How to build a retail brand
Brand value increases exposure and goodwill toward your company. As your brand value grows, your business becomes a more valuable commodity, as more people recognise who your company is and what you stand for.
The value of your brand, also referred to in some cases as brand equity, is generally identified as the amount of money the business makes when compared to a similar product with a generic brand. In other words, how much more (or less) money does your company make due to its branding.
What is retail brand activation?
Brand activation is the process of making a brand a popular, trusted household name. It’s crucial in developing a positive connection between your brand and your audiences. First impressions count.
You may find product samples in stores, pop-up shops in high streets or more complex experiential events. It’s as much about an emotional engagement with consumers as it is putting a new product or brand in the hands of potential buyers.
Here you’ll showcase the core features that make you stand out from the competitors. You’re creating your brand positioning. Doing this effectively and consistently results in greater customer loyalty, as long as their values match your own.
Also consider:
Marketing and creative that engages with an audience on an emotional level. Get them to believe in your brand.
Timing – engage your customers at a time that’s right time for them.
Achieving brand consistency
In everything you do, your brand identity should remain consistent throughout the entire company. However, building brand consistency can prove difficult, especially for new companies searching for an audience. Here are several ways brand consistency can be realised as part of your retail strategy.
Create a brand guide
Every brand needs to have a clear voice and identity. It’s what the company stands for and what gives it personality. However, unless you have this clearly defined and established, your company will lack brand consistency. This is why creating a brand guide is necessary.
The brand guide should outline what personality the brand has, the brand’s identity and what sort of character your brand has. All of these traits should receive a clear identification as soon as possible. This way, you can determine your brand’s voice, which will guide a lot of your retail marketing efforts. Generally, your brand guide will fall in line with your key demographic, yet customised for your unique values and objectives.
Once you have created a brand guide, use it for every bit of marketing material, social media post and in-store display. Ask yourself if it fits into the brand guide. If it does, good. This helps build brand consistency. If it doesn’t, adapt the material until it does.
Evolve with the times
It might sound counterintuitive, but your brand needs to evolve. This doesn’t mean dropping all your products and completely changing the services you offer. Instead, evolving your brand identity simply means keeping your company vibrant and current.
Companies evolve their brand identity all the time.
If you look at the history of the Lego logo as one example you’ll find 13 versions since the company began in 1932.
And Lego is certainly not the only brand to reinvent itself – Apple, Burberry and Stella Artois among others have all reinvented their brand. There are many examples and the reasons behind it vary from facing bankruptcy to wanting to appeal to a new generation of consumers.
By constantly revisiting the brand guide and refreshing it when necessary, it is possible to not only stay current, but it allows your business to continue to stand out in your industry. Just make sure everything you produce and all marketing material is consistent with your brand identity.
When you establish a clear brand identity, it allows you to build brand consistency and use this to inform any retail marketing campaign.
Use social media to build a retail brand
Social media has become a powerful way of communicating all elements of a brand to today’s consumers:
The best retail marketing ideas should incorporate a mix of social media techniques:
Don’t stick to a single channel
Customers use more than one channel. You should too.
Use social to support existing campaigns
As well as the obvious advantages of reaching out to new audiences, using social to support existing campaigns will help create a seamless brand experience for your customers.
Use social media for feedback
Social media channels offer great opportunities for gathering feedback about products and testing new ideas.
It’s a great customer service tool
Some customers will only use social media to contact your business. Develop the customer service side of it, to ensure their experience is as good through social as it would be if they phoned.
Get customers to share
A huge advantage of social is the ease with which customers can share their positive experiences. A photo for example, of them happily using a new product. Use them as your advocates.
Listen for trends
Social media channels are where people chat. Look for trends in your market, or about the products you are selling. It’s also a great opportunity to hear what customers are saying about your business.
Use social shopping
People can now buy directly through social media. Make sure you’re on board with this to maximise your business’s sales potential.
Retargeting
If someone comes into your shop or visits your site but doesn’t purchase, it’s possible to retarget them through their social media pages. Like social shopping, it’s all part of the marketing mix.
What does brand equity mean in retail?
The principle here is that well-established brands, those with a good reputation, are more successful.
Brand equity is important. It affects both the user experience and your potential customers’ confidence over making a purchase from your company.
Retail brand value
Brand value allows a business to charge more for the brand name, and it generates more interest as consumers want to be part of your brand. As your own customer brand equity grows, so too does your ability to increase profits over the competition.
However, as a company, you must first identify and agree upon a way to define your own brand value, in addition to how to measure growth.
Define your brand values
Do not confuse brand value with brand values. The values of your brand are what your company stands for.
It is important to have clear brand values established ahead of time. This way, you can define your retail brand’s value while maintaining core values. Core values are often a prime motivation for customers to engage with your organisation. They like that you provided quality products at affordable prices, or that you donate a portion of proceeds to a local charity, or that everything is made with locally sourced materials.
As brand value grows, and you shift your core values, it will affect brand equity. Increasing the prices of your products, as an example, may negatively impact the way customers saw you as an affordable option.
Brand valuation methods
Your business needs to determine not only how to define brand value for the company itself, but also how to measure it.
The income approach brand valuation, also known as in-use approach brand valuation, looks at predicted future net earnings and connects it to the brand in order to establish a retail brand value.
In other words, it forecasts future sales. You’ll also have your forecast to use as a measuring tool.
Market-based brand valuation occurs when you compare your brand against others on the marketplace. You would be looking at, for example, transactions, prices for similar products and client growth.
You then measure brand value in comparison to the competition.
Cost-based brand valuation looks at the costs your business has accumulated since it started. It looks at how much it would cost to replace the brand.
You’d be aiming to have revenue greater than the cost of creating the brand.
Moreretail marketing tips
Have a local appeal – customers want to feel special, and that their unique needs and pain points are being met by your brand and its products. Even if you don’t have a physical store location, you should still be making efforts to localise your marketing to connect on a deeper level with consumers. Employ location-based marketing techniques, such as targeted adverts and discount codes for users in select areas, to drive traffic directly in your local markets.
Create a unique in-store experience – more and more people shop online for its convenience, but nothing beats a friendly face when they come into your store. Get inventive with your retail marketing efforts here, as customers are only a few steps away from a sale. Experiential marketing can be particularly effective, whether it’s sampling sessions or free trials of products, it can greatly enhance their experience and how they view your brand.
Retarget online customers – customers who don’t purchase can be retargeted through advertising and social media
Use online data for agile retail marketing – When your customers shop with you, you build up a profile of information, such as their personal details, buying habits and browsing history. As you amass more insight, your digital marketing and website messaging can be tailored to create a more personalised experience for individual consumers.
How to do retail marketing well – your template
Effective retail marketing requires a good amount of initial research. That would include data that helps you understand the market for your product, including a SWOT analysis, a competitor analysis, understanding the demographics of your audience and where they are buying. Are there any trends? Are there areas where other companies have been successful or failed? The more you have at this stage, the more you have to work with.
Based on the data you’ve acquired, you should have a good idea as to what sort of product or service to highlight in your upcoming marketing campaign. You’ll also uncover other attributes including key demographics and what marketing channels generate the highest return among these audiences.
With a wealth of information provided off the back of your analytical data, you have a strong foundation to produce a functional, successful retail marketing plan.
You just need to generate a template for documenting what works, what doesn’t and how you can evolve the plan over time. Here are a few suggestions on creating that marketing plan template:
Target customers – consumer profiling
There’s a good chance your company has a few different key demographic consumers. Or, you may be interested in attracting a new demographic to the company.
Identify the target customers. Create a customer profile, regarding their age, income level, gender, character traits, interests and everything else you might need to put a real face behind the target customer profile. This step should be an essential part of each of your marketing plans, always placing the consumer, their characteristics and their needs at the heart of everything moving forward.
USP
Your unique selling proposition helps separate your business from the competition. Basically, it’s what special feature your brand delivers that nobody else does. Are you the fastest? Are you first? Whatever it is, say it loud and say it often.
Many companies fall short here, placing their focus on generic benefits over something that genuinely makes their business unique.
Expenses and projections
Where possible make projections for expenses and don’t lose sight of costs. Your budget may be the most crucial part of any retail marketing plan. It will inform where and how you advertise.
Measure success
An often overlooked part of any retail marketing plan is taking time to reflect on the areas that did work, and what fell short of expectations. Testing and refining are crucial in finding the successful formula, so ensure during and after each campaign, you devote time to analysing where improvements can be made.
In addition, define what success means for your company at the start of the process and build milestones throughout to keep you on track. This presents a benchmark for your marketing efforts, so you’re aware if changes are required to achieve the goals you have set out to accomplish.
Great retail marketing ideas for retail stores
In-store events, such as book signings or book clubs, can be promoted through social media and email.
Leveraging employees to share information about the store through their own social media channels.
Taking advantage of channels like Instagram Stories, which allow you to show off certain aspects of your store in an informal manner.
Price discounts are a fast way to increase sales and get people through the door. Most customers these days expect some kind of sale.
Get their attention by creating a brilliant window display. Use it to promote your sale.
Many high-street stores promote loyalty programs. It creates returning customers, but in some cases retailers can even maintain a higher price on their products as customers return to spend their loyalty points.
Stock products made locally. It’s a great selling point and you can align your brand behind supporting your local community.
PIM – Product information management
You’ve developed the brand, created the strategy but your business will still need to implement and managing processes at each stage of your customer’s journey, including the eventual purchase.
Bigger opportunities mean more challenges, especially when it comes to product-related content. The strategic opportunities of new lines may not include the practical reality of getting those products online, into shops or within catalogues.
Who’s making sure that the descriptions are accurate from a technical (and legal) point of view? Perhaps most importantly from a marketing perspective, with so many products to list and lots of people involved in content creation, is your central brand message in danger of becoming muddled or diluted? And how do you make sure your marketing is using the correct pricing?
This is where your product information management (PIM) strategy comes in.
At heart, it describes a set of processes and tools to help you stay in full control of the information linked to your product lines. Getting it right enables you to make your whole content creation process much more efficient, and promotes a stronger, more accurate and more compelling marketing message.
Why do I need PIM?
From your buying or product development department, via marketing and customer queries, and right through to order dispatch, your products are essentially on a ‘journey’ as they pass through your organisation.
Unless the right information about these products is presented to the right people at the right time, that journey can become needlessly protracted. Here’s how:
Governance
Multi-channel marketing and sales are now part of the marketing mix. Tone and content may alter to meet the needs of different channels, but with multiple sales platforms to manage, there’s a risk of straying from important product information. So it’s useful to have a central hub for core information about the product for your people to draw on – along with channel-specific guidelines.
Flow of information through the company
Where information is fed into a single source, you don’t have marketing teams sitting on their hands waiting for technical information from the product development department. They can access these details immediately and independently to greatly reduce turnaround times for marketing to reach consumers. Plus, it offers a valuable platform for collaborative working with employees who may be based remotely.
Flow of information to the customer
Having access to managed product information makes it easier for your marketers to tailor advertising and marketing materials to your various audiences. This allows you to showcase particular features or particular product variants to groups based on how receptive they will be to these aspects, supporting your personalised marketing efforts.
Only 5% of retailers focus on Gen Z. However 60% still target millennials.
Be vocal about social issues. Most retailers think it’s a risk worth taking and that there are inherent risks with sitting on the fence.
Be varied with your use of discounts. People seek deals, especially those shopping on mobile. Retailers will offer exclusive discounts to mobile users.
Invest in voice search. Many retailers believe it’s the way of the future.
Retailers will use more exclusive products and offers to compete in the digital space.
You may also want to improve on the basics
Ensure you comply with GDPR and the EU ePrivacy Directive
Differentiate your brand
Improve the shopping experience
Whether it’s retail digital marketing or in-store marketing, paying attention to these trends while shaping your strategy will make it more likely you see rewards for your retail marketing efforts.
Retail marketing during COVID-19
In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, few sectors have felt both extremes brought on by this crisis like the retail industry. From the immense pressure placed onto supermarkets and other essential organisations, to the reduced traffic experienced by high street shops and fashion lines, 2020 has brought unprecedented challenges to this sector.
When discussing the retailers’ response to COVID-19, there’s a greater emphasis than ever on keeping engaged with customers at this time of confusion and misinformation, investing in digital channels and producing content that resonates with audience’s pain points and changing behaviours in these unique circumstances.
While there is the temptation for those with reduced activity to take their foot off the gas, we firmly believe now is the time to focus on innovation and adaptation. By taking these strides, retailers will be in a stronger position to maintain customer loyalty in this difficult period and perhaps form connections with new audiences both now and beyond this crisis.
So, why retail marketing?
In its simplest form retail marketing is the process of getting your product or service in front of the audience. The immediate benefits are more sales, which are crucial for the survival of a business.
Retail is experiencing a transformation too. People want the experiences to be more personal. Providing brilliant customer service distinguishes you. Great branding inspires confidence and it all has the power to result in repeat custom.
Some of the strategies and techniques available to the retailer are listed here, but when it comes down to it, the sky (and budget) is the limit with developing ideas that get your brand to the top in this noisy world.
A well-defined marketing mix, delivering the right message at the right time, to the right people is a recipe for success.
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