employee-marketing

What Global Mobility Professionals Need to Understand About Employee Marketing 

There is more to employee marketing than spreading the word that you’re a good global mobility specialist or recruiter to possible new hires.  Employee marketing and a customer-centric relationship with global talents are key to their engagement at work.

Engagement makes them feel valued and appreciated by their managers and employers. They think that their professional goals and personal values are aligned with their companies’ overall mission and vision. That connection makes them want to stay, perform, and advance up to the company’s higher echelons.

Treat your employees like clients, and use employee marketing to create a continuous, collaborative communication system with them—and you would have won the battle when it comes to their long-term tenure with the company.

But first let’s define what employee marketing is. Many global mobility specialists only think of it when they do recruitment. They associate it with brand marketing, or making sure that their potential hires put them on their “preferred employer list.” Those concepts and practices are true, but employee marketing has transcended them a long time ago.

Builds sense of community

Employee marketing is internal communications that regularly disseminates facts, information, and other relevant data to the employees on a regular basis. A lot of it has to do with explaining the company’s mission, vision, products, services, and other goals. It also talks about the brand, its values, the messaging, and how the individual employee is an important part of the overall campaign that the company is promoting at that point in time.

Employee marketing also builds a sense of community by updating the workforce on activities, business meetings, and training sessions. It also invites them to town hall meetings and other important assemblies where they can speak their thoughts and possibly thresh out issues.

Now, internal corporate communications has been doing this for a long time. However, re-assigning the whole concept and practice to employee marketing is a game changer. Internal corporate communications is primarily meant to inform.

Employee marketing is designed to create a connection between the employers and the workforce, and the employees with each other; it’s good to understand them even if it’s not part of your job. The operative word is “marketing,” which connotes that human resources is just letting the employees know about certain information, but they are promoting the company and its brand to them.

Difference in functions and objective

There is a huge difference here when it comes to function and objective. News and data that are just given as information to be digested may not require any other information except understanding. There is no other engagement anticipated. However, when it comes to marketing and promotion, there are elements of persuasion that are involved; at the end of the day, the employees and the other recipients are expected to agree with and take to heart the messaging. Agreement, in this case, is not just passive understanding, but a whole-hearted acceptance of what the company stands for and is saying; far from lip service, it also means support of and alignment with the brand.

To illustrate more concretely: reading disseminated information can be like a reader browsing a piece of news online, and then clicking away a few minutes after. No other action may be required from them. In contrast, marketing, offline and online, has a call to action, no matter how subtle; within the messaging is an invitation to do something aside from just reading—whether it means clicking to another link, downloading an ebook, or registering online.

Employee marketing is internally-driven communications that, over time, persuades or convinces an employee to accept the company’s vision and goals, align their own professional objectives with them, and work toward their mutual success.

Employee marketing is important because it increases the employee’s level of engagement. It provides them with intangible yet equally powerful motivations to be productive, beyond their paycheck. It also makes them part of a community who, because they are like a second family, can make them feel supported and loved. 

Critical to company morale

Employee marketing is critical to overall company morale because they make the employee feel valued. They also recognize their contributions to the bigger picture. It makes their engagement stronger, more resilient, and long-lasting.

Gallup numbers prove this. Engaged team members report an 81 percent difference in absenteeism, and a 14 percent uptick in productivity. There is also a 43 percent difference in turnover. 

A high-level engagement also spills over outside the company walls. Employee marketing makes enthusiastic employees brand ambassadors of the company, and not just when it comes to recruitment. 

They are the first to ask their circles of influence to apply for vacant company positions. They are the first to post about how their company takes care of them on social media. Because they are highly motivated, they are also the front liners who take good care of the company customers.

As Gallup reports, “Highly engaged business units achieve a 10 percent difference in customer ratings and an 18 percent difference in sales.”

Employee marketing can make a difference in the company’s bottomline, but it starts with communicating with the employee that makes them feel valued, appreciated, and an integral part of the company’s overall success.