Communication is all about the audience. Once you know who you are talking to, you know how to address them. That’s why in marketing, you analyse the group of people you want to reach and you call them your target audience. You find out as much as possible about them, and then you adapt your content, way of communication and more to make sure they receive your message. But your internal target audience is just as important!
Of course, the external audience is important and therefore marketing is important. They are the ones that buy your product and actually bring the money in. But in the end, people are the most valuable asset any company can have. Without the right people, you can’t sell your products or provide your services. They know best how to do their job and probably learned a lot while doing so. When those people are not committed and willing to do their best to actually do their job, you lose that asset to a certain degree. One way to actually increase commitment amongst employees is good internal communication. If they can identify with the company’s values and know the strategy and goals that are relevant to their job, too, they will do their best to reach them. And they will become even more valuable of an asset to your company.
Make Internal Communication as Relevant as External Communication
If you want your employees to be (and stay) committed, you need to realize that your internal target audience needs just as much attention as your external one. If you spend so much money, time and resources on communicating the right message to the right external target group to make them loyal customers, why wouldn’t you do so internally? So instead of writing one email to send to all of your employees or posting one message on the intranet, think of your employees just as you think about external target groups. You wouldn’t send all potential clients the exact same, short email, would you? Not all of them have the same level of knowledge, background and job. Instead of looking at them as one big target audience, you can segment them just as you would do with external groups. Adapt your message to every segment. Make sure you know how to reach them best, when to communicate with them and to make your message relevant to them. Is it really important for them to know about what you’d like to communicate? Or do they only need a part of the entire message to do their job properly?
Benefits of Internal Communication
Once you realise how important internal communication is and start using this knowledge, you can actually benefit from it. In the beginning, it might seem like a huge investment and big step, but you’ll quickly see that it’s worth it. If employees are more committed, they will do their best to help your customer – which is a win-win situation. But you cannot only benefit from good internal communication in everyday business. It’s especially important if you want to communicate big change program within your company. Need an example?
Imagine you’d want to introduce a new software solution to improve your customer service. To make this change efficient and actually improve your customer service, you don’t only need to install the software, but you want your employees to work with it on a daily basis. If you only send one email to all of them, chances are it will take very long before they actually embrace the change and start working with it. By targeting every internal audience individually and explaining them why it’s relevant to them to learn how to use the system, they are much more likely to do so. By breaking the process down to steps and guiding them along the journey, you will most likely improve the results as well. Once they all use the software, your customer service improves significantly. Your customers notice this, and are very happy about it. This increases the chances of them being loyal to your company whenever the chance arises. See, and that’s exactly why your internal target group needs to be your most important one.
Need help to reach your internal target audience? Get in touch with our consultants to see how they can help you take your internal communication to the next level!
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