Collecting ideas and information from your internal employees is an excellent process for finding ways to market your specific organization. Each organization has its own wants and needs to reach their target audience. Finding a way to execute this process for your own business will be helpful for your marketing team.
One way to collect these ideas is through the process of interviewing your internal employees. Here are the steps you can take to ensure you find specific marketing ideas within your organization:
Step 1: Establish Goals
It is important to establish what you are trying to learn from your employees in the interview.
You need to ask yourself: What exactly are you trying to gain from this interview to help the market within your organization? What goals are you aiming to achieve from this interview to convert into content?
Some questions we have asked our employees in the past have been: What have you done recently for a client to improve their conversions? What have you done recently to reduce a customer’s cost per click? With that information given, we picked out the key parts to convert into social media content that J&L puts out: Tech Tip Tuesday.
Step 2: Formulate Questions
Formulate the right questions to ask your employees to ensure you get the content you need.
You want to think through your questions to make sure your employees give you the answers you want from them. The minimum number of questions to have ready is 2, as the questions can lead to more in-depth discussions.
Here are some examples of questions we have asked our J&L Sales Representatives:
- What challenges are dealers facing that we can help resolve?
- What challenges are non-dealers facing we can help resolve?
- How are they responding to the way we “pitch” them?
- What is the most common rejection you get?
Step 3: Set up Interviews
It is useful to set up interviews with relevant employees for your topic.
All of your employees are busy with the work on their plate, so it is good to reach out to them and find a time that works best for both of your schedules. You also want to make sure the employees you are interviewing come from a department that is relevant to the information you are seeking. You would not ask a Sales Rep question about the digital marketing analysis reports within the month, as that is not the field they work in and would not provide the most relevant content for you. You would ask a digital analyst in this interview.
Step 4: Interview Employees
When conducting these interviews, they should be separate. Interviewing more than one person can affect the way the interviewee answers the question. They will give you a more relevant answer when it is a one-on-one interview.
Step 5: Reduce Content
Go through the content you have received and consolidate it, while keeping all of the important messages.
It is important to consolidate so it is easier to read and understand for your audience. Facebook revealed that the average attention span on the platform for video content is about 2 seconds: On a desktop computer, the average attention span is 2.5 seconds, but on mobile, it is 1.7 seconds. You can make a long-lasting impression on your audience in those 2 seconds, so that is why you must make those seconds count. When the content is too wordy or hard to understand, people will scroll away to the next post. TikTok has grown rapidly because the videos are made to get the content that they needed out in a short 15 second or less videos.
After narrowing down content, the next step is to establish the appropriate format to convert these phrases into social media posts. Some good platforms for businesses to publish content are:
- Instagram (Written post and images)
- LinkedIn (Written post and images)
- Facebook (Written post and images)
- Tik Tok (Videos)
Social Media Is the Way to Market
These social media platforms are an efficient way to market your company to a wide range of audiences that can reach all over the globe as long as you are taking advantage of and using your platform correctly. According to a survey, most businesses build loyal customers using their social media. Social media users between 18 and 35 years old are more loyal to products and businesses they follow on various social media platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Users have also stated that they prefer buying products from businesses that are more active on social platforms. They believe that engaging with their clients is a sign of better service. Engagement with clients on social media gives a client the opportunity to ask questions about your brand and build trust.
Social media marketing gives you a terrific opportunity to engage in conversation with your current, prior, and future customers. This opportunity can help you to generate innovative ideas based on areas where your customers have expressed dissatisfaction. You get to know what your customers want and what drives them. This allows customers to feel valued, hence building a trustworthy relationship with your brand that will keep them coming back for more. A trustworthy relationship with your customers will give you a reliable clientele. Using Ads to run campaigns on your social media channels has the capability to target ideal buyers. Doing so will allow you to drive relevant traffic to your site.
Tracking your results is a useful way for your team to know what is working and not working on your social platforms-which content is getting you the most reviews, likes, clicks, etc. Then with these results, you can make sure you are putting out the content that interests your target audience. With these results, it can help you decide how you want to collect content internally in the future. Trial and error are a big part of the process in finding what works best for your specific company.
Keeping Your Platform on Brand
Keeping your posts consistent with your company’s brand is another crucial factor that goes with building a relationship with your target audience. A brand platform is a synthetic document designed to compile all the elements that make up the DNA of your brand, both visually and ideologically. The brand platform recaps all the key aspects of your brand’s representation. It should give a clear picture of how your company should be received by its customers, but also by its collaborators at large. It should be grounded in a strategic reflection on your brand’s positioning, value proposition, and vision to develop a coherent brand strategy. Companies put out brand slogans for many reasons to help benefit their market. A big reason companies do it is to evoke an emotion or idea of the company in association with the slogan in a consumer’s mind when they hear it.
An example of a slogan would be, when you hear “Just do it” your mind automatically goes to Nike.
An example of a phrase would be, when you hear “My pleasure” what do you think of? Most likely Chick-Fil-A.
Incorporating brand slogans and phrases into these messages you collected from your employees will help keep your company in brand with what you are trying to convey to the target audience. J&L is known for our slogan, “Out-Smart. Don’t Out-Spend.” So, when I interview these employees, I convert that slogan into the messages I have collected when I am reducing the content down.
You want to make sure you use the appropriate colors and design that correlate with your business. Keeping the same design and color throughout will make it easier for your target audience to recognize your post in their feed, and it makes your platform look more professional. Putting the interviewees’ personal headshot on the post with their specific content gives them the recognition they deserve and shows your audience that these are actual employees’ quotes.
Achieving Those Marketing Ideas Internally
Taking advantage of the various employees within your company, and the diverse types of knowledge they contribute, is an important way to find the latest ideas for your marketing. Everyone is working towards the same goal, which is the best for your company. Interviewing relevant employees can be a terrific way to gather the right content you are looking for. Using social media to your marketing advantage is a way to get ahead of the game. Keeping track of your results while putting out brand friendly content can help the company reach out to its target audience and get the right message to the right people!
