Why your company needs an internal content strategy

Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing high-quality, thought-provoking content that aims to engage a particular audience and ultimately, drive business profits. It is less about selling a product or service and more about attracting and retaining a customer base that can relate to your brands values and ideas. Content marketing usually refers to external customers, but isn’t promoting your business identity to your employees equally, if not more important?

Regardless of whether you’re running a small start-up company, or a globally recognised organisation, employee engagement is a common challenge. An internal content creation strategy should aim to support or educate employees about business happenings. More importantly, it should excite them. Employees are a business’s most valuable asset, so by using content marketing tactics as an internal engagement tool, they will become more aligned with the brand.

Empower your employees

Google leads the way in employee engagement, with its impressive 4.4-star rating on Glassdoor, accumulated from over 6000 individual employee reviews. Sure, the massive budgets Google has for ‘work perks’ play a part, but Google’s approach to engagement is more about encouraging development and making data driven decisions, based on employee feedback.

According to Culture Summit, Google recommend that businesses use internal surveys to collect employee feedback, identify problems and propose resolutions. This data can form an important part of your content strategy, as you can share these key learnings with the rest of the company. Seeing their contributions promote action will help empower your employees, as a key part of engagement is getting involved and feeling as if your opinions are heard.

Boost engagement

Many internal content strategies focus too heavily on improving behaviour or working habits. Usually formatted as a ‘policy update’ or woven into a newsletter, this style of content can be seen as negative. Whilst it’s necessary to include business updates into your content strategy, it should be supported with positive content that promotes personal and professional development; for example:

• Industry relevant news
• Personal updates (e.g. to support fundraising events)
• Financial guidance
• A monthly round-up of top performing blog content
• Reports highlighting company victories, or where improvements are required
• Updates/ reminders of company benefits
• Poll’s for companywide events (e.g. Christmas Party; charity days etc.)

Internal content marketing that is insightful or interactive has many advantages. From strengthening business policy/ benefit awareness to increasing employee performance and engagement. This helps to define brand expectations in a way that is easy to digest, so your employees will feel more motivated and more involved, which can lead to improved service.

It can be difficult to get employees to truly care about larger business goals, however by promoting a content lead culture through communication, collaboration and education you can take an employee-first approach to driving business success.

By Allegra Santis, creative marketing specialist at Oak.