While companies spend hefty sums marketing to customers, hardly any designate a budget for marketing to their staff. Aside from the occasional recruitment ad, employee communications are nil. This is potentially catastrophic.

You tell customers what makes you great, but does the staff know?
The marketing department's message is critical to the entire company. If you tell your customers what makes you great, but employees don't know (and believe) that message, chances for greatness are diminished. Without adequate communication, the staff is in the dark about the promises made to customers. How, then, can they be expected to deliver on them? Unfortunately, they can't. And when employees don't deliver as promised, trust is broken. Without trust, brand erosion, not brand development occurs. To have a strong, unbeatable brand, you need employees who understand it and are motivated to live it daily. To develop that workforce, you'll need an employee communication program. What it takes to launch and deploy a successful employee program to enhance brand delivery:

1. A clearly articulated brand statement. Just as you would have a single-minded message for marketing to consumers, you must have a well-defined message for employees. If employees only received and remembered one message from your company, there's no more valuable one than what the brand stands for. We'll assume here that you have a defined, articulated brand. And I don't mean a logo or graphic standards. I mean a specific experience that you want everyone who deals with you to remember. Think of Disney, Ritz Carlton, or Starbucks. They all deliver a tangible, definable experience. What's yours? What will always happen? What will never happen? What's the "aftertaste" you want everyone to have. Tell your staff the answers to those questions and you'll be headed in the right direction.
2. Internal employee communications every bit as good as outside marketing efforts. People today are bombarded with boring junk, and your staff is no exception. To communicate effectively with them, forget routine newsletters and easy-to ignore announcements, and think about the same tactics that attract consumers' attention. Harvard Business School recently noted that internal marketing was the best way to help employees make an emotional connection to the services provided. Think of employees as the market and the brand as the message. Then communicate that message in an engaging, motivating, inspiring way. It's not easy, but it's definitely possible.