Your employees are the face of your organization. They are your brand ambassadors and leave an impression – positive or negative – with everyone they interact with. They are on the frontline interacting with your clients and prospects every day. It is important to your business that they leave a strong, positive lasting impression on everyone they interact with from customers to vendors. To best ensure they are leaving this positive impression, branding is key.
Strategically creating a strong brand starts from within. Is your frontline team acting as brand ambassadors in the way you intended? Your brand reflects your business’ reputation, popularity, visibility and viability in your marketplace. It increases both awareness and resonance distinguishing your organization from its competitors. Your brand also helps to retain and re-up/renew existing customers.
Five tips to turn your employees into brand ambassadors
Brand ambassadorship is too important to leave unwatched in the hands of your team without proper guidance. In order to do all this, you need to establish a shared understanding of your organization’s goals, vision, and mission. Building a successful brand requires an inside-out approach. Provide transparent communication on important news, goals, achievements, and milestones to inspire and motivate your staff. Keep employee experience high from day one.
Similarly, while building a brand with your clients and customers is important, failing to treat your employees as the heart of your organization can harm employee engagement and employer reputation alike. Have you created a common culture and an environment where people love to work through a strong brand? Four key ways to do this start with:
- Define your direction. Define your values, mission, and vision to provide a clear direction and give your business an identity or purpose with which your staff can identify.
- Strengthen staff loyalty. Help people understand why their role is important and how they fit into the overall picture by aligning them with the company purpose. Transcend your staff’s demographical diversity and create a common culture of togetherness and belonging that will make your staff love your organization.
- Support your workforce. Bring your most important resources directly to your employees to support them in their daily tasks and make their working lives easier.
- Inspire and empower. Encourage your employees to participate in the conversation and provide a direct line to company happenings and important information. Encourage your employees to participate in the company conversation by providing platforms for feedback and discussion.
- Make your workforce love your brand. Promote your brand internally through visual and engaging communication channels (not just email).
The concept and definition of your unique branding needs to be established amongst your team from top to bottom to create a meaningful connection to your brand. This will allow your employees to blossom individually but also collectively into brand ambassadors all rowing in the same direction. Once established internally, then you can focus on the outward presentation of your fabulous team…
Three print products to turn employees into brand ambassadors
Professionally designed printed collateral and promotional items can work to showcase your brand ambassadors in the best light. Minuteman Press Calgary Shepard is a print shop after all. Here are three print ideas you can use to help your team stand out embodying your branding goals:
- Incorporate branded apparel into your team’s everyday wear. Your team can become a living source of brand exposure by wearing clothing that showcases important brand-related imagery. Shirts, hats, and aprons worn by your brand ambassadors can be custom-made to feature the organization’s logo and color schemes. Any slogans created by the business may also be included on the apparel to familiarize visitors with the brand’s taglines.
[Tip: Name tags offer a quick and easy opportunity for your brand ambassadors and your prospects to cut through the ice and engage on a personal level more quickly.] - Provide your brand ambassadors with business cards. Your employees may hand their cards out to clients or prospects to promote future interactions with the brand. You should include details on the card such as your organization’s web and social media pages. This will help potential customers locate and connect with your brand online. Offering a business card to a person will also form a more personal connection between the recipient and the employee.
[Tip: With today’s print technology, most printers can design and create business cards for your entire team – including small volume runs for your team who maybe aren’t on the frontline. It is a great way of showing they are part of a larger team.] - Give your employees custom stationery, forms, presentation folders and/or notebooks to work with. Your brand ambassadors can be provided customized stationery to interact with clientele that includes your company logo. This offers further employer brand exposure than a non-branded alternative.
Your brand ambassadors have a lasting impact on customers and can improve consumer recognition of a business. Companies can use branded apparel, business cards, and custom stationery to turn their workers into better brand representatives.
Post Press
All businesses should look within for their best opportunity to brand – their employees. Your employees – or brand ambassadors as we have called them throughout this blog – can become your single greatest secret weapon in branding. You can use the above tips assist you in framing how you can leverage this secret weapon most effectively. Don’t know where to start? Contact the team at Minuteman Press Calgary Shepard.
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