It ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. A good quote from Mark Twain. Does your business pay attention to ways to improve your staff retention and loyalty?
Like making employees feel they are making a significant contribution? And giving them more ways to develop new skills and experience?
More than 100 studies have now found that the most engaged employees — those who report they’re fully invested in their jobs and committed to their employers — are significantly more productive, drive higher customer satisfaction, and outperform those who are less engaged.
A Towers Watson global workforce study found that only 20% of employees are truly engaged in their work — heart, and soul. As a student of management for over 40 years, I’m depressed by the fact that so many people find work depressing. Wow, that really is a number that will impact a business in lots of ways, yes?
Engaged employees who are satisfied with their jobs and feel that they’re making a contribution to their organizations and helping customers are more likely to work hard for their company’s success.
It is therefore imperative for organizations to make sure that they achieve and retain high levels of employee engagement.
It’s a disconnect that serves no one well. So what’s the solution? Where is the win-win for employers and employees?
The answer is that great employers must shift the focus from trying to get more out of people, to investing more in them by addressing their needs. This includes getting them to bring the best of themselves to work every day.
We have all heard the importance of developing engaged employees at our workplace, but too often the articles are full of theoretical discussion instead of practical steps to make it happen.
Here are some simple steps to consider when looking for win-win in employee loyalty and engagement:
Employee loyalty should not be viewed as an either/or proposition, should it? Employees and their careers often are not fully in concert with loyalty to a company.
And that is not a bad thing.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive, especially when employee skill development is in alignment with what the business needs.
Remember that employee loyalty is never forever. So when you lose talent it doesn’t mean those employees were not loyal.
Employee engagement and loyalty … focus on relationships
Often employee loyalty is based on relationships with management and fellow employees. It’s the reason they choose to leave or chose to stay. So work to create a strong relationship with your people.
One way to do this is to make your expectations clear and make sure employees have the resources and skills they need to fulfill these expectations and to grow the experience they desire.
Staff retention ideas … build jobs with variety and autonomy
Think back to your career experiences. Most of us have preferred to have a variety of job experiences that permit maximum growth and development.
Jobs that provide variety and the freedom to make decisions engender awesome loyalty. A commitment to job variety, freedom, and change is not easy for a business.
But it is truly a win-win for the employee and the business.
Employees values versus company mission
My career started with IBM and its lifetime employment pseudo-contract. It was a great way to instill employee loyalty. But things have changed considerably since those days, even for IBM.
Even then, and certainly now, lifetime employment was not the only way to instill loyalty. Emphasizing a company’s purpose and mission also engenders loyalty.
A human face on a business mission and then living that mission can go a long way to build employee support and loyalty.
When a business helps its employees develop expertise and skills that help them be more marketable both internally and externally, it represents a big win-win.
But it is often very difficult for the immediate managers involved, especially with their most valuable employees.
However, when they understand and appreciate the bigger business benefits, it is often easier to convince these managers.
Management needs to help their employees identify links between their own career goals and those of the ones of the business. This is a big step in the loyalty-building process.
The bottom line
Once business leaders recognize that employee engagement is directly related to optimal customer experience and will have an impact on their bottom line, they are more willing to invest in it.
But they should be careful not to spend all their allocated dollars on one-time initiatives but focus more on their individual employees, making each feel valued.
At the end of the day, how you treat people is what they’ll remember. Employee’ engagement is built each day.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More leadership material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Companies are in a bit of a crisis in the modern era. Even though consumer-brand trust is as important as ever, the sad fact is, people, don’t trust brands. Therefore you need to build customer trust.
They see corporations as faceless profiteers, a sentiment brought on by tales of corruption in big business, the 2008 financial crisis, and the constant bombardment of advertising over the past several decades.
Your audience wants to see you, hear you and understand you. They want you to inspire them to connect and engage with you. They want you to help them achieve their goals and objectives. They want relevant content and conversation that makes them think. They want inspired to do different, do better and be better.
Humanizing your brand is a requirement, not an option if you want to survive in business today. Yes, you can put brand humanization on hold. However, every day you lose is a day you could be building relationships, nurturing friendships, establishing and earning the respect of powerful brand evangelists who will shout from a mountain top how wonderful you and your brand are.
Don’t wait. The time is now. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or brain surgeon to do these things. Start now and start somewhere. Perfection is the enemy of the good. Embrace imperfect perfection.
Since people trust other people more than they do brands, all you have to do is make your brand seem a little bit more like a person—you have to humanize your brand.
Here are 9 practical steps to help you do so:
Focus on relationships
You must get out of the old school thinking of only email blasts, traditional advertising. Think about the conversations, the content and the way you can build relationships with real human beings. If you think like a corporate engine or cog in the wheel, you are going to have a hard time connecting as a human being.
Relationships are the life raft of the never ending social network technology changes. If you focus on the relationships, your audience will follow you wherever you go, despite how the social landscape changes. This is because they are not connecting with you as a Twitter handle or brand name, but instead as a human being or group of human beings.
In his book Permission Marketing, Seth Godin pioneered the idea of content marketing. Create something of value that will motivate people to provide you with an email address. The problem is, we’re competing for attention with so much noise, so earning that conversion has become increasingly difficult. There are over 80 billion business emails sent every week and over 200 million hours spent on YouTube. Consumers have access to a lot of content and are weary of another brand sending more emails into their already cluttered lives.
Create an interactive avatar
Your brand needs a human voice, and a personality, but it’s hard to assign those qualities to a logo or a corporate name. Instead, try assigning them to an actual personal framework. Come up with a fictional character who represents your brand, and flesh out all the details.
Who is this person? What’s their name? How do they dress? What’s their favorite food? What are their likes and dislikes? Are they excitable or calm? Formal or casual? These questions will help you imagine a real personality to serve as your brand’s avatar, and from there it’s easy to slip into that mentality. This is the best way to have to almost literally humanize your brand.
Don’t just post ads to your users; engage them in conversation. Ask them what they like and what they want to see. If they tell you they like one of your posts, thank them for their readership. If you see your audience members commenting on an external thread, jump into the discussion.
This shows that you’re paying attention and that you care about more than just one side of the conversation. The more you engage with your users, the more likely they’ll be to see you as a trustworthy, personal entity. Again, this requires more work; it’s easier to sit back and throw out an extended monolog. But when you engage with individuals, you’ll instantly cement those individuals’ loyalties, and you’ll look good to everyone else looking on.
Communicate with your customers
Delete the corporate mumbo jumbo speak. Social media is not a billboard for your 1995 corporate collateral. Speak to a tone, words and rhythm your customers, partners and social community can understand. Use language that inspires them and connects them to you and your brand.
Show material from behind the scenes
This is one of the best ways to become a human brand. Share the moments that you are human. If you have a company party or picnic, take some photos and share them. If your team goes on a team building mission or hike, let your audience know ahead of time they are going. Ask them who they think will win the contest.
Share the fun and serious moments your team has offline working to help your clients meet their goals. If you have a team meeting, share a couple of photos of the team brainstorming at the whiteboard or enjoying themselves with a bag of candy or popcorn. You’ll be amazed at how these simple little shares of your personal side will help build a relationship with the people in your community. Try it, it works!
Show a sense of humor
Humor has a primal way of connecting us. When we laugh together, we tear down walls and bond with each other—it’s why we’re more likely to laugh when we’re surrounded by people we care about than we are when we’re by ourselves. When you make your users laugh, you show them that you don’t take yourself too seriously.
You show them that you enjoy humor just like the rest of us and that you aren’t afraid to set aside the formal professionalism of your brand for just a moment to experience a human moment.
Obviously, the type and appropriateness of humor you use will be dependent on your brand, but self-deprecating humor and tongue-in-cheek references both work especially well for audiences. You don’t have to be a consistent comedian, but you have to throw out enough references and asides to keep your audience feeling good about you.
Show your personality
Knowing who you are is obviously key to having a brandpersonality. If you don’t know what your brand personality is then you better figure it out. Who are you? What are you? Are you serious? Are you funny? Are you a combination of both? What is the tone of your conversations? The tone of your educational material?
Social media is going to open everything up for everyone to see. If you have one personality online and another when a customer calls your support center, it is going to become quite apparent. Nail this in the early stages, and it will become an asset to you forever.
Regardless if you are communicating with your customers, partners, and audience online or offline simply be available. Don’t setup the latest social network profile unless you plan actually to show up. Show up more than once a week or once a day.
Don’t show up to just brag about your latest reward won, promotion or blog post. Instead, show up with a goal to inspire and connect with your audience with an underlying goal of helping them achieve their objectives. Be proactive and responsive to the interest of your audience and fans at the heart of all.
It’s one thing to provide the opportunity for your customers and community to give their feedback and voice their desires. It’s entirely another to show them you’ve listened by responding through action. When you truly listen to someone, you gain their trust, and more importantly, their respect.
Show emotions
Emotional brands are the brands that are building real relationships in the social ecosystem. Make me laugh. Make me cry or make me mad. Do something that makes me think different, be different. Inspire me to do more, be more and leverage you, your team or your products and services to do such. The more you can connect with your audience, the better you will be at understanding what emotional chords will work best with them.
Being authentic and genuine isn’t something that companies can fake. Consumers are smart, and they expect a lot from the brands they choose to support. More than a great product or service, it’s the passion and cause at the core of the company that builds this much deeper emotional connection between the brand and the customer. All of which can be fostered through personal, meaningful, and relevant content.
The bottom line
Did this post motivate you to better humanize your business? Does your business truly connect with people? Or are you guilty of corporate speak? If you have already been thru this process and have made strides toward becoming a social business with humanization at the core, what tips can you provide for others?
The good news is that all of this stuff is pretty simple. We’re all human beings. We all work with other human beings. We all know that we need to treat our customers how we would like to be treated.
The bad news is that simple is not the same thing as easy. Humanizing your brand, building trust, fostering an authentic and lasting connection with your customers is hard work. It doesn’t necessarily scale. And unless you can tap into some genuine, authentic passion of your own, the connection is going to be a whole lot harder to ignite.
Need some help in building better customer insights from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer base?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job of growing customer insights and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:
The Story of How JetBlue Turns Customers into Advocates
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Social media community engagement? What does it mean to your business? Dialog with customers for sure. What about reading your content and remembering? Appreciating your help? We believe it is all of these things.
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
– Edwin Schlosberg
In the ever-changing landscape of social networking, you might be wondering if you are getting the most out of your business’s social media community engagement? Here we define social media community engagement as the process of gaining website customer traffic, attention, and interaction from customers through social media sites.
Social media, like most marketing, is emotion-driven. People’s behavior (e.g., sharing your content or buying your product) is based on emotional responses. Your social media content should appeal to their hearts–not their heads. (You can—and should—appeal to their heads through quality content on your website or blog)
Have you ever thought about how to build positive social media community engagement?
This task starts with what customers want and need. Most people want to: feel needed, be valued, be appreciated, be fulfilled, share emotions, laugh and be happy, succeed, and be inspired. Make them feel something that feels unique to what other brands are blasting at them. To do this you must know who your community is. You must know how to catch and hold their attention.
So let’s examine our recommended game plan to build a positive social media community engagement:
Win the first impression battle
What are you doing to make their first 30 seconds on your platform useful and worth their attention? If you can’t answer this question, you need to start here. First impressions are everything.
Can you be human?
Be human
Humanize your brand. Realize that your brand is everything about you from what you tweet to how you respond to comments on Facebook. Don’t hide your employees. Let them shine and be a living, breathing representation of your brand.
Related post: Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study
Be patient yet persistent
You aren’t going to capture your community overnight or on the first day you launch any social media site. Building and launching an integrated online community takes time. Give yourself and your team the time to do it right. Have patience and persistence. Slow down and do it right and at the end of the game, you’ll be the winner, guaranteed.
Social media community … connect emotionally
Make them feel. If you want to grab my attention on G+, make me laugh. Make me cry. Make me feel something, anything. When I have a super busy day and I am replying to posts I have no choice due to the amount of them and time constraints but to choose where and when I am going to respond. It is an easy choice for me. I respond to the people who grab my attention. The people who are nice, who make me feel good. The people who are genuine. The people who make me laugh, playing the emotional card.
Focus on relationships
The life of social media is people. People like you and me. People who laugh, cry, get mad, go crazy, get married, divorced, have kids, lose family members, win jobs, lose jobs, get promotions, win new clients, get new opportunities, have fun, play hard and work hard. Offer value to the people in your community with the goal of building real relationships. Offer value and knowledge.
Lots to learn from Brian Carter and The Carter Group.
Inspire your communities to connect with you with a foundational goal of achieving their objectives. Inspire … Connect …Achieve. To do this you must know their objectives and goals. You must know them. When you know your audience then you can know how you can help them be better. How can you help them learn? How can you help them go faster? Work smarter? Be smarter? Share more valuable information with their colleagues, clients, partners and friends? Figure these answers out and use them to help.
Teach them
What knowledge can you share with them that will make them smarter? How can your knowledge drive real efficiency in their life or business? Share your best stuff, not just the same old, same old you wrote two years ago that is overused and oversold, by everyone everywhere.
Make it easy
People want to connect. They don’t want to be spammed at every opportunity. Give them an opportunity to engage with you, your brand, and your team. Be available. Open up your comment stream on your blog. Listen and be relevant and responsive.
Listen well
The most important thing you can do to create a positive engagement is to listen carefully. Listen with a goal to understand. Bottom line, listen more than you talk. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your audience when you shut up and listen.
What’s next? How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
In summary, building a positive social media community engagement is very similar to making friends. Keep it simple and be genuine.
Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. Follow these simple tips and you will be leading the way.
Do you have an experience on your team’s positive engagement to share with this community?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Case Studies to Evaluate New World Marketing Concepts
Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study
Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Lessons and Examples
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small businesses. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
