Your company brand influences more than just your customers. However, some business owners often treat it as an isolated factor, removed from the employees. Alex Lysak, a marketing expert, tells us more about marketing and HR teams’ combined effort when building your brand.
Alex’s marketing agency, Scanteam, understands the importance of employee engagement in your brand and wants to help you get the best out of your marketing initiatives. Combining human resource and marketing functions in branding has many benefits.
Why is Branding Important to Employees
Besides the obvious importance of branding for your customers, it’s also essential to understand how branding impacts your staff. The top factor in attracting talent to your business is your reputation. Building your brand means growing your reputation.
Marketing shouldn’t have a narrow view of their role in the organization. It’s more than generating leads and accommodating sales. Marketing also includes attracting new talent to your organization.
A strong relationship between HR and marketing can enhance your business’s core functions. The company can build a culture in line with its brand, adding value to the whole business.
HR and marketing do the same for different audiences. They promote your business in different spaces. So HR and marketing working together will improve both teams’ ability to meet their goals.
Benefits
Collaboration between HR and marketing translates into benefits for employees, prospective employees, and customers.
Employees
HR can train employees in brand messaging and help them to engage positively with the company. In turn, this will create a positive image of the business. The employees know what the company is about, so they’re excited about the brand. Engaging in the brand also improves staff morale, which, in turn, influences productivity.
Prospective Employees
The business can attract and retain the best talent due to its positive image when marketing and HR work together. The battle to attract the best talent is fierce, and a good image is vital to winning the top employees.
Customers
Customers can benefit from better informed and motivated employees who know the product and believe in it. The behavior of your employees reflects the beliefs and organizational culture. If they have bought into the brand, customers will pick up on that.
What Can the Teams Learn from Each Other?
There are a few lessons that the teams can learn from each other to make your business better.
What can Marketing Learn from Human Resources?
Marketing can learn to influence business strategies and behaviors through employee engagement. Give the marketing team a chance to learn about employees’ beliefs and how they feel about the company’s brand identity. In turn, it will help them establish themselves as key influencers in the business structure.
Marketing can also learn to put people before profit. The people in the company are the cornerstone of success. On the other hand, marketing can often be so driven by numbers that they forget about the people. The employees are the representatives of your brand. Encouraging marketing to understand your business through employee’s eyes will give valuable insight into better marketing campaigns.
What can Marketing Teach Human Resources?
Marketing folks are more tech-savvy and generally, better at communicating complex ideas. They can teach the HR team about technology and its benefits for internal communication.
How Can the Teams Work Together and be Efficient?
HR, marketing, and brand building are words that don’t often stand in the same sentence. However, is there a way to get your teams to work better together?
Purpose
Both teams should acknowledge that they are working towards the same goal and then figure out the best way to achieve it. Collaboration and teamwork are key. Use the product you are selling to customers as the reason for the team’s existence and to drive all decisions.
Commitment
As with any change in your company, management’s commitment drives the buy-in from employees. Your team should be on board and encourage the idea of HR and marketing working together. The leaders of the organization should drive the role of human resources in services marketing.
Leadership
Teams need to know what roles they fulfill and who handles which aspect of the work. Teams collaborate better when they see the team structure and the distinct purpose of each member.
Conflict Management
Conflict is a vital part of teamwork. If a conflict happens, it might mean a degree of comfort among the team members. They know each other well enough to disagree. Manage the situation well, and the conflict will turn into successful collaboration. Don’t allow your team to dwell on the conflict, but rather focus on solutions.
Communication
Both the marketing and HR teams are experts in communicating with certain audiences. Now they have to learn to communicate well with each other. It would be best to decide on workspace and channels to facilitate the process and reach common goals.
Informal communication can work to some extent, but you can’t rely too heavily on it when the two teams have just begun working together.
Conclusion
HR and marketing have always seemed like they are worlds apart—two completely different functions in an organization. However, the goals of these departments are similar. One is about internal, and the other is about external communication. If they combine their expertise, the company will attract and retain the best talent available. Through proper training, employees can also engage in the brand in such a way that it enhances your company’s image.
Author Bio
Alex Lysak is the CEO of ScanTeam. I have been working in online marketing since 2011, my main areas of expertise are marketing research, social media marketing, and SEO. During 9 years of experience, I have helped many products and startups to develop marketing strategies and to implement them further.
