How effective digital marketing can benefit employee engagement across your organization

If you know anything about Advito, you know we’re experts in traveler engagement. In fact, we wrote the book – metaphorically speaking – on how to help travel managers drive program adoption, improve traveler satisfaction and achieve buy-in for their travel programs across the board.

It’s not just the travel program that can benefit from a digital marketing strategy; it is something every department across the business needs. Best-in-class marketing tactics and communications strategies ensure that employees feel they align with the company’s overall strategy and mission and make them active participants in helping to achieve them.

What does an effective engagement strategy look like?

Engaging employees goes beyond just sending an email. It’s about communicating the right message to the right audience at the right time, using the right channel or communications method to influence their actions and create the culture you want in your organization. For employees to feel connected, it’s important to establish two-way communications, so they stay informed and feel engaged. Surveys, polls and focus groups are great ways to enable this, as well as using merchandising techniques, such as graphical banners and calls-to-action on your various online tools and platforms to publicize the initiatives and maximize participation.

Merchandising is also a great way to leverage visibility across all available digital communications platforms like online booking tools, intranet sites, employee portals, mobile applications and more, to communicate with your employees. And it doesn’t stop there. Gaining full visibility into key metrics using data beaconing tactics is key to identifying and addressing employees’ pain points across all instances of their digital presence.

After you’ve identified your key pain points, there are several approaches you can take:

1. Deploying digital adoption strategies can exponentially increase the uptake of new tools and technologies across different teams and functions, minimize user errors, and provide training and guidance within digital platforms, helping to reduce the need for additional user support.
2. If employee training is what’s needed, intelligent curriculums can help build intuitive learning and development (L&D) modules for progressive digital e-learning, training, videos, and more.
3. If your company policies require updating to keep pace with leading industry standards or best practices, progressive policy assessments, benchmarking, recommendations, and rewrites can help modernize them for the digital age, ensuring your organization is best positioned to attract and retain talent.
4. If the objective is to target niche audiences within your organization, tribetailing – or marketing and selling to a specific group of people – and specialized communication initiatives can help identify and align them with the outcome that you are after.

Across all communication assets for your employees, it is critical that they have been created with digital accessibility top-of-mind to ensure they are representative of and accessible to everyone.

Using Employee Engagement Across Your Business

Employee engagement strategies can benefit any aspect of your business. Here are some examples:

• Procurement: Digital marketing and merchandising strategies can help create visibility around your preferred suppliers and approved vendor partnerships, procurement processes, as well as contract terms. Digital adoption platforms can also help with user adoption of new procurement tools and technologies and provide ongoing guidance to minimize errors and support tickets.
• Human resources (HR): Effective communication of HR initiatives is vital for everything from onboarding, retention, productivity and creativity, to helping keep your employees informed. A robust, end-to-end digital marketing strategy can help ensure the visibility, adoption, and overall success of your programs such as employee appreciation, growth and development, wellness, work-life balance and more.
• IT: Clear and consistent communication provides employees with the guidance, training, and support necessary to understand and use the full capabilities of IT tools and systems. By effectively communicating updates, best practices, and tips for using various technologies, along with maximizing digital adoption platforms, you can empower your workforce to streamline workflows, increase productivity, and seamlessly adapt to new digital tools. Data beaconing can help you gather key insights and analytics on your employee’s pain points when using the available software and tools, providing clear direction on how you can alleviate those challenges users are facing to maximize adoption and efficiency.
• Meetings and events: Digital marketing strategies are pivotal in enhancing the value of meetings and events within your organization by enabling engagement, alignment, and collaboration among participants. Tribetailing techniques can help optimize your end-to-end processes, targeting specific audiences or groups with relevant messaging. From the initial stages of gathering critical information needed for pre-event planning and goal-setting (surveys, stakeholder communication, and more) to event advertisement and agenda distribution, ensuring attendees come prepared, understand the objectives, and are focused on the desired outcomes, through to attendee feedback to help shape future events, a strategic marketing campaign can elevate your meetings and events.
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I): A marketing campaign can help foster a culture of inclusion and belonging where different perspectives and backgrounds are truly valued. You can raise awareness about the importance of digital accessibility and implement best practices for creating accessible content, such as using alternative text for images, providing video captions, and ensuring compatibility with assistive technologies. Communication platforms and tools can also be optimized to accommodate diverse needs, such as offering customizable font sizes, screen reader compatibility, and keyboard shortcuts. By promoting a culture of inclusivity and providing the necessary support and resources, you can empower employees to participate fully in digital interactions, collaborate effectively, and contribute their talents and perspectives to the organization.
• Sustainability: Regular and engaging communication with employees is paramount to achieving specialized initiatives, such as meeting sustainability targets. It can help create a shared understanding of your company’s sustainability goals, initiatives, progress, and the best choices to make, empowering employees to actively contribute to your organization’s efforts. Engaging employees in conversations about sustainability cultivates a sense of ownership and accountability, motivating them to adopt environmentally responsible behaviors, both within the workplace and beyond. Merchandising strategies can place educational assets at eye-level when employees go about their day-to-day work across digital platforms such as your online travel booking tool, intranet portal, and more, helping them become mindful of and make sustainable choices in their business activities. Intelligent curriculums can also help with the educational aspect of your business’ overall goals and progress, from onboarding new employees to refresher courses for existing employees, helping to get everyone aligned with your sustainability ambitions from the get-go.
• Risk and security: Progressively written policies and transparent communications enable you to disseminate crucial information regarding safety protocols, emergency procedures, and potential hazards effectively. By keeping stakeholders and employees informed about risks and providing them with the necessary policy guidance and resources to mitigate them, you empower your workforce to make informed decisions and prioritize their well-being. Two-way communication enabled by effective digital marketing can play a crucial role in engaging key stakeholders within the organization in the process of assessing and improving your security protocols.

No matter, what business area you’re in, we can use our expertise to help you:

• Identify what’s working and what’s not across different business units within your organization
• Set achievable goals through effective communication
• Review and discover channels where you connect with internal customers
• Detect different internal audience segments and stakeholders
• Create alignment between audiences, channels, and goals
• Deliver targeted digital content to influence behavior and help with change management
• Build trust and a community-spirit among employees to strengthen their connection to the workplace

Employee engagement strategies give you a healthier and more profitable business. Contact Advito to learn how we can help.