Looking at a marketing strategy, you can easily identify a few critical areas that make or break it. Most of these are fairly obvious, such as where your marketing investment goes. Loads of strategies invest in things that simply aren’t effective at generating leads, meaning you lose money. You also have the biggest issue of all: marketing to the wrong target audience. If you do this, all your efforts are wasted on people with almost zero chance of becoming leads and customers.
Having said that, there are some troublesome elements that are less obvious at first glance. Let’s not beat around the bush, you’ve read the title and it’s hooked you in. How are your employees ruining your marketing strategy? How can there be a correlation between the two?
Well, the deeper you dig, the more ways you discover that your employees can harm your marketing strategy. Throughout this post, you’ll see precisely how this can happen and what you can do to prevent it.
Sending out the wrong messages
A huge chunk of your marketing campaign will depend on employees. For example, you need people running your social media accounts as part of your social media marketing strategy. This is where things can get awkward as your employees might send out the wrong messages – both literally and metaphorically.
In a literal sense, they could send messages that really don’t reflect your brand image at all. This makes it hard for your audience to identify with your company as there’s all sorts of confusion surrounding your image. What tone are you trying to give off? What is your brand image? Poor employees can mess this up, meaning you have to start all over again trying to build your brand and send out the right tone to your target audience.
Similarly, they can send out the wrong messages just in how they behave and act. You need employees to align with your cultural fit, which forms a key element of your branding. As you’re well aware, branding is then at the core of your marketing strategy. If your employees give off a completely different message to your company, it looks bad. For instance, people working for you are seen or heard doing things that are inherently bad for the environment, but your brand is all about promoting an eco-friendly future. It confuses consumers as they wonder what your brand actually stands for.
Damaging your reputation
Employees can also be responsible for damaging your reputation, which impacts the success of your marketing strategy. In the example above, we can predict that consumers will have a negative response to employees that go against what a brand pushes forward. It makes your company seem contradictory – it’s like you preach about certain values but then you don’t follow them yourself. You have to remember that your employees are a direct reflection of your brand!
So, if they are involved in scandals, your business will take the brunt of it. This is, again, a key reason why hiring for cultural fit is so important. You need people in your team that align with the key messages and values your company puts across. In turn, they are less likely to stray from this, meaning your brand image is clear for all to see – and they actually end up helping your brand and promoting your business.
A damaged reputation is hard to recover from, but not impossible. It will mean that a lot of your marketing efforts are wasted, however. People will be less likely to click on your ads or pay attention to your content if you’ve been hit with some negative publicity.
Poor customer service
When we talk about customer service, we’re talking about all ways in which your employees can serve your customers. Believe it or not, but this has a direct impact on your marketing efforts. For example, many consumers will contact a company to make inquiries or ask about certain products/services. If they are met with terrible levels of customer support, they’re unlikely to proceed any further and will look elsewhere. Thus, your employees could cost valuable leads because of their terrible levels of customer service.
Similarly, your sales team plays a massive role throughout the marketing cycle. They are responsible for converting many of your leads, and a poor level of service will mean they don’t do this. It results in lots of money being pumped into marketing strategies that generate loads of leads but end in a terrible conversion rate.
Lastly, you have the issue of poor customer service relating to existing customers. These are people that have been converted and spent money on your business. But, a bad level of customer service may mean they leave and never return. Not only that, but they leave bad reviews that make your marketing efforts even harder. You have to try promoting a business that has awful reviews, putting a lot of people off. Again, it means you can waste so much money!
How can you stop your employees from ruining your marketing strategy?
Obviously, they aren’t doing it on purpose. Nevertheless, you need to take action before things get out of hand and your business is sending money down the drain. Here are some tactics you can try:
- Improve your hiring process – We mentioned it a few times, but hiring for cultural fit is a key thing to focus on. Don’t hire people based on their experience alone; look at their values and see if they fit your brand or not. If they do, there’s less chance of them sending out the wrong messages and messing up your brand image.
- Keep your employees motivated – Often, poor levels of customer service are linked to low levels of motivation from employees. They don’t feel inclined to work hard for your business, possibly because they feel unappreciated or unseen. As such, finding ways to motivate them can rewrite the script. With platforms like Motivosity, you can have tools that help you recognize and see your employees. Shower them with praise, give them raises, and they will start to feel happier at work. From here, the motivation to do well increases, boosting the level of customer service across the board.
- Train your employees – One of the biggest marketing mistakes is using untrained employees to handle your content. This can include writing blogs or social media posts, and you assume that anyone can do it. Realistically, you need to train your employees so they understand how to create good marketing content. It can stop the wrong messages from being put across, ensuring that your business maintains a consistent brand image.
- Outsource – If you want, you can also consider outsourcing a lot of jobs to other companies or contractors. For instance, a marketing agency can handle all of your social media and content, while a customer support agency can deal with that side of things. It means you get expert services from professionals, and they aren’t tied to your company. So, if there are any scandals amongst the other companies, it won’t reflect badly on your brand.
All in all, this post should show you how your employees could ruin your marketing strategy. It seems like a very negative post, but what if you flip things around. If you hire the right people and have great employees working for you, they can aid your marketing strategy! It’s all about identifying whether or not your team is holding you back. If they are, you need to take action to right the wrongs and ensure your team helps your business instead.
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