Should your entire team be involved in marketing?

This question is a very important one, and there are very differing answers to it. Some managers still have team members working in silos, where others have chosen a more integrated approach involving all team members at multiple stages of the decision-making and development process. Should you follow the thought leaders and include your team in your company’s marketing? Well, here’s why you should – and why you kind of already are:

The Company

Including other department decision-makers and managers in marketing brainstorming sessions can lead to new discoveries and content marketing ideas. This also helps to ensure that the over-arching PR message, that is necessary to get across with marketing campaigns, is understood by all.

Individuals from other departments also make great test subjects for marketing campaigns. Marketers can run preliminary pilot studies on internal staff members from all departments to gauge the effectiveness of each marketing message before sending them out into the world.

If you think about it, all company employees are quasi-marketers in some way or form. They might wear their company tee-shirts in public, or talk about new marketing campaigns to their family members and peers. If they know the marketing message, employees will most likely share it.

This means that you need to pay specific attention to your employee branding.

What is the definition of employee branding?

Employee branding involves introducing the organisation in the best possible light to employees, job candidates, internal and external stakeholders as well as customers. It’s about moving your employees on board with who your company is as well as what you do. Through social sharing in addition to word of mouth, they convey that externally.”

Academics have offered the follow definition of employee branding:

“[Employee branding] is the procedure by which employees internalise the preferred brand image and are encouraged to show the image to customers as well as other organisational constituents.”

Companies with a strong employee brand have the power to turn their employees into formidable brand ambassadors. In addition, they are more likely to enhance employee loyalty, build a positive brand name, increase employee motivation levels as well as attract and secure the correct talent.

The marketing department

If you’re not sure about if you should include your whole marketing team in your over-arching marketing strategy, this section is for you. Each promotional campaign involves a series of individual actions by various marketing professionals. Copy writers, graphic designers, marketing managers, customer relations staff, and others have to fulfil their roles to create the campaign as a whole. For it to be truly cohesive, the aforementioned professionals should know what’s happening across the campaign at all times.

Like individual contributions from content producers play a significant role in the overall marketing campaign, so too do individual campaigns and their auxiliary functions combine within the organisation’s overall marketing and public relations strategy. Print advertising needs to know what online PPC is pushing, and other heads of content should be privy to what other public-facing brand voices are saying.

Marketing staff are ambassadors for the brands, its promotional campaigns, and what the overall goals the company hopes to achieve. By sharing with all workers from all marketing departments the specifics of campaigns, they become early-access vendors who start spreading the campaign information to drum up public interest.

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