While you’re busy developing high-quality content for your customers, you may be overlooking a valuable audience: your current and future employees.
The heart of any great organization is its people, and a culture-driven content marketing strategy can draw on that belief to enhance employee morale, attract incredible talent, and inspire a high-performing team that wants to stick around.
Here, we’ll illustrate how to craft culture-focused content that engages the people at the center of your company’s success.
Employees Are Part of Your Audience, Too
Most companies lack a dedicated strategy for engaging their “internal audience”—their own people (and potential new employees). Sure, they might have a Careers page with job openings and a list of core values, but here’s the thing: if you want to attract and retain top talent, that’s not going to cut it.
What if you thought bigger, recognizing current and future employees as worthy of a compelling content strategy? By developing culture-centric content around the soul of your company and the experiences of its workforce, you’ll forge an employer brand as bold as your business brand.
Content and culture
To be clear, content can’t fix a lifeless (or worse—bad) company culture. But if you have a healthy internal culture, you should proudly show it off! Don’t assume everyone already knows about your team’s give-back initiatives, its prize-winning projects, or the bouncy house that marketing stuffed into the conference room for April Fool’s Day. Your customers have no idea what really goes on inside your business, and prospective employees may know even less if they’ve never interacted with your brand.
Meaningful culture-focused content not only sparks happiness internally but also gives outsiders even more reasons to care about your company.
The cost of underestimating employee engagement
Ignoring your internal audience can come with a hefty price tag. Estimates from Workable, Gomada, and Forbes suggest that you can expect to spend anywhere from 50% to 400% of an employee’s salary replacing them. And Payactiv references a Gallup study showing that a 100-person company could face annual turnover costs upwards of $2.6 million.
Of course, numbers only tell part of the story. Think of the projects left hanging, the collective sigh as workloads balloon to cover the gaps, and the hit to morale. We’ve all seen it happen, and it’s not pretty.
A culture-centric content marketing strategy can organically draw the right people to your door while dramatically reducing churn.
How to Craft a Culture-Focused Content Strategy
Kickstart your new content strategy by opening a dialogue with your employees. Begin by inviting them to look beyond the company’s core values and describe what they actually value about their jobs, their coworkers, and the company culture as a whole. Your business’s core values probably don’t fully capture the personal values that truly form your company culture.
Surveys can also provide deep insights into your team’s needs and perceptions. You’ll want to seek feedback from employees across all departments, levels, and tenures to understand the full array of reasons why they joined your organization—and why they continue to stay.
To encourage open, ongoing communication, you may want to consider enlisting a neutral third party to lead these conversations regularly. With an outside source keeping the feedback fresh, you’ll never run out of relevant content to share.
Newsletter content
Great content is a scalable, one-to-many touchpoint that feels personal and authentic.
We love the effectiveness of a monthly email newsletter in providing a small but significant connection with your entire team. Individual meetings aren’t feasible for a CEO with a sizable workforce, but an internal newsletter can keep every employee informed and connected.
- Highlight achievements—which departments have wins to share?
- Share updates—what news needs to be shared outside the C-suite?
- Announce opportunities—does your team know about your upcoming events, trainings, and job openings?
- Invite feedback—which benefit do your employees like (or dislike) most?
An Atlanta business leveraged the last idea and learned that its team was less interested in the company’s box seats at the local stadium and more interested in regularly catered lunches. The CEO took the feedback to heart and thrilled his entire team with daily catering that ultimately cost the company less than the underused sports tickets.
Social media
Get more bang for your content buck by repurposing elements from your newsletter as social media content. The perk of publishing culture-focused content on social media is that it does double duty, reaching your internal team and your broader outside audience.
Why would anyone other than your employees care about photos from your holiday gathering? Because these behind-the-scenes moments tell them more about what you value than your actual core values.
Prospective employees—especially the younger generations—prefer to work for companies that demonstrate external success and rich internal culture; customers also like a more holistic view of the brands they do business with, and nothing offers a big-picture perspective quite like social media.
Interspersed among your customer-focused content, use social media to commemorate team events, projects in progress, and moments of employee life inside your organization.
Go one step further and actively engage with your team’s social media content. Every business has a social media presence these days, but not every owner takes the time to like or comment on the posts their team creates. Showing up on social media not only boosts your team’s morale but also indicates to outsiders that you’re an active participant in your company’s culture.
A Connecticut brand posted a video of their CEO getting dropped into a dunk tank at a company party—a hilarious moment that humanized the executive for team members, customers, and job seekers—and the CEO reshared it to his personal page. Everyone loved it.
Culture-Focused Content Is Always Relevant
Don’t wait until you’re desperately hiring to launch an internal content marketing strategy. Make the investment now to strengthen your existing team and begin cultivating a pipeline of potential employees eager for an opening.
The growing workforce of younger professionals is accustomed to personalized experiences defined by easy social media interactions with their favorite brands and versatile work cultures that treat them as individuals. With content that speaks directly to these expectations, you can set your company apart from your competitors.
Who’s doing it well?
Two companies that wholeheartedly leverage their rich company cultures to attract and retain team members are Sense and Paperless Parts, both Every Little Word clients. You can also look to many SaaS companies for excellent examples of culture-driven content; because SaaS businesses hire quickly and at scale, they’ve learned the value of employee-focused content for building talented teams.
Content Crafted with Care
When your team feels valued and understood, they don’t just stay—they become your best ambassadors. And when you craft content for current and future employees with the same care as content for customers, it doesn’t just speak to them; it speaks through them.
Whether you’re talking to a room of investors or a single new hire, the right words can inspire, motivate, and engage. Every Little Word can help you create a workplace narrative that resonates with every member of your team—the people who work there today and the ones you’ll bring on board tomorrow.
