3 Ways Marketing Can Enhance Your Company Culture

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Corporate culture has arguably always been important. But as many business leaders are beginning to recognize, it is actually becoming more important as the modern workplace continues to evolve.

  • 88% of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success. (Source: Deloitte).
  • Employees’ overall ratings of their company’s qualities are 20% higher at companies with strong cultures. (Source: CultureIQ).
  • 90% of employees at winning company cultures are confident in their company’s leadership team. (Source: CultureIQ)

And while culture has become an increasingly important factor for employees, it is also on the top of mind for business leaders as well.

  • Companies with strong cultures saw a 4x increase in revenue growth. (Source: Forbes)
  • Being named a Best Place to Work is associated with a .75% stock jump. (Source: Glassdoor)
  • 82% of business leaders believe that culture is a potential competitive advantage. (Source: Deloitte)

Everyone in your organization makes hundreds of decisions that affect the business every day. Culture determines the quality of those decisions.

So, what does this have to do with marketing?

3 Ways Marketing Can Enhance Your Company Culture

While marketing might not be responsible for many of the factors that impact culture —  it can have a direct impact on creating certain aspects and taking your current culture to the next level.

Because of the unique place it sits within your organization, here are three ways marketing can enhance your company culture:

  • Supporting and re-casting vision. Leadership is responsible for casting the vision, but it’s not something that should happen once. Companies with positive cultures are constantly reminding employees of the vision employees are working together to achieve. Marketing can support this effort by using your expertise to help identify which messages will stick with your audience, your employees, and developing creative ways of keeping that vision in front of employees.
  • Learning and development: Continual learning and personal development are two big factors in employee satisfaction. Because marketing is often at the forefront of changes in the industry or updates to a product, you can play a valuable role in keeping employees educated on the latest trends worth noting.
  • Connection and collaboration: Marketing can help people stay connected — especially as more and more employees start working remotely. Whether it’s something incredibly simple like managing an internal employee Facebook group to share updates or putting together a more formal employee engagement plan, your marketing team can lead out in enhancing communication and collaboration between employees.

Here’s Why Your Marketing Probably Isn’t Working

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As the leader of a marketing agency, I have the opportunity to constantly meet business leaders who have questions about marketing or curious about our work. Almost every conversation starts with… “Our marketing strategy isn’t working…” or “We need a new marketing strategy that will help us reach more customers.” Once we dig a little deeper, there’s nearly one common reason why most companies struggle to generate success through their marketing efforts — they define marketing by thinking about tactics instead of strategy. Marketing Tactics vs. Marketing Strategy Let’s take a step back and look at the difference between strategy and tactics. In marketing terms…
  • Strategy = defining the space where the business decides to engage, and how it plans to win in the market.
  • Tactics = identifying the tools and executions deployed in order to deliver on that strategy.
A strategy is an overall framework that is filled in by the tactics you use. It is essential for determining which tactics will be most effective. When most businesses say their marketing strategy isn’t working, what they typically mean is that the tactics aren’t effective. When this happens, it’s likely an indicator that they didn’t take the time to develop a strategy in the first place. The reason their marketing strategy isn’t really working is that there wasn’t really a strategy to begin with. How to Develop a Marketing Strategy At Green Apple, there are a few key components we encourage brands to consider when developing a marketing strategy:
  • Define your target market and buyer personas. If you want your marketing tactics to work, you need to have absolute clarity about your ideal buyer and how they operate. You need to know their challenges and pain points. Defining your target audience and evaluating the buyer’s journey are essential for an effective marketing strategy.
  • Identify your unique value proposition. What makes you better than your competitors? Answering this question is imperative for your marketing strategy. Your value proposition is a unique value that a buyer desires and will receive from your company, product, or service. Think of the word “only” and how you can apply it to your business, products, and services.
  • Determine how marketing will support your larger business objectives. In order to develop and implement an effective marketing strategy, you need to be absolutely clear on what you’re trying to achieve. What are the larger business objectives your marketing strategy is supposed to support?
Once you’ve addressed each of the issues above, you need to start asking which tactics you should use to reach customers. It’s only after your target market and buyer personas have been defined that you can decide which kinds of tools and processes might be deployed to reach them.