
How Company Culture Can Improve Your Marketing Efforts
Most employers understand that their company culture will have a profound impact on their recruiting, team productivity, and internal morale. But they may not realize that their culture can also strongly influence their marketing efforts.
What is this relationship like, and how can you use company culture to your advantage in this context?
First, let’s examine the many sides of company culture. The better you understand your own organizational culture, the better you’ll be able to implement it as part of your marketing campaign. It’s also valuable to recognize that each element of your company culture can have a different kind of impact on your target audience and on your marketing potential overall.
Values
One of the most prominent aspects of your company culture will be your company’s core values. These values are important principles or philosophies that guide how you operate your business, both externally and internally.
For example, your business may hold safety as the ultimate top priority. It may prioritize collaboration over individual efforts. It may extol the virtues of giving back to the community. In any case, if your business is seen as altruistic through its core values, your messaging may become more persuasive or may be capable of reaching new types of people.
Leadership
Your leaders also have a prominent impact on your company’s culture and how your company is perceived. Your CEO and other executives may not make an appearance in all your advertising efforts, but in some marketing approaches, their presence can be felt.
Good leadership can make your marketing more impactful, while bad leadership can make even the most creative campaigns fall flat.
Communication
How your company communicates is typically a reflection of its internal values and overall culture. Are you open, honest, and transparent in your messaging? If so, people will be much more likely to trust your marketing and advertising materials. Are you typically more closed, careful, and terse? If so, your words may not be as powerful, and you may need to find an alternative path to persuading your audience.
Fairness
Increasingly, many demographic segments are expressing significant concern over issues of fairness, along the lines of diversity, equity, and inclusion. If your company culture favors fairness and equality, you’ll have an easier time appealing to these groups.
Community
Also, how you engage with your community reflects your company culture. Being outgoing and volunteering your time and effort for the community generally reflects well on your business, and gives you more opportunities for brand exposure, visibility, and trust building.
How Company Culture Impacts Your Marketing
In addition to the influences we listed above, you should understand that company culture impacts your marketing in several ways:
Core Material
Sometimes, you can use your company culture as part of your core material and messaging. For example, you can circulate an ad that explains why your organization is ethically superior to your competitors or one that highlights how happy and satisfied your employees are. You have to be careful here, as misrepresenting your culture or unduly bragging could actively work against you. Instead, try to work your culture and values into your marketing messaging as smoothly as possible.
New Opportunities
Certain aspects of your company culture also reveal new opportunities to show off your brand to new people. For example, volunteering for a charitable cause, appointing a new leader, or reaching certain targets aligned with your goals could be great chances to reach new people in new ways.
Public Perception
Also keep in mind that your company values and culture might impact how people perceive your messaging, even if those elements aren’t present in the messaging itself. If your company has a bad reputation for polluting the environment and covering up scandals, for example, almost any message you produce is going to be less valuable.
How to Harness the Power of Your Company Culture in Your Marketing Efforts
So what strategies can your business use to harness the power of company culture in your marketing efforts?
Solidify your culture (if you haven’t already).
If you don’t have a solid, consistent company culture in place, now is the perfect time to build or refine it. You won’t be able to highlight the best aspects of your organizational culture if you don’t even know what they are.
Highlight the best aspects of your culture in your messaging.
Try to incorporate the best aspects of your culture in your messaging. You can do this either explicitly or implicitly.
For example, you can distribute an ad that highlights the safety record of your organization, or you can simply include a diverse cast of actors to showcase your commitment to fairness and equality more subtly.
Demonstrate your culture consistently.
No matter what, you need to demonstrate your culture consistently and across all platforms. No one is going to believe that your organization is open and transparent if you refuse to acknowledge contentious subjects relevant to your business on social media, for example.
Measure and analyze your efforts.
It may not be entirely clear how your audience is going to respond to your company values or the relationship between those values and your marketing. Accordingly, it’s important to consistently measure and analyze your results so you can improve in the future.
Consider adjusting.
If you find that your marketing isn’t resonating the way you expect, or if there appears to be a gap between your organizational values and the values of your audience, consider adjusting. Changing a company culture isn’t easy and isn’t always the right move, but in some cases, it could help your business evolve and build a better reputation in this era.
Company culture and marketing are often treated as entirely separate concepts, but it’s better to think of them as having a tightly interrelated relationship. If you want to be successful in marketing, you need to polish and improve upon your company culture, then harness the power of that culture to make your marketing even better.