To help you with your marketing and communication strategies, here's a collection of tips to help you market your survey to your employees.
When you're getting ready to launch the employee survey, you want to ensure your employees are educated and excited to share their feedback. To do so, you have to think like a marketer and your employees are your customer.
While your employees aren't going to "buy" the survey, you do need them to buy-in so they participate.
So, we thought it would be helpful to share some general marketing tips and suggestions to help market your survey. This is especially important since the workplace changed significantly since COVID-19 and your efforts may primarily be digital now. Let's dive in!
Use Empathetic Messaging
Put yourself in your employees shoes. Your employees are your audience, so communicate the benefits and tie the purpose of the survey to your employees' perspective. For example, you may be interested in benchmarking data and getting insight into engagement levels within your organization, but your employees don't care about data. They want to be heard and they want action.
Be Transparent
To be transparent, offer a space for Q&A and be prepared to answer questions. For example, employees may be wary about an employee survey and they will likely be concerned about confidentiality. You can gain their commitment by communicating that you are using a third party survey partner to ensure they can provide honest feedback and the responses are completely anonymous and confidential. If you are transparent about the survey and what the experience will be like, employees will feel more confident to participate and provide honest feedback.
Think "Omnichannel"
Omnichannel is a marketing (and sales) approach that meets the customers wherever they are and the experience is seamless. While we recommend incorporating messaging and communication into existing company or department meetings to streamline scheduling and capture the largest employee audiences, don't stop there! Consider other channels, too.
For the best survey participation and results, meet your employees where they are. Where do your employees consume information? For example, promote the survey on the company's intranet, communication channels like Slack, flyer board, high traffic office locations (if applicable), newsletters, and internal social media outlets. Depending on your team and culture, these marketing efforts may even be delivered with a funny meme. Feel free to be creative, which leads us to the next tip: personalize the experience.
Personalize the Experience
Your employees are all going to be in different places. New hires may have different engagement levels than employees who have been with the company for over five years. Your employees will also all have different levels of awareness and understanding of what an engagement survey is. But for everyone, interest depends on the experience - who delivered the message, when was it delivered, and how was it delivered?
To help you get started, we have Email Templates with messaging that can be adjusted based on who is sending the information and who is receiving the information. Feel free to think outside the box and consider different angles. For example, a manager may choose to send survey reminders to the entire team via email and, if it fits the team, maybe attach a funny meme. Another manager may choose to deliver the reminders personally in a 1-1 setting. Regardless, make sure that the experience is personalized to your team, their understanding, and your culture.
Next Steps
- Did you set a Timeline Strategy and a Participation Goal?
- Marketing and Communication Strategies and Templates
- Check out the #BeHeard Survey Confidentiality Promise
- After the survey is complete, take action and Share the Results