Building an Employee Brand—Thanks to Your App

There are many ways to engage your employees in the workplace. Traditional tactics range from the basic poster in the break room all the way to fancy gamification portals that reward and recognize. I’ve personally developed hundreds of tactics and campaigns to help dozens of clients improve employee engagement and have learned that in today’s digital world, tactics have to be creative, attention-grabbing, intrinsically motivating and most importantly, quickly executed.

In many ways, your mobile app can become a one-stop shop to engage, entertain, inform, reward and recognize your greatest employee brand ambassadors. Engaging with employees through your app offers a wide variety of possibilities, which helps to keep your engagement campaign fresh.  This can include:

• Gamification
• Surveys
• Feedback
• Augmented reality
• Quizzes
• Coupons/loyalty/incentive based marketing
• Important corporate communications
• Videos/photos/multi-media
• Much, much more…

Mobile technology allows for rich features such as augmented reality scanning (think scavenger hunts and other incentive-based communications) while using proximity technologies such as geofences and iBeacons to trigger the right message at the right time. Continuous loop frameworks such as CoIL Engagement™ allow you to analyze results and retarget automatically, based on parameters you set in advance. Messages become personalized, making employees feel more connected to the brand—because the brand understands them.

Most comprehensive employee engagement programs take a minimum of several months to design and implement—if not years. You can now utilize the power of mobile technology to cut this development and execution time to a fraction of what traditional programs require, at a fraction of the costs, by using SAAS platforms. The app your employees will see is proprietary and branded your way—the technology is SAAS and pay as you go/use. Low risk—high return!

You’ve heard the advice, “fail often” right? In the mobile world, you can afford to take risks, to try many different things, so that you fail often and quickly discover what works and what doesn’t. Since mobile marketing is fast and cost-effective, you can trigger many different tactics at once, or take it slow and try just a few or even one approach at a time. Think of mobile marketing as your own little internal branding lab that helps you to identify and focus your efforts on the most productive approaches to employee engagement, saving development and management costs in the long run.