If you have your own business, you’ll know that your company image is crucial to building up a respected reputation within your industry.
Businesses nowadays set aside huge budgets for marketing and rebranding, in a bid to control their image.
While your advertisement, branding and social media presence are all important, think about your staff.
Your employees play a huge part in how others see your brand, and it’s important that they’re making the right impression.
Establishing brand identity
First things first, you might well know your business and its values like the back of your hand (it is your business after all), but do your employees?
Like it or not, they are a spokesperson for your brand, and they need to be as well drilled on your mission statement as you are. If you don’t have a mission statement, here are some tips to get you started.
This is doubly important if your staff are going to be dealing directly with customers and clients. You can’t be everywhere at once, so your employees need to all be on the same page about your values and principles.
Having said all this, if your employees don’t really care about the business, you can’t expect them to represent it in the way you want them to.
To get your staff to engage more with the business, give them opportunities to give feedback on the way things are being run.
If you don’t treat your employees with respect, you can’t expect them to show that kind of respect back to the business.
Social media
Increasingly, social media presence is becoming a very important tool for business branding.
However, it’s not just your own social media accounts you need to keep an eye on. If your employees are speaking ill of the business it can quickly spiral into a real problem, but on the flipside, if they’re speaking enthusiastically it can be a great marketing tool.
As such, don’t go overboard by banning social media, but encourage it. As long as you make your business a happy place to work, your employees should have no reason to say anything negative online about it.
Having said this, you should probably enforce some form of social media guidelines so that everybody knows what is expected of them, and that they understand that they represent the company even when they’re out of work!
Appearance
Your employees aren’t just representing you in the way they handle themselves. Even their appearance has a huge impact on how others perceive your business.
If you don’t already, perhaps you should consider implementing staff uniform. Not only will this create a sense of unity, and reflect a professional image, but it acts as some free promotion by having your company name and logo clearly visible.
While the benefits of having your staff wearing work uniform might not be immediately tangible, we spoke to Stitch Embroidery who told us: “Our clients have told us that they’ve had a noticeable upturn in employee attitude since adopting a uniform policy.
“Sometimes it’s that putting the uniform on in the morning puts the staff into that ready-to-work mind-set, or sometimes it’s that it makes them feel more like part of a team.
“Ultimately though, your employees will feel the extra responsibility that they are representing your business and brand, and will step up to that responsibility!”
Your employees play a massive role in how your business is perceived by customers, suppliers, and just about anyone that you come into contact with.
Making sure that they are a happy, professional and knowledgeable workforce will go a long way toward building that winning brand that customers and clients will want to keep coming back to.
