A Tool To Follow Internal Brand Guidelines In Employee Communication

Internal branding is important to ensure you have consistency with both your stylistic branding and corporate ethos by encouraging your employees to live and breathe the brand and its values so that translates to the way they represent the brand in the external world.

Quite simply, if your employees don’t actually believe in the company’s brand, how can you expect them to convince anyone else to?

Why internal branding is so important

When you implement internal branding strategies you can help your employees develop a personal connection with the brand, improve teamwork, improve productivity and boost employee engagement.  

A strong internal brand can also help you to become an employer of choice, attracting top talent in your industry, and to retain the employees that you have.

Many companies, however, ignore this critical aspect of their branding. 

Research from the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing found that only 55% of marketers believe that their internal brand culture is aligned with their external brand values. 

And a Gallup study found that less than 30% of employees believed in their employer’s brand - which shows that the majority of employees in many organizations don’t believe in what they are doing.

Building an internal brand can also help to add excitement and investment into major projects and initiatives that your employees are working on, or can be used as part of a change management campaign.

The importance of internal brand guidelines

Brand guidelines are a set of rules outlining how your company represents itself both internally to your employees, as well as externally to customers, stakeholders, and the wider world. Your internal and external brand guidelines can either be standard or complementary depending on your internal branding and external branding strategies.

Internal brand guidelines are a resource for any employees to access to understand what needs to happen whenever the brand is being represented and ensures a consistent and professional approach.

Internal brand guidelines should include:

• Your company’s corporate identity including the vision, mission, values 
• The tone of any writing
• Design standards such as logos, color palettes, fonts and font sizes, bullet styles, spacing, etc.
• Approvals process for producing branded material
• A language and grammar style guide

These guidelines will ensure that when it comes to internal communications, anyone creating and distributing either written or visual content will know what is required of them when they design any material and ensuring that the material aligns with the company’s internal brand.

How the DeskAlerts Skin Editor can help with internal branding

When you use DeskAlerts as your internal communications system, you can easily ensure that the messages you send to employees reflect your internal branding. 

78% of our customers have told us that they prefer to send messages with a branded design.

The new DeskAlerts Skin Editor tool makes it even easier to achieve internal brand building and can help you to follow brand guidelines in your internal communications and build a strong brand in your company from the inside.

The Skin Editor is available as an optional plug-in and lets you design branded templates for pop-up alerts, video alerts, emergency alerts, mobile alerts, surveys, quizzes, polls, and digital displays.

The Skin Editor differs from the DeskAlerts skin service in that people within your company can create the skins, letting you do your internal branding design in-house - whereas with the skin service you need to get in touch with DeskAlerts to design the skins for you. The skin service also offers a limited number of designs, while you can create unlimited designs with the skin editor. 

With the Skin Editor, you can design custom skin within 15 minutes, whereas if you outsource it to our team it can take more time.

What is departmental branding and why should you consider it?

Many diverse organizations use “sub-brands” or “brands within a brand” to differentiate different departments, teams and projects that are being carried out by an organization.

These sub-brands will sit under the overall umbrella of the organization’s branding guidelines, and may have their own logos, fonts, colors and images that distinguish them from other parts of the organization, while being harmonious with the organization’s overall brand identity.

For internal communications purposes, it can help when a lot of information needs to go to employees from different sections of the organization, such as IT, Human Resources, payroll, accounts payable, internal communications, the CEO and other leadership team members. By branding a department internally, employees will understand where the communication is coming from.

With the DeskAlerts Skin Editor, there is no limit to the number of template skins you can make, which helps you with branding a department internally and means you can even create distinct templates for “sub-brands” within your organization. For example, the IT department might use its own color scheme so that when there is a pop-up notification about an outage, employees will be able to tell that it is an IT message and not a payroll one.

Different authorized users from within your organization can log into the DeskAlerts portal to design a template that reflects their departmental branding, and send the kind of message they need to send to employees.

***

Having well-developed internal branding guidelines is essential to foster a uniform, consistent, and transparent identity across your entire business. In doing so, you can have a recognizable brand identity that sets standards and rules and your core values, aligned to showcase your organization as professional and impressive.