PR Can Increase ROI Simply by Helping Employee Comms

The authority on mixternal comms

Previously I’ve argued that if you trust your internal communications team to support a business initiative internally, then you can use the content they create to support your communications strategy externally.

How Internal Comms Can Support PR Strategies

The opposite is also true. Seeing as how Public Relations is entrusted to spread the company’s narrative across the media landscape, the same messaging can be shared with the organization’s most important audience—the employees.

• This, of course, assumes that both PR and Internal Comms are signing from the same messaging hymnal.

PR can effortlessly increase ROI simply by sharing already completed work with the employee comms team. The six actions outlined below are easy and require very little—if any—extra work. Honestly!

• If you’re in PR: These six practices will increase the ROI of your time and energy, especially for the material that “goes nowhere” externally. You will be appreciated for being a proactive team player.

• If you’re in Employee Comms: The collaboration will be like adding a stealth member to your team, especially around content creation. You’ll be in lockstep with the external narrative.

  • Pro tip: Forward this article to your PR team. Ask them for a meeting to discuss these six tips. Which could they implement starting today?

• If you’re in Corp Comms: Everyone benefits from increased cooperation, which also boosts transparency into each other’s work, as well as sympathy for the day-to-day activities that go largely unseen. One team, one dream, right?

Six Ways PR Can Increase ROI by Sharing With Employee Comms

1. Include employee comms on your email distros.

Each week/month you send a note to all of your internal stakeholders with an update on external news and media coverage, including placements of bylines, earned media, the making of lists, industry awards and recognition, and so on.

Include the employee comms team on this distribution. They can very easily re-share the links with employees in group chats, newsletters, and internal/external blog posts. Moreover, employee comms learns who’s who (SMEs) within the company and industry, so they know who to go to for quotes and material for future articles, presentations, town halls, etc.

• Show me one expert who doesn’t like looking good in front of their entire company, and I’ll show you a sole proprietorship.