5 Quick Tips for More Successful Brand Training

Much of the research around branding confirms that consistent branding drives revenue. Some studies even claim a 23% revenue increase due to cohesive branding [1]. Unfortunately, companies often have difficulty translating the importance of their brand and their brand training to their employees. 

A brand is more than just a logo and a color palette. It encompasses company values, purpose, and culture. But if employees don’t have the skills to express these values, then your customers certainly won’t get it either. Most often, this boils down to one simple problem: your employees don’t have the vocabulary or the context of the big picture. Moreover, front-line employees struggle to see past their individual roles. Luckily, with the right training strategy, you can engage employees and shape them into internal brand ambassadors.

How to Choose Your Brand Language

In order to effectively communicate the brand to your employees, you have to be strategic with your use of language. It should be clear, concise, and ideally catchy. Most importantly, you need to be able to tie the company values you’re describing to tangible behaviors.

Here are some questions that can help lead you to the proper language:

• What differentiates your company?
• Who does the company serve?
• Is the brand authentic?
• What does the company value?

Some studies even claim a 23% revenue increase due to cohesive branding.

You may also want to put together a two-sentence “elevator pitch” encompassing themes from these questions. Long-winded descriptions aren’t easy to remember or well-suited to casual conversations.

Aligning a Visual Strategy

A visual strategy is an integral part of branding, and just as important to brand training. The imagery associated with your brand language also has an impact on learning outcomes. Charles Plummer, our VP of Creative Services, offered some insight around visual strategy for eLearning in a recent interview. “It’s important to use the artwork in your course to communicate on both an aesthetic and instructional level,” he said. The way that your visuals interact with your content can further comprehension and recall.

Brand Training for Behavior Change

You need to be able to tie the company values you’re describing to tangible behaviors.

Understanding company values is a great start, but it’s still a few steps short of the on-brand behavior companies strive for. To accomplish that, brand training has to draw a connection between company values and practical situations. For example, how would an employee respond when their friend asks what service their company provides, or why they’re better than a competitor? Most importantly, training for on-brand behaviors help employees better represent company culture outside of the office.

Having high-quality brand training also creates a strong impact on your company by increasing the loyalty of your employees as well as your customers.  Having greater loyalty stabilizes your company and creates a more consistent experience.

Motivate Brand Training Consumption

Content consumption is an issue with brand training, as it is with any other subject. So, to get employees excited and attentive to yet another training program, try to make it more engaging and relevant. Here are a few tips to do just that:

How to Increase Engagement

• Make it about personal branding – Your employees are much more likely to promote your brand when they feel the company values are aligned with their personal values. People have a strong need to feel like they are making an important contribution, and that should be reflected in the training.
• Make the training relevant to the employees – Use common, realistic scenarios that your employees already encounter to add relevance.
• Consistently create educational content – Push smaller follow-up brand training content pieces to keep the subject top-of-mind.
• Make content sharing convenient – Allow your employees to easily send training content and branded material to one another. The effect of social influence will strengthen content consumption.
• Encourage participation through incentives – Whatever gets incentivized gets done.  By creating a reward system that supports the desired behaviors for your brand, your employees will become more like brand ambassadors.

Conclusion

A brand must convey company values and getting your employees on board is critical. That’s why your brand training has to translate those values into tangible behaviors. If you can motivate your employees to become brand ambassadors for your company through best practices in employee engagement, then you can increase employee loyalty, and create a more supportive and interactive community as well.

References:

[1] Branding Statistics