Far too often, companies use company culture as an excuse not to hire qualified candidates. They see company culture as the final arbiter of whether they should hire someone for a vacant position. But this misuse of company culture can often exclude people who can help in the organization’s marketing strategies. Too often, this leads to marketing campaigns that are non-responsive to what the audience expects to see and know.
Think about it: when your company culture does not accept different views and ways of life, how can the marketing strategies be diverse? How can you reach diverse customer segments with your content and internet marketing? Are you going to be aware of your customers’ problems and the steps you need to take to get there? You may never ask the right questions if you don’t understand the different views of your target market.
Even when you outsource marketing strategy coaches, you could be excluding marketing agencies that do not fall into your line of thinking. This is the worst thing you can do. You need to find a marketing and ad agency that will provide a fresh insight into a diversified market.
What Happens When Company Culture Becomes Exclusive?
When you don’t ask the right questions, you will never come up with the right answers. Excluding groups of people will lead your marketing campaigns astray. It means you could be offending different sectors when you are simply trying to sell your products and services.
Hiring Culture
Allow inclusivity and diversity to enrich your company. You don’t need to set quotas on who to hire for every position. This is not about race, religion, or age. It’s about welcoming new ideas and letting your company absorb the unique gifts people come with. Don’t exclude hiring people because they may not fit in with your organization’s culture. Find out through a series of interviews what gifts they can share and what your company can learn from them.
Bernie Sanders is almost 80 years old, and yet his views spoke to millennials that they are his primary supporters. It’s not about how different the candidates and your company culture are. It’s about how they complement each other. In the end, you need to prioritize skills, talents, and potentials over the possibility that these candidates don’t fit into your office culture.
Workplace Culture
By transforming your hiring process, you are already welcoming people with different backgrounds and perspectives. The next step is to make sure you have the workplace culture for them to thrive. Your priority should be to increase employee engagement by involving them in the decision-making process, spending time with them, and accepting their feedback.
Studies showed that companies with high engagement with their employees outperform their competitors by 147%. They also cut down on expenses related to recruiting new employees, onboarding, and training. The more engagement there is in a workplace, the more likely you will be able to retain your workers.
You can start doing this through employee workshops and team-building activities. Making sure that everyone is a part of the organization will improve the chances of having better and improved engagement in the office. Even your most out-of-the-box hire will somehow feel welcome.
Content Culture
A diverse workplace will also give you fresh insights into the problems your customers face and how your company can help them. It will transform the content you produce; the same content you intend to attract customers to your business. With insights coming from different perspectives, you will gain a new understanding of how to craft content that speaks to your target audiences.
Good marketing content does not only sell products and services. It also sells, above others, solutions to the customers’ problems. Its focus is on helping people rather than selling to them (though that is the end goal eventually).
Make it a habit to ask your employees to answer surveys and questionnaires. Whether they are office assistants, managers, assembly-line workers, or executives, they have come into contact with different groups of people. They have varied experiences. These will help the business come up with potential solutions to your customers’ everyday problems.
It is not easy to separate your business from the culture that you think it has built. While company culture is a crucial element of managing a business, it does not mean excluding other people to keep that culture thriving. The inability of companies to welcome fresh perspectives will impact not only the marketing strategies they come up with but also the growth of the business. New ideas and different views will keep your company relevant and up to speed.