How to make your internal comms in telecoms 10x more exciting and engaging
If you work in the telecoms industry, you’ll know that internal communications is a role which requires you to constantly tweak and refine your strategy and tactics to produce the best results.
Your comms strategy, which worked the previous year, may not effectively work this year, so your engagement levels may drastically change. It’s also important to note that trends outside of the workplace will greatly impact how your employees consume content. For example, Since the rise of TikTok, people have been desperate to consume short video content, and anything published in the written word has dramatically declined.
So how can you make your internal comms in telecoms more exciting? This article will explain the best tactics for making your internal comms 10x more engaging and how to deploy them in your telecoms business easily.
Don’t overlook the power of videos
As we mentioned previously, TikTok and Instagram Reels have taken the world by storm for a good reason too. People are so much more susceptible to videos than text, with 95% of viewers remembering a video ad rather than a blog or text ad.
Video is dominating social media and slowly impacting the internal comms space too. If you want to get your message across to your telecoms team in a fun and engaging way, we’d suggest video as a way to do this. If you think, “I don’t have the time or money to make professional videos.” That’s not a problem; many free video creation sites are out there, making it easy to create professional video content.
Here is a selection of websites we’d recommend: Animoto, Vimeo, and Movavi. And if you use an internal comms app like Ocasta Engage, you can quickly embed your videos into any content you post. You can even turn them into quick learning tasks to ensure your telecoms team fully understands the information you’re sending.
Think beyond the traditional realms of communications
Gamification isn’t just for the learning and development department. Why not turn your communications into a quick game to mix up your comms strategy and get your telecoms team interested in what you have to say?
When you repurpose your information into a speedy five-minute daily challenge, your telecoms team will likely retain the information. It will also stop your telecoms teams from having to read long pages of text consistently.
One of our telecom clients used our gamification app to make their comms more exciting. Staff could play every day and had three daily challenges to complete, which only took around 5 minutes, but the results were impressive. 65% of employees were so engaged that they were playing the game in their own time, outside of office hours.
The question format would look like this: Our latest offer has been released, but which benefit should you discuss with the customer? A. Free delivery? B. The waterproof features? C. Do the three days return policies?
This ensures that your telecoms team doesn't just skim your content but understands it.
Encourage friendly conversations in the comments section of your articles
If you don’t have a comments section for your internal comms, you could be missing a crucial step which could make your comms more exciting and engaging. Comments allow for feedback and give your employees a voice. This makes it easier for conversation to flow and for you to gain a deeper insight into what your team is thinking.
If you do have a comments box, you must encourage your team to use it. You want to create Buzz around your comms; not only is this amazing for improving engagement, but it makes people more invested in what you are saying.
Here’s a quick example of how you could do this in your telecoms business:
Next month is the launch of our Springtime Selling Competition! We can’t wait to reward the hardest-working play team, and we’re excited for you to see the amazing offers we’re about to launch. You’ll get the chance to earn a 30% commission on all packages you sell, and the SpringTime Selling winner will get an all-expenses trip to Malta.
Do you feel ready for the competition, or is there anything you need more support on? Comment in the box below. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
By making employees aware that they can comment and will get a response, you'll dramatically increase the likely hood of them engaging.
Stop sending that mass message to your telecoms teams; they are ruining your engagement levels
Let’s start with a quick question. What do you do with all the spam mail that comes through your letterbox? You probably immediately bin it because it’s not tailored to you or your needs and desires.
That’s exactly what your telecoms team will do when they receive a mass email from you. They briefly skim the first line, assume it’s not useful to them and hit the delete button.
If the majority of your team are ignoring your comms, you need to think about personalising your content. Did you know that 82% of marketers have reported an increase in open rates through email personalisation?
How can you make your internal comms more personalised?
Segment your audience
Rather than sending your communications to all junior staff who work in all areas of your telecoms business. Segment each level of your team by what they do.
For example, if you have a group called junior staff, split them into junior staff (sales floor), junior staff (stockroom) junior staff (customer service). By doing this, you can tweak the content to suit them. Our internal comms platform for telecoms teams makes it exceptionally easy to segment your team so you can effortlessly send personalised comms.
Just to be clear, we’re not saying you have to write hundreds of different articles; you can just change certain words and phrases which are more relevant to each specific group in your telecoms team. For example, if you are discussing changes to your returns policy, you could tell your sales staff how this may affect their selling script. If you were talking to your stockroom staff, you might talk to them about how it may affect where they put returned goods or how they check items before they send them back.
Filter your internal communications so employees only see information which is relevant to them
Rather than tweaking content on your articles, why not categorise your comms so that employees only see information which is relevant to them? Because they will only be able to view information which is valuable to them, it will naturally increase engagement and keep them coming back for more.
Our internal communications platform for telecoms teams allows you to post any article, news post, how-to guide, manual or process article and it will personalise your employee’s news feed, so everything is specific to them and their role.
Speak about your team
People like people, and they especially like watching people they know. That’s exactly why Facebook and Instagram are so popular. We’re naturally interested in what others are doing. This is the same for internal comms.
If you are constantly publishing top-down heavy communications, which are rarely about the teams you are sending your comms to, your employees are naturally going to get bored of reading them. To make your internal comms more exciting and engaging, you must include insights from your telecoms teams or highlight a particular employee. For example, if you are writing about a change in your products. Highlight a team member who has been doing well to sell the benefits of those changes. Film a short video clip of them giving some top tips and share it. You can then repurpose this content for future posts too.
Go for the BuzzFeed titles
BuzzFeed is one of the most successful entertainment news sites in the world. The business has a monthly audience of more than 150 million readers. So how did they reach that success? By using controversial titles and list titles. BuzzSumo analysed which BuzzFeed headline categories are most effective for social sharing, and the same headlines can be used for your internal comms to boost engagement.
It’s important to add, we’re not talking about ‘click baity’ titles, just positioning your content in a way that’s compelling to the reader.
They found that the following categories had the most read articles:
Humour - Make your telecoms teams laugh with a funny title, and you’re almost guaranteed to get them to read on.
Identity - Titles that people can relate to. Buzzfeed is well-known for their ‘13 signs you’re a…’ types of articles. You can do this for your comms, for example, ‘10 ways the new sales guide to telecoms will make your life easier.’
Emotional - Posts which make your team feel something. Can you make your staff feel curious, happy, angry or sad? Think about this when writing your article title and content.
Be thought-provoking with what you are saying
Don’t write your articles with the intent for staff to read and move on with their day. Write articles which you know will leave them pondering over what you have said. To be thought-provoking means to be gripping, fascinating and intriguing. Keep this in mind whenever you write anything for your telecoms team.
Here are our top tips to make your telecoms content more thought-provoking:
Question certain things
When you ask yourself, ‘how can I make my internal comms more exciting’ think about what’s popular or the normal way of doing things and question it. Question normality and try to look at things from a new perspective. Would you rather hear an internal comms article where you can predict what it will say, or would you rather hear something completely new?
Don’t tie everything up
A lot of internal communicators feel that they have to bring closure to everything that they say. They are afraid to end their comms on a cliffhanger. Still, you shouldn’t be afraid to close your article off with an open-ended question to spark imagination and curiosity. Allow your audience to come up with their own opinion of what you have to say.
Use quotes
Quotes are a great way to summarise what you have said in one simple, easy-to-digest sentence. They leave your audience questioning what you have said and leave a lasting impact more than what a few paragraphs would.
Build anticipation in your internal comms
Humans are curious creatures. It’s in our nature to know the answers to things even if there is no apparent benefit to us. This is how TV series, film sequels, book trilogies and computer games have boomed and taken over our society. We are always curious to find out the next piece in the puzzle.
So what’s stopping you from using this technique in your internal comms to make it all a little more exciting? When you next have a telecom article that you must publish, try to drip-feed the information to your staff rather than telling them it all in one go.
Take popular topics and use them to get your message across
This tactic is hugely popular and commonly used by large marketing companies, and for a good reason too. They look for popular and trending topics and assess how they can jump on the back of them.
Not only does this make what you have to say more exciting. It also makes you more relevant because you will be incorporating yourself into a topic already being discussed by everyone in your workplace.
Look at what has worked previously and refine it
This one sounds obvious, but it is always overlooked. For your telecoms content to be more exciting and engaging, you’ve got to work with the data/ Have a long hard look at your analytics and try to spot any trends of what your teams like to read.
You can then test various tactics and see which ones your staff like the best. We know that every company culture is different, so what works in one telecom business may not work in another. You can only find out by testing it and giving it a go.
Our internal comms platform allows you to easily see the reach of your articles plus an engagement score which looks at the number of opens your article or news post has had. Don’t waste time trying to find ways to measure your effectiveness. Let us do the hard work so you can get on with creating compelling comms which drive real, tangible results.
Exciting comms made simple for your telecoms team.
Are you looking for a way to make your internal comms more exciting and still unsatisfied with the information above? Then you’ve come to the right place. Ocasta Engage is an internal comms platform that transforms engagement, so much so that Virgin Media have a 99% app usage rate across their entire business.
If you’re interested in seeing how it could work in your business, book a quick demo below and one of our friendly experts, we’ll take you through the platform and answer any questions you might have.
