As communications and marketing professionals, there are few things more important than your brands.  The biggest struggle then becomes getting that brand and those values communicated to your employees.

1.  We can't get the message out to employees at our company.

2.  No one wants to use our intranet, so we email collateral and documents back and forth.

3.  We don't know how to use our intranet to update the content on it.

Without a proper working channel of communication, it doesn't really matter how good the message is, it won't reach its intended audience. 

Get the Message Out Loud and Clear

Let's meet June. For the purpose of this exercise, June is a fictional Marketing Director at . June responsible is for marketing Noventum's products and services to the public, as well as overseeing internal communications. To prepare for the launch of a new product means she first needs to get the enthusiasic support of the entire company.  Her team has developed a series of announcements for promotional giveaways, contests, and informational flyers so that everyone is on the same page.  Not many people use the intranet at Noventum, so June and her team decide that the best way to reach the company is through an email campaign. Design and marketing create a fantastic newsletter, and send it out to the entire company. Everyone's all excited to see the company's reaction to this new product. But a few days go by, and then a week. and then a week and half, and they haven't heard any rumblings from the rest of the company. June checks the analytics on the email. Only 127 people out of 600 employees even opened the newsletter.  The message has been faded out by inbox clutter, busy schedules, and the choice to avoid company news emails. 

June's story may not be your story, but it's a story with which you're likely familiar. Unfortunately, only 74% of communicators can demonstrate a Return on Investment on their campaigns. 

Keep Your Inbox Free of Clutter

Did you know that on average, employees spend up 20% of each day searching for information?  That means that almost an entire business day each week is spent looking for the material needed to spend the other four business days working.  Often this takes the form of a full inbox with buried emails of important documents and information that are inevitably lost in the back-and-forth.

When you need to find a piece of collateral for a campaign or an important client document, an well developed intranet can facillitate search. This will reduce the time sending or receiving emails that say, "Can't find this document," or "Where is the flyer for our new campaign?"  News updates can be put in a specific place on the intranet, emergency announcements on another, the key is just to make sure that everything is in one home, but in their own place. 

Easy Content Updates

The issue with SharePoint intranet is that content owners must learn how to edit content on the backend of SharePoint.  It's not particularly difficult, but it is an awkward interface, the opposite of one would call intuitive. It's usually the job of marketing to make content updates on a company's intranet.  A number of factors can prohibit end users from meeting this learning curve.  These factors could include a lack of proper training, time passing between training and needing to update content (and subsequently forgetting the training), or employee turnover.

Your content owners are the champions of your intranet.  They're the people who need to be completely in tune with how content updates work, because their knowledge directly affects the way your intranet will be used by the entire organization.  Instead of spending time learning the backend of SharePoint everytime it updates itself, or trying to send your content to every employee's inbox, a decent front end interface will let you drop in new content and move on with your day. If your intranet is set up correctly, content owners can even send out the content to the correct targetted audience without any real effort. 

Intranet can greatly affect your marketing and communications efforts for the better, but it's also a solution for any department. Want to see our IntranetPro in action? Schedule a demo with us.

If you'd like to speak with a Codesigned SharePoint Expert before scheduling a demo, let us know.       We'd love to chat.