Are employees ignoring your internal communications?
When you are trying to get a message across to a broad audience, it can be difficult to capture everyones attention. In this respect, internal comms isn’t much different than advertising. You want the maximum amount of people to see and comprehend your message, so if people are ignoring your message, take a card from their playbook and add some visuals. There is a reason TV ads don’t just contain scrolling text.
Using video and images in your internal communications can catch the attention of and engage your audience in ways that plain text cannot. Studies show that people remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, and 80% of what they see and do.
In our recent newsletter we highlighted some resources we recommend to improve your use of visuals in communications.
If you want to implement a broad visual communication strategy, start with a book that addresses the best way to do that. The book, The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand, is a comprehensive rundown of why you should be using visuals in comms, and how to go about it. While the concepts are marketing based, they equally apply to employee communications.
Don’t have time to read the book? Here is an informative podcast featuring the author, Ekaterina Walter.
We use video a lot at Red e App. Video shows personality and humanizes people in ways that an email can’t. You can send video through Red e App, so we wrote a blog on 3 ways to use videos in internal communications that is worth checking out.
We also recommend adding visuals to enhance your text based communications. Sending a message to your workforce? Add an image to increase engagement. Here are some free tools you can use quickly to edit and enhance your images :
- Skitch: Quickly annotate images to highlight the most important aspects. Add things like arrows, boxes, and highlight sections of images.
- Canva: Access to thousands of templates, backgrounds, fonts and clipart. Build professional grade event flyers, add text over images, and create templates for future visual comms.
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