Your employees are most definitely one of your key target audiences.

• You need to motivate them.
• You need to provide them with specific information pertaining to their work.
• You need to educate them.
• You need to integrate them in to the company and make them feel part of the community.
• You need to build their awareness of the company, your identity, your values and your key marketing messages.

Most companies aren’t doing any of these things, and that goes for small businesses as well as large enterprises.

You can be different, because in the end, it’s your people that create your company, and all of your people are in fact also your marketers. It’s not only about increasing their productivity, but communicating with them in such a way that they become evangelists for your company.

You can never achieve that if you just leave them alone. No, you need to communicate with them on a regular basis, giving them the information that will gradually make them "live your company".

On the other hand, you also need to inform them of what’s going on, and make all kinds of relevant information available to them, such as what direction your company is going to, what new products you are launching, and when’s the next big company picnic.

Let’s try to break all of this content down in to manageable content categories:

Corporate news
This includes everything from the Annual report to new product launches to listing the company’s successes and letting people know what direction the company is heading in.

Community news and motivational content
Includes introducing new employees, announcing the next company picnic, featuring especially deserving employees, letting your people know how various projects are doing and who can be thanked for their success, articles on why every employee matters and how they contribute to the overall success of the company, new case studies, best practices, what others are doing and what their responsibilities are, giving credit when and where it’s due etc.

Corporate culture
As already mentioned above, corporate culture does not grow on its own. It’s not just a piece of paper you force every employee to read when they start working for you. But it is about constantly communicating with your people. Constantly telling them what you stand for and making the point with concrete examples and case studies (for instance, if you support any causes, give them concrete examples as they arise); giving tribute to other employees who are "living the company"; publishing relevant articles that represent what your company stands for; providing constant reminders of how your company communicate to the outside world and what it stands for; constantly communicating your mantra; etc.

Intranet content updates
Do you have an intranet where you publish new documents and similar content that’s important to your employees, such as meeting briefings, memos, reports, contracts etc. RSS is an excellent channel to deliver such content updates. It might require customization though, if you publish much of this stuff, so that the right content updates get to the right people. For instance, if you have many project groups, members of each project group should primarily get the content updates relevant to their work.

Educational content
Everyone wants to increase the productivity and effectiveness of their people, and to do so you do need to educate them. The people in your marketing department need to become even better marketers. The people that cover your finances need to learn how to do their jobs even better, and so on. Everyone in your company can become better at what they are doing, period. If you’re not educating them constantly, you’re losing out on their potential. Providing such educational content will definitely require customization à you need to allow your people to select what educational content they want to receive and let them choose for themselves what content they’ll profit from the most. But what content are we talking about? It can include relevant articles from different sources, whitepaper updates, industry news, case studies, etc. You don’t even need to write this content in house — you could easily syndicate it from other online sources.

Does all of this look extremely "corporate", not appropriate for small businesses?

It’s anything but that.

This is what every business should be practicing, no matter its size.