Effective audience segmentation in internal communications is crucial for reaching the right people with the right information.
By understanding your internal audience better, you can tailor your content to match their needs and establish yourself as a trusted advisor and audience expert within your company, particularly among senior leaders.
This is a lot easier said than done. As a communications professional, you probably know that achieving this efficiency level can be challenging. User feedback often concerns information overload, lack of relevance, or poor visibility.
In this blog, we will explore strategies for improving internal audience segmentation, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of your internal communications.
As a starting point, gaining a comprehensive understanding of your workforce is essential. This involves focusing on actionable and easily accessible information. Consider the overall organizational structure, including departments, locations, and employee numbers.
Additionally, analyze demographics such as gender, age groups, languages, ethnicities, and lengths of service. Understanding work patterns, whether employees work in shifts or are engaged in frontline, field, factory, or desk-based roles, is also critical.
Assessing the existing communication channels and their usage and identifying patterns related to motivation and engagement can provide further insights into your audience.
Several approaches can be employed when segmenting internal audiences based on your communication objectives and target audience. Let's explore some segmentation ideas:
Location: Start by segmenting based on geographical location.
Department or team: Break down communication by departments or teams, particularly in larger organizations.
Job title: Send communication tailored to employees' job duties and responsibilities.
Seniority level: Segment your communication to include sections accessible only to managers or specific levels of seniority.
Workspace: Differentiate communication between remote and in-office employees to avoid sending irrelevant information.
Preferred language: Accommodate non-native speakers by providing communication in multiple languages.
Training or certification: Tailor communication based on employees' training or certification status.
Tenure: Provide different levels of information to new hires and longer-tenured employees.
Project involvement: Segment communication based on employees' involvement in specific projects.
Communication preferences: Deliver messages through channels preferred by individual employees, such as email, text, messaging apps, or Slack.
Generation: Adjust your communication style based on the generational preferences of your workforce.
Work schedule: Segment and schedule communication to ensure it reaches employees when they are most available and attentive, considering their work shifts or schedules.
Parental status: Provide relevant communication to parents, addressing their specific needs and work-life balance.
Action taken or not taken: Differentiate communication based on whether employees have completed specific actions or tasks.
In- or out-of-office: Send follow-up emails or updates to employees who were out of the office during significant announcements.
Program enrollment or interest: Tailor communication to inform employees about specific programs or self-selected content based on their interests.
This method provides insights into employees' preferences and helps personalize communication. Using an employee application can make your audience segmentation easier.
At Speakap, we have an HR sync functionality that lets companies mirror their organizational structure when launching the employee app in their organization. Instead of manually segmenting and uploading their employees by location, team, department, job title, and workspace, the process is automated via a tool.
You can also easily segment your audience by training enrollment or completion, parental status, language, task completion, and tenure, to name but a few.
Our social internet tool integrates with your desktop and mobile apps, enabling a single sign-on experience to enhance engagement.
Once you have gathered the necessary information and explored different segmentation options, creating personas for internal communication can further refine your approach.
Create fictional characters representing your most important user types, including their key attributes, pain points, challenges, and needs. By doing so, you gain a clear understanding of your audience and can tailor your content to meet their specific requirements.
In conclusion, audience segmentation plays a vital role in enhancing internal communications' efficiency and effectiveness.
By understanding your internal audience and implementing appropriate segmentation strategies, you can ensure that the right content reaches the right people, ultimately improving your organization's engagement, relevance, and overall communication outcomes.