If you are in the marketing business, you will have heard this phrase touted about by the professionals, more often as a derogatory term, as in: people start a blog or LinkedIn profile and everyone thinks they’re a marketer now!

The fact is, we SHOULD ALL be able to do some marketing. It is one of the essentials of business, just like knowing how to do some simple financials or understanding the basic principles of people management. Heck, any marketing department head or consultant should be making it their aim to make everyone in the organisations they work with into marketers –that’s what separates the average marketers from the great. When everyone in the business is aligned to the unified marketing approach of that business, then the whole business wins.  Why? Well instead of having just the marketer or marketing department, you’ll have everyone  driving your marketing strategy with just as much passion as you do, and that just makes sense, doesn’t it?

So here are just 3 tips to help make “everyone a marketer”:

1. Make your employees a target market

If you can’t convince your employees with your own marketing message, what hope do you have of convincing anybody else? Even if your product may be the most expensive diamonds in the world –if your employees can’t understand and rave about why those diamonds are so worth it, even though they could never afford to buy one, chances are your brand message is dead in the water before you’ve got your skis on. Treat them like a target market –advertise to them, promote to them, get them to join your social media platforms.

2. Involve employees for better idea generation

You have all these people working under your brand umbrella who are desperate to defend why they work there. They are also bursting with good ideas about how to make your offering better, in all sorts of different ways and from the ground up. Often our employees may have a better feel for how the brand is behaving in the marketplace and this feedback is priceless. By getting employee contributions to your marketing strategies and campaigns, you not only get better ideas through bigger groupthink, but you involve them in the process, and that’ll get them even more pumped up about the marketing strategy in the end.

3. Give employees the tools to promote you

We can’t expect that just because someone works for you, that they will know the most effective ways to market your offering. Think of them like a pack of sporting dogs –so eager and so ready, but they need you to show them the rabbit, and off they’ll go! Feed them the language and terminology they should use, let them know who to target, let them become familiar with your USP and backup evidence, invite them to share your brand blogs and promotions. Send out media advertising schedules and let them know about your events –and watch them run with it!

Have you got some more tips to share? Please share them with us here. Do you disagree with opening up marketing to the whole organisation? Let us hear your reasons…