Marketing Work Tech: Your Customers’ Culture Can Be Your Key to Growth

What are the most important things to your customers?

It may not be your platform’s features or how well your SaaS platform solves their pain points.

Surprisingly, it might be how well you align with their culture.

This alignment is ultimately why companies choose one SaaS platform over another. HR leaders understand how the software they select reflects their company cultures, and the right software will reinforce the employee experiences they’re trying to create.

If your software can do this, it should be your No. 1 selling point.

Why Your Customer’s Culture Is So Important

As employers seek to attract and retain their talent, employee experience has become more important than ever for HR leaders. A company’s culture is what shapes an employee’s experience.

Employers that want to attract and retain the best talent need to think carefully about how to shape, refine and promote their culture, says Natalie Baumgartner, chief workforce scientist at Achievers. “Great culture should provide continuous alignment to the vision, purpose, and goals of the organization.”

In fact, employees are drawn to employers that speak openly and explicitly about the cultures they want to foster. According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends report, two-thirds of candidates are “more engaged with job openings when companies talk about culture.”

Culture and employee experience are always front-of-mind for HR executives. Make sure your marketing reflects this.

How Does a Company’s Technology Factor In?

The tech a company selects plays a vital role in the employee experiences it creates.

Think about a tool like Slack, and what role it has played in creating cultures of transparent communication within hundreds of companies over the last decade.

For some work tech tools, though, culture alignment will be more nuanced and may only be appreciated by the purchasing stakeholders. It might be a commitment to privacy, for instance, a shared belief in environmental sustainability or an integration with a more prominent and culturally relevant tool.

In any case, the technology you use reflects something about your company’s culture and values.

Show How Your Tech Can Reinforce Your Customers’ Cultures

Here is the marketing opportunity. When you demonstrate how your solution can reflect (or shape) a customer’s culture, you show that customer a new way for them to refine their employee experience.

This is how work tech marketers can differentiate themselves. “In a world in which so many people are reassessing why and where they work, [employee experience] is at the heart of how organizations set themselves apart,” McKinsey’s Jonathan Emmett, Asmus Komm, Stefan Moritz and Friederike Schultz write.

Setting your work tech platform apart from others is as much about showing your own fluency in employee experience as it is about features or pricing.

Speak to Employees, Not Just Executives

Make sure you speak to your prospective customers’ employees in your messaging.

Because of the greater emphasis on employee experience, HR leaders won’t be able to make decisions in silos, writes Craig Johnson, a partner at Mercer’s career workforce communication and change group.

“Once you have an HR-technology strategy and roadmap, sharing that with the appropriate stakeholders at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way will help you align leaders and eventually help you communicate the correct messaging to all end users,” he explains.

Leaders also take cues from employees, says L. David Kingsley, chief people officer at customer communications platform Intercom. “The most important thing I do when buying technology is understanding what my customers — my internal customers, the employees of the company — what do they want?,” he notes. “How do they want to experience technology in their work life? I take cues from that. It varies by organization.”

Customer success and onboarding guides should also focus on employees, not executives. Employees are your customer’s customer, and their success with your software is tied to the success of your company.

Culture and values aren’t as easy to sell as features and benefits. But taking the time to align your messaging with your customer’s values can be just as effective as split testing your landing page or running PPC campaigns.

Images by: Priscilla Du Preez, Christina @ wocintechchat.com