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Leverage these 5 characteristics of unforgettable internal communications messaging for business success

Effective communication is the key to success for any organisation. It boosts employee engagement, productivity and motivation, and it also has a knock-on effect on other areas of the organisation like innovation and employee retention.

The goal of investing in internal communication – whether it’s workplace digital signage software, your company intranet, emails or other collaboration channels – is to communicate better and increase workplace satisfaction. However, the success of your internal communication channels will only ever be as strong as your messaging.

A good message will be remembered, influence action and engage with your audience. In this article, we will explain five characteristics of unforgettable messaging so your internal communication messages will always hit the mark and boost employee engagement:

  1. Know your purpose
  2. Know your target audience
  3. Get to the point
  4. Is easy to understand
  5. Repeat and repurpose

1. Know your purpose

If you want your internal communications to inspire, educate or reinforce behaviours, you need to know your objective. Communicating purposeful messaging allows you to keep your messages relevant and deliver exactly what you want to communicate.

2. Know your target audience

Once you know your why, you need to know your audience — who will you be speaking to? Even within your workforce, you will have a variety of people: remote workers, hybrid workers, frontline workers, contractors and sub-contractors, and more. Or maybe you need to communicate to your workforce who are spread out across different locations.

Different groups of people have different messaging needs. Adapt your messaging to different target audiences. Take this opportunity to also review your communication channels – are they adaptable to different target audiences?

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Dimond Roofing Dunedin actively listens to their workforce to deliver the right messages

3. Get to the point

Information overload is a big challenge for employees, even non-wired workers. They’re constantly badgered by pop-up notifications, emails, instant messages and more. The last thing your team wants to see is a waffly message that takes time to read and only adds to the noise.

The best messages are short and sweet. Especially if you’re posting it up on your workplace digital screens – keep those as short as a Tweet (roughly 140 characters).

4. Is easy to understand

Keeping your messages authentic in plain language makes it easier to understand and avoids ambiguity. Here are some things to avoid when writing employee communication:

 A great test to see if your message is easily understood is if your teammate can recall and repeat it back to you.

man sitting at laptop with a colleague
Clear communication enables better recall and engagement

5. Repeat and repurpose

The saying “repetition is the mother of all learning” has some truth to it. Afterall, people need to see a message about seven times before they act. But there is a right way and a wrong way of using repetition to leverage your internal communication.

The wrong way would be to repeat the same message – word for word – across all your communication channels, non-stop. It’ll quickly turn into noise and forgotten.

The right way to use repetition is to space out the delivery of your messages over time. Start with a higher frequency to begin with, then reduce the frequency over several months.

Read more:

5 pillars of effective internal communication


With these five characteristics of unforgettable messaging, you’ll be able to confidently craft employee communications that will help you achieve your desired outcome, whether that’s to inform, educate, or inspire.

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