An intranet often serves as the brain of a company, housing all the necessary information employees and leaders need to perform their duties and stay connected with other departments and teams. As such, intranets require careful planning to determine what content to produce, where to place it, when to refresh it and how to repurpose it effectively.
Below, 15 Forbes Communications Council members share the intricacies of planning a successful intranet content strategy and recommend some approaches you can take to do so. By taking these steps, you’ll not only streamline internal communication, but you’ll also foster engagement and knowledge sharing across the corporation.
1. Focus On A Strong UX
The key to a strong intranet is the user experience. For years, companies have overlooked intranets as a fundamental tool for employee engagement and culture building. Coming out of the pandemic, many people are finally viewing their intranet as the virtual gathering place (think water cooler) for sharing critical information, educating on key facets of the company and ensuring business alignment. – Catherine Anderson, Cityblock
2. Tailor Content To Early Adopters
Find your champions. Intranet content is tricky. Although creating content that can be unilaterally used across your organization is a noble aim, the fact is that employees usually abide by a bell-shaped curve of how quickly they adopt new materials from a piece of content. In order to get the best traction, focus on creating content that your early adopter champions will use—yielding momentum the fastest. – Patrick Ward, Formula.Monks
3. Adopt Smart Systems With Multiple Integration Options
Smart systems are foundational to an intranet content strategy, especially when managing dynamic hybrid operations and creative teams. Software tools with various ways to interact, comment, track and view content (and tasks) are powerful and free up time for team members to operate in their zone of genius. Multiple software integration options are essential for growth. – Ashleigh Chevalier, Level Up Collaborative
4. Consider A Multi-Step Plan To Build An Intranet
A multi-step plan to build and promote the intranet at our nonprofit worked. My communications team piloted the first channel. We shared templates and added a wellness channel and a place to post vacation photos. We used inviting graphics and promoted new content at staff meetings. Our people team rolled out their HR channel next. Access to info, archives and a fun culture equals success! – Sylvia Ewing, Elevate
5. Mimic Strategies That Work Externally
The best strategy is to mimic what works externally. Build a private mobile app, share content that can be accessed 24/7, build channels for employees to talk about key topics and focus on making the experience useful. A great experience leads to stronger comprehension and absorption of the messages. Think absorption, not just engagement. – Bob Pearson, The Bliss Group
6. Mix Business Content And Human Interest
Our priority in intranet content is to keep a steady stream of engaging content flowing so that employees see new stuff constantly. Include monthly and weekly newsletter articles accompanied by employee photos (when possible), employee videos, leadership podcasts, manager roundtables, promotions and anniversaries—a mix of business content and human interest. – Elizabeth Baskin, Tribe, Inc.
7. Leverage The UI To Encourage Engagement And Connectivity
Design the user interface and user experience like you would any external-facing site. Group together evergreen content, like policies, in a single place, and ensure a good “front page” of up-to-the-minute content. Promote an interactive area, like an employee blog section, to encourage engagement and connectivity. – Karen Quinn, Finastra
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8. Identify Where Your Audience Is Currently Finding Knowledge
It’s best to begin planning intranet content by first identifying where your audience is getting their information. We let those findings help guide our content strategies, and it’s important to start with the main message and identify specific channels where it will be shared. We then slightly adjust the message for each channel and release it all at once so everyone is informed simultaneously. – Victoria Zelefsky, The Menkiti Group
9. Use Continuous Analysis To Drive Content
User feedback and analytics are vital for refining your intranet content strategy. Tracking engagement metrics, user comments and feedback helps you identify areas for improvement, optimize content and ensure the intranet remains valuable. Continuous analysis drives the enhancement of the strategy. – Jawaher Al-Khuzaei, GWC
10. Build The Whole Experience Around The User Base
To strategize intranet content and make these key decisions, we follow four steps: Define the content’s purpose and audience and find the platforms they often visit; produce content using topics, templates and tools accordingly; publish the content on their favorite platform using clear structuring and SEO optimizations; and update or repurpose the content based on analytics and feedback. – Vikas Agrawal, Infobrandz
11. Segment The Content On A Regional Or Role Basis
We align intranet content with our vision and mission to cultivate a positive, inspiring and uplifting culture. We prioritize the needs of our internal audience and teams, segmenting the content as needed on a regional or role basis. We regularly assess engagement, and feedback such as likes or thumbs up or down helps us to update or remove outdated content. – Anthony Kennedy, ION
12. Use Different Content For Different Stakeholders
We first like to understand the different users and create personas around their needs, use cases and jobs to be done. We then try to ensure we are using different kinds of content to engage the different stakeholders. The content is repurposed from other channels as well. – Roshni Wijayasinha, Prosh Marketing
13. Schedule Time To Remove And Update Content
For intranet content, it’s typically good to have a solid system in place that sets a cadence for checking in on the relevance of content (e.g., a set time and day each week when the team reviews content to remove or update). This system should also provide other departments with a way to contact your team for unexpected changes or those times when information needs to be added or changed ASAP. – Melissa Kandel, little word studio
14. Understand The Needs Of Your Different Audiences
As gaming marketers, our team follows a strategic process for intranet content. We start by understanding the needs of different audiences within the organization, such as developers, customer support or management. We create content that addresses their specific requirements and aligns with the company’s goals. Regular performance analysis helps us determine when to update or remove content. – Jonathan Shroyer, Arise Gaming
15. Gamify The Process Of Contributing And Sharing
One effective way to strategize intranet content is to create knowledge communities that cater to different talent segments in the organization. By gamifying the process of contributing and sharing knowledge within these communities, you can encourage engagement and make it more fun for employees. – Sowmya Moni
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