Employees aren’t dumb; they’re not going to use the intranet if it offers little value. However, many, many intranets deliver value, but don't get the employee traffic expected. In fact, quite often, if you build it, they will not come.

One of the reasons why even the best intranets need to be marketed to employees is that computer-based workers are often exceptionally busy and do not have time to explore and surf the intranet. Field workers, sales staff and manufacturing employees have even less time. They need to be educated as to what the intranet offers and why it is of value to both them as individual workers and also to the organization as a whole. Employees need to be ‘sold’.

Here are 5 tips for driving traffic and marketing the intranet:

1-     Default home page – make the intranet home page the unalterable default home page for every employee browser. A very small minority of employees will complain during the first week after the change, but those complaints will disappear quickly if the home page is updated frequently.

2-     E-newsletter – send out a weekly or twice weekly e-newsletter to employee mailboxes with news highlights and links to the full content on the intranet.

3-     CEO involvement – publish reqular Q&A stories with the CEO, and/or webcasts, and/or a hosted online chat.

4-     Contests – nothing sells like a prize. Reward usage and readers with prizes by hosting online contests or quizzes (polls).

5-     Sticky tools – think beyond news, forms and policies to ‘sticky’ tools that aren’t critical to the business, but will be popular with employees including cafeteria menus, online classifieds, weather forecasts, employee discounts, etc.

It goes without saying that if the intranet does not provide valuable content and tools in a user-friendly context that employees won’t use the intranet regardless of your marketing and promotion. However, even great intranets need to be marketed so that when you build it, they will come.