When we talk about marketing we most often talk about external marketing. How we communicate with our potential customers. How we get their attention at the right time and place, with the right message. But did you realise that internal marketing is just as important. Implementing a successful internal marketing strategy will also help to streamline your customers journey to purchase.
What Is Internal Marketing?
Internal Marketing helps your employees get a better understanding of the competitive landscape and what makes your businesses stand out. It also gives them insights into the direction you want to take the business in. It ensures everyone is “singing off the same hymn sheet”.
Remember, our audience isn’t only our potential buyers, it’s also the people who work within our organisations. Internal marketing needs to be just as engaging as external marketing – with so much information being accessible online, you have to create new ways to engage with your customers and employees.
What Is The Purpose of Internal Marketing?
Internal Marketing can help not just your potential customers fall in love with your product but your employees too!
Employees should be seen as the most trusted sources of information to your buyers. If they don’t believe in the company’s values and promises to deliver on their products, the purchase stage of your buyer’s journey is less likely to be completed with your company.
A successful internal marketing strategy will make sure that your marketing team and sales team are aligned on the company’s messaging and what the product can do for your clients. And when you employees care about the brand and its products, they care about their sales.
What Are The Goals Of Internal Marketing?
If you are revisiting or developing your Internal Marketing Strategy make sure to include these 3 goals to have an effective strategy.
Goal 1 – Increase Employee Engagement
Get your employees excited about the place where they work again and make sure that they know the role they play is vital in helping the company to achieve its goals. Ultimately it’s not only good for the company but good for them as well!
Goal 2 – Foster Brand Advocacy
Employees who understand your Brand values, care about your company’s goals and are aligned with your messaging, will naturally want to promote your company.
Goal 3 – Equip staff with the best tools to work with prospective customers
Make sure your employees are aware of your company’s messaging. Ensure they fully understand the products or services you sell and how they can solve particular solutions for your customers.
These goals will serve your company well in giving your employees pride and confidence in the work that they do, which in turn will reflect in their own performance.
What does Internal Marketing Include?
The specifics of any internal marketing strategy will obviously look different for different companies and organisations, but here are just a few key takeaways to get you thinking about what to include in your own internal marketing strategy.
Match your messaging both internally and externally
It’s important that your internal and external messaging match as otherwise employees may focus on the wrong areas. Indeed, their sales techniques may become stagnated if they are confused as to which message is more important to follow.
By aligning your messaging across the board, you will begin to foster trust with your employees. Just as a trusting relationship is important with your potential customers, it’s also vital to build trust with your employees to help them on their journey to becoming brand ambassadors!
Bring the brand alive for employees
Much in the same way as you do for your potential customers, you want to create an emotional connection between your employees and the products/services they sell. These feelings will then help to influence their day to day decisions in the workplace even, if they are not in a customer facing role, here’s an example:
Employee Journey
Just as I discussed the buyer’s journey last month, your employees also have a journey to go through and specific touchpoints where companies can reach out to them. It’s important to know the steps of this journey to understand how we can improve our Internal Marketing Strategy.
For example, the first stage of your employees journey to becoming a brand ambassador is when they are hired by your company. This is the perfect opportunity to set the tone for what their working life will be like within the company.
Together with learning how to perform their role within the business, they will also begin to form a relationship with your business. What this relationship looks like will depend largely on their first impressions and the internal training and marketing they are first shown. Think about your onboarding process with new employees. Do you train new employees to just do the job, or does your process allow them to understand why they do it and how their role fits into the company as a whole?
How does Internal Marketing Help Sales?
To streamline your customers journey, make sure that your whole company understands the stages of that journey and the information they have been given along the way. Your entire team needs to be communicating with one another effectively and understand the part that they play in the sales process. How they help to reinforce the company’s messaging and finally how they can fulfil the customers expectations.
Internal Marketing Strategies
There are a number of elements that need to come together for a successful internal marketing strategy, much like any marketing strategy! Here are a few things you may like to consider when reviewing your own internal marketing strategy.
Timing
Choosing the right time to launch your internal marketing campaign is crucial – there needs to be an inciting event for these internal campaigns to reach their potential for success. If things are done too soon, there is little interest. If things are done too late, rumours arrive before actual fact and the message can be lost.
Here are some examples of when internal marketing can be most effective are:
- When a new product or service is going to be launched.
- At the beginning of a new quarter to share company goals
- When an employee is promoted or someone is hired externally.
- Company mergers or acquisitions
Don’t feel you have to wait for “big” news before communicating with your staff. Having regular updates and requesting their input and feedback is always beneficial!
Try to find a balance between your internal marketing, just as we have to with our external marketing. Just as pushy sales techniques no longer work for our companies’ consumers, pushy internal marketing can lead to confusion and fatigue for your teams.
Brand Ambassadors
Identify who your internal brand ambassadors are through internal research – get them on board with your campaigns, after all sometimes memos and meetings from managers aren’t always enough to sway the opinion of disgruntled employees.
Give these employees the opportunity to speak openly about your brand online, this is one of the best forms of user generated content! By allowing your employees to speak freely online about your products/service it can also create new talking points for your sales team with potential customers.
After conducting internal research, you can also offer free open support to your employees who have shown an interest in learning more. This again with foster trust and confidence within the company.
Tips for Introducing Internal Marketing to Your Business
Not sure how to kickstart your internal marketing? Here are a few suggestions:
- Employee of the Quarter. Ask the staff to nominate a colleague who has gone above and beyond and celebrate their success
- Rotate who delivers the quarterly results. It can get very tedious hearing from the same Senior Manager time and time again. Instead, get different staff members involved. This is also a great opportunity for them to gain a better understanding of how the business operates
- Social events. It’s not all about business! It’s also important that your team work cohesively and in my experience a good night out every so often is the perfect way to achieve this!
- Idea of the Quarter. Encourage staff to submit ideas for improving internal processes or for introducing a new product or service. Giving them the opportunity to present their idea to the wider community demonstrates the value that you as a business leader put on their contributions.
- Employee Feedback. It’s all well and good to ask for feedback, but implementing that feedback is what will win your team over!
Conclusion
I’m an advocate for smarter marketing and a part of that is making sure your internal marketing can match the demands placed upon business in the ever changing marketing landscape. As with any other form of marketing strategy make sure you reassess and pivot if you need to change things up to keep everybody aligned.
I hope this article has helped to shed some light on the process of developing your internal marketing strategy, but if you’d like to discuss your Internal Marketing Strategy in more detail or some of the tactics I have discussed here, please get in touch. I’d love to chat with you!
You can drop me an email at Lissa@dynamicmarketing.ie
And be sure to check out my website for more insights into the ever-evolving world of B2B marketing!