Internal Marketing: Strategies to Engage and Empower Employees



Often overlooked, internal marketing is a crucial part of business strategy. While businesses devote great resources to external marketing aimed at customers and clients, they often fail to realize that equally important to a brand’s success is the people who work for it. Internal marketing is about much more than just hitting employees over the head with PowerPoint presentations that try to engage them and make them love the brand. It’s about making sure that employees know what the company is all about and why it exists in the first place. This article goes deep into why this is essential, how it affects organizations, and what some best practices are for doing it well.

What is Internal Marketing and Why Does it Matter?

Internal marketing is a strategic way to get the company’s employees to comprehend and commit to its objectives, culture, and products. Usually, when we think of “marketing,” we think of the stuff companies do to get you, the customer, to buy their product. But companies also need to market to the people they employ, especially when the company is asking its employees to do something unusual—like act as if the whole organization is a brand and the employees are on the front lines championing that brand. Why is it important to market to your employees in this way?

Defining Internal Marketing

The company’s objectives, products, and culture are what internal marketing promotes among its employees. The internal marketing department’s job is more than just informing the employees about what is going on at the company. Its main goal is to engage the employees and motivate them to act in ways that are consistent with the company’s overall vision. When internal marketing does its job well, the employees are so engaged that they act as if they are the company’s marketing department. They do what a marketing department would do: They promote the company among the external public.

The Relationship Between Internal Marketing and Employee Engagement

Internal marketing has a powerful outcome: engaged employees. When it comes to the mostly invisible work of internal marketing, it, too, has mostly invisible yet powerful outcomes of its own. For one, it renders employees meaningful advocates. And when employees at every level act as advocates for the company, that becomes a meaningful outcome. So just as much strategic work goes into internal marketing as into external marketing. And that prompted a question from me: Is internal marketing just external marketing aimed at employees? Is the work done in internal marketing justified? And ultimately, does internal marketing even matter?

Internal Marketing vs. External Marketing

Attracting and keeping customers is the main aim of external marketing. But internal marketing is all about making sure the employees of a company feel valued, in the know, and in step with the company’s business goals. The intended audience is the main thing that sets these two forms of marketing apart. For external marketing, the audience is consumers or stakeholders. For internal marketing, the audience is the company’s employees. Both are dependent on the other to work properly. If a company’s employees are not engaged, the company will have a hard time delivering on the promises made to the customer outside the company.

Key Components of Effective Internal Marketing

An internal marketing initiative is only as strong as the strategies and components that support it. For internal marketing to be effective, it must have a multi-faceted approach that is tailored to an organization’s culture, communication style, and goals.

Corporate Vision and Mission Alignment

Kickstarting an internal marketing campaign requires getting employees on the same page as the company’s core values, mission, and long-term vision. Getting this alignment between internal actors—ranging from the C-suite to entry-level staff—makes the necessary condition for a shared focus on the same likely outcomes across an easily diverse set of internal stakeholders. Helping achieve this condition may be the job of a narrative—which is part of the secret sauce for effective strategy implementation.

Two-Way Communication and Trust

Internal marketing that works builds trust through transparent, two-way communication between employees and leadership. When it comes to this type of marketing, there are no half measures. Earning the trust of your employees means not only communicating with them but also encouraging them to communicate back with you. An internal marketing program that works ensures leadership is always just an email or voice message away. A two-way communication loop guarantees:

Encouraging Employee Feedback

Surveys, focus groups, or suggestion boxes can provide employees with invaluable ways to give feedback. That’s especially true when the feedback is acted on. Then it becomes a tool to build trust because it shows management is listening and cares about what concerns employees.

Overcoming Knowledge Silos

One of the barriers to effectively marketing internally is communicating in silos. Open communication across departments (e.g., marketing, sales, operations) is necessary to ensure that employees are on the same page and have the same vision for the organization. Moreover, all employees who have any type of client or customer interaction must be well-versed in what the organization markets and to whom it markets—that is, they must be internal marketers.

Training and Development

Another critical pillar of internal marketing is investing in employee training and development. When employees are well-informed about the company, its products, and its services, they are more confident and liberated in their actions.

Role of Onboarding

The first step in assimilating new hires into the corporate culture is a solid onboarding program. This period of time is a prime opportunity to engage newly hired employees. It’s a window of time in which you can set them up with everything they need to succeed and to thoroughly embrace the company’s mission.

Continuous Learning Opportunities

The company’s commitment to employee growth is served well by continuous professional development opportunities, certifications, and skills workshops. Such initiatives ensure the workforce remains current with industry trends and company policies.

Benefits of a Strong Internal Marketing Strategy

Internal marketing campaigns, when executed properly, provide enormous paybacks that flow throughout the organization, well beyond the walls of the corporate office.

Enhanced Employee Satisfaction and Retention

When employees feel valued and included within a well-executed internal marketing strategy, they are far less likely to look for jobs outside the company. This good retention of employees means companies are not spending money on recruiting and onboarding new hires. That is a very good thing.

Extended Brand Advocacy

Workers who harmonize with the business’s ambitions can serve as its most genuine online and offline brand proponents. They can further company goals in ways that no outside push can match. Employees can help raise the visibility of a brand and can sway its stock in ways that are almost impossible to measure but that probably add up to something real.

Best Practices for Executing Internal Marketing Campaigns

To gain the advantages, companies must implement meticulously devised internal marketing initiatives that strike a chord with workers on both personal and professional levels.

Tailoring Messages to Employees

The average corporate message doesn’t do much to win over today’s workers. Instead, it’s communication with an actual pulse that tends to connect. Whether via emotionally potent videos from top brass, social media campaigns driven by employees, or just plain good internal blogs, the kinds of communications that seem to resonate more effectively in today’s average diverse workforce deliver more than just a message—they connect the dots between management and minions.

Social Media as a Tool

Whereas internal marketing deals mainly with the engagement of people within a company, external platforms like WoopSocial can also be used to bring people within a company onboard with external campaigns. WoopSocial can help—from the outside looking in—engage employees in the brand’s initiatives in such a way that they feel like part of the internal team. It can act as a bridge between external and internal marketing. Increasingly, the line between internal and external marketing is blurring.

Establishing Metrics and Evaluation

Similar to any marketing campaign, the internal marketing effort requires measurable outcomes to ascertain success and pinpoint areas in need of improvement. Possible metrics include employee engagement surveys, participation in feedback loops, and social advocacy initiative tracking.

Adapting Based on Feedback

The landscapes of business and the needs of employees shift and change. More companies are gathering regular analytics and feedback to revisit and refine internal marketing strategies that align more closely with the ever-shifting expectations of their employees.

Leveraging Tools for Seamless Internal Marketing

Revolutionizing today’s communication strategies is possible with marketing tools like WoopSocial. These can integrate internal and external marketing efforts seamlessly. Automating social media posts is just one way WoopSocial can save a business significant time and allow it to work with expanded marketing capabilities. Ensuring an organization can message consistently across all social accounts is another. In fact, WoopSocial can help with such tasks. Employees can also use it to align themselves with external content and foster an organization’s internal resonance.

Conclusion

To sum up, internal marketing goes beyond being a simple HR initiative. It is a transformational strategy that connects the company’s organizational culture with the kind of customer experience that leads to increased loyalty and better business results. Prioritizing the internal audience builds a bridge to the external world—an audience of invested and engaged employees who can authentically communicate the brand and deliver on its promise.