Why Does Your Company Need To Use Internal Marketing?

Need To Use Internal Marketing

Why Does Your Company Need To Use Internal Marketing? Most businesses are managed from the outside. Internal marketing turns the focus inwards.

 

Internal marketing can show your company to the people who work for it… your staff. Promoting the company’s values to members of staff to motivate them to help your company to reach their goals.

 

You can even break this down further and market aspects of your corporate services – for example, IT, HR, communications, or specific projects – to other parts of the company so they know what services are available.

 

  Why is internal marketing important?

 

Need To Use Internal MarketingInternal marketing helps your employees to understand the vision and goals of the company in the same way you would promote it to your external stakeholders.

 

Companies spend a lot of time on branding exercises promoting the business’ values to the world. But when your customers’ experiences of the brand are not in sync with what is being sold to them, it can affect overall satisfaction with your brand.

 

Internal marketing reflects external marketing and it’s a way of ensuring that the staff is on board with the vision of the company that is being portrayed to the outside world and helps the workforce to align with your company’s stated objectives. It can help them to live your brand values and improve engagement and morale.

 

Think of the times you’ve been in touch with a company based on marketing materials, only to have the person on the phone not have any idea what you are talking about. Even worse is when they start telling you the company policy is “Xyz” when you’ve been led to believe it is “ABC”.

 

When everyone is on the same page it can reduce these sorts of misunderstandings and improve and enhance your company’s reputation. 

 

What is the internal marketing environment?

 

Your company’s internal marketing needs to be considered. These are the facts in your business that need to be treated when defining how to implement internal marketing campaigns in the company.

 

Every business is unique in its internal process.

 

This includes management style, communication, staff engagement, and objectives.

 

It’s important to understand the internal marketing environment because just copying an internal marketing plan from another company that may have a vastly different internal culture, or finding a marketing plan on the internet, may not achieve the desired results and outcomes.

 

 

Internal marketing strategies and tactics

 

The main goal of internal marketing is to educate and inform employees about the company’s goals and objectives, including ensuring they are familiar with its projects, products, services, and any external promotions.

 

Developing a strategy that takes internal marketing into account is the first step. Depending on what the environment is like – including what existing marketing is being made, or if there has been none in the past, will help you to build a strategy.

 

That strategy should define the direction that the business will take in this area. The strategy should include:

 

 

  • Goals, vision, and objectives

 

  • Plans to achieve these goals

 

  • Education and training needs

 

  • Communication needs

 

  • Timelines

 

  • Responsibilities

 

  • Resources required

 

  • Tactics and tools required to achieve goals

 

Measurement – how can you tell if it was successful?

 

Tactics (not to be confused with the specific tools and channels that you use to deliver your marketing campaign) are not the same as the strategy but form part of it.

 

These are the approaches that you take to deliver marketing communications to your employees.

Internal marketing examples

 

Internal marketing examples include:

 

  • Hosting internal education seminars, classes, and events.

 

  • Having different monthly themes and topics on different messages.

 

  • Look at innovative ways to have your employees live up to your values and offer encouragement for doing so.

 

  • Turning your employees into brand ambassadors.

 

  • Gamification to incentivize staff to deliver on KPIs and more.

 

  • Involving employees in developing your brand and values.

 

  • Reward and recognition programs.

 

  • Team building and planning days off-site.

 

How to communicate internal marketing?

 

Once you’ve got the strategy and tactics of your internal marketing campaign worked out, it’s time to turn your attention to the delivery methods.

 

For max effectiveness, your messages need to be delivered more than once, using different channels, so that they can sink in. Repetition is key, the “rule of 7” which states that messages need to be heard at least seven times before the listener will take action.

 

Fortunately, there are many different tools around to help with this so that your marketing efforts can be noticed!

 

Some innovative internal marketing communication tools include:

 

Video content – custom-made videos can help to tell your branding story and reinforce your messages.

 

Podcasts – many people prefer audio as their learning style of choice and podcasts are relatively easy to make and deliver for an internal audience.

 

Screen savers – a great way to reach employees every day where they sit with specially designed screen savers that reinforce your values, branding, or other key messages.

 

Newsletters – depending on what you are communicating you can have standalone dedicated newsletters to the concept, or you can include your branding and values in existing internal newsletters.

 

Digital signage – where you turn different screens within your organization into moving billboards that broadcast your custom content.

 

One tool that will help you deliver your ideas is DeskAlerts – an internal communications software solution that has man features such as pop-up alerts, scrolling ticker tape, corporate screen savers, and more. Content can be sent to any computer, tablet, or smartphone in your organization and can be scheduled in advance. You can send to every employee, or custom audiences, wherever you determine your efforts are most needed.

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