There are countless opportunities to put internal marketing into action in your organization. You may have implemented a shared internal marketing strategy or materials without even realizing it. Common avenues and channels for internal marketing include:
This is not an exhaustive list; Don’t be afraid to try new things to find what works for your organization. Creativity is your friend, and it could be the competitive edge you need to reap the full benefits of internal marketing.
Internal marketing can benefit both your employees and your organization as a whole. Some of its main advantages include:
- Employee engagement – Internal marketing can keep employees informed and supportive of your company. If their jobs have a purpose and they feel like they are a valued part of their organization, they are more likely to be enthusiastic and dedicated to their work.
- Company culture: By allowing you to communicate your mission and values, internal marketing can help develop and strengthen your company culture. Having engaged employees can further solidify the culture, making your organization a more positive and enjoyable place to work.
- Brand Awareness: Internal marketing not only helps build your organization’s brand, but also increases brand awareness among employees. This helps employees become brand advocates who advertise your company (both to customers and potential employees) outside of the workplace. As long as your messaging is consistent, this can also help with your external marketing efforts.
- Recruiting and Hiring – Internal marketing can also support your recruiting efforts, making it easier to market job openings and recruit talented employees. With more engaged employees and a strong company culture, your organization will gain a positive reputation, making it a desirable place to work for more applicants.
- Retention – What’s more, this can also help you retain employees, both new and old. Increasing employee engagement is believed to reduce turnover, allowing you to keep the best workers on your team for the benefit of your business.
Internal marketing is too important for your business to ignore or neglect. However, it’s crucial to get it right for your internal marketing efforts to be effective.
To enjoy these benefits, you must build an effective internal marketing strategy. Just like any other marketing initiative, internal marketing requires time, attention, and care if you want your efforts to be successful. The key components of any internal marketing include:
- Employee engagement – Internal marketing can keep employees informed and supportive of your company. If their jobs have a purpose and they feel like they are a valued part of their organization, they are more likely to be enthusiastic and dedicated to their work.
- Company culture: By allowing you to communicate your mission and values, internal marketing can help develop and strengthen your company culture. Having engaged employees can further solidify the culture, making your organization a more positive and enjoyable place to work.
- Brand Awareness: Internal marketing not only helps build your organization’s brand, but also increases brand awareness among employees. This helps employees become brand advocates who advertise your company (both to customers and potential employees) outside of the workplace. As long as your messaging is consistent, this can also help with your external marketing efforts.
- Recruiting and Hiring – Internal marketing can also support your recruiting efforts, making it easier to market job openings and recruit talented employees. With more engaged employees and a strong company culture, your organization will gain a positive reputation, making it a desirable place to work for more applicants.
- Retention – What’s more, this can also help you retain employees, both new and old. Increasing employee engagement is believed to reduce turnover, allowing you to keep the best workers on your team for the benefit of your business.
· A clear strategy for your business in general;
How is internal marketing applied?
In the simplest terms, internal marketing is when a company “sells” itself to one of its largest groups of stakeholders: employees. It often focuses on convincing employees to believe in the company’s philosophy or mission, thereby improving how committed they are to their work.
Internal marketing can also be a powerful tool for things like:
- Increased employee acceptance of specific goals or programs.
- Driving genuine enthusiasm about the company’s product or service.
- Enhance an organization’s reputation as an employer.
The idea is that when employees fully support the company’s approach to business or plans for the future, they can provide better value to potential customers.
You see, internal marketing theory proposes that customers’ attitudes toward a company are based not only on the product or services offered, but also on their overall experience with the company.
In other words, the varying levels of interaction of current or potential customers with employees in every department of a company (not just the customer service team) can shape its view of the organization.
Also, it doesn’t much matter if they’re interacting with an employee in person or online through social, email, or community forums. All of these outlets can change opinions.
Traditionally, internal marketing efforts are headed by human resources, but involving your company’s marketing leaders can help ensure long-term success. Honestly, you’d do well to consider hiring an internal marketing manager, or even hiring an entire internal marketing team at some point, but we’ll discuss that later.
What is the main objective of internal marketing?
Internal marketing is important because it helps align employees with brand goals and values.
When employees understand and support your company’s mission and principles, they are better equipped to promote the brand to customers.
More importantly, employees feel and do better at their jobs because they are genuinely motivated by the goals of their organization.
Still not convinced that you need an internal marketing strategy for your business? Here are some key benefits of an internal marketing program to consider.
Engaged employees are not only more satisfied with their jobs, but 17% more productive. This makes employee engagement one of the biggest benefits of an internal marketing strategy.
Effective internal marketing inspires employee engagement through a clear and compelling vision of the company’s mission. Whether through effective communications or inspiring internal storytelling, employees gain a deeper sense of purpose in the company.
When employees understand and are inspired by organizational goals, they are more likely to excel in their roles. They also believe in the product they are promoting to customers, which improves both the employee experience and customer satisfaction.
When employees feel inspired and invested in their role, recruiters are less likely to influence them.
With effective internal marketing, employees are continually reminded of the benefits of working for your company.
What problem does internal marketing solve?
Internal marketing should be a priority for all types of businesses. Whether you offer a unique product or an unmatched digital service, getting your employees excited about representing your brand is the first step in understanding the interest of external audiences. However, there are other reasons why internal marketing is a must.
There is nothing more unproductive than an uninformed workforce. Internal marketing not only answers the “why” questions that people within an organization might have, but also keeps them up to date with product or service updates. Whether your employees interact directly with customers, their awareness of brand equity should be a priority.
Below is an invite to a meeting that will give the entire team at G2 an update on new products for that week. This is a perfect example of using internal marketing to ensure that each team is aware of what the business offers.
Internal communications software can keep your employees informed and help them become loyal advocates for your business. Once they understand the value your business offers, they can then convey that information to external audiences, on and off the clock.
Consumers trust the people inside a business to provide them with the information, service, and quick fixes they need to reap the benefit. Employees, especially those who interact with customers, must be given the resources they need to provide an enjoyable customer experience. Significantly positive and negative employee encounters highlight consumers and can shape their perspective of a certain brand.
What is internal marketing?
Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) represent two different models of marketing products and services externally to different types of customers. External marketing describes the promotion and distribution of brands and products to business customers. Marketers in most organizations spend the majority of their time creating and executing external marketing strategies that drive the achievement of target sales and revenue for the organization.
While organizations focus most of their marketing resources on external marketing, there is a separate area of marketing that receives relatively little attention: internal marketing. Internal marketing refers to the promotion of a company’s goals, processes, culture, brands, products, and services to employees and staff members within the organization.
When companies market internally, they generally have different goals and intentions than when they market externally. The goal of internal marketing is to keep employees engaged, spread awareness about the organization’s activities, and help ensure that employees have a positive image of the organizational culture and brand. In contrast, the goal of outsourced marketing is generally to build brand awareness which results in more leads, opportunities, and sales for the business.
Ultimately, internal marketing has more to do with selling the company’s vision and mission than it does selling products, but internal marketing still plays an important role in moderating employee behaviors and ensuring success. success of the company in the market.
What does internal marketing mean?
From the sales technique, like marketing, I moved on to the use of market techniques to be applied to employees, to obtain participation and motivation: “internal marketing”.
Before introducing the topic, we give the definition.
It is the set of methods and techniques that, implemented in a certain order, will allow the company to further increase the level of performance in the interest of customers and collaborators at the same time.
The experience of internal marketing is not in the truth, since, since, already in the 80s and 90s, especially by the Scandinavian school, it had been focused on this topic, but in Italy, it must be recognized that it had been lived more like a fashion to import, than as a deep and serious experience on which to invest.
Internal marketing is opposed to external marketing and is directed at the company’s customer.
It was born in the early 1990s, defining a new type of customer: the “internal customer”. In fact, the employee is the first testimony of the company, who is linked by a relationship of mutual trust, with the organization to which he belongs and is the first to take care of him, who becomes credible, with external interlocutors, as a guarantee of honesty. .
Internal marketing attracts, develops and motivates the qualified worker, through the satisfaction of his needs.
Within the company, people are the only inimitable resource and their satisfaction acts as a motor for the company itself.
The role of people in the organization and their direct contribution to the success of the company establishes that everyone has the double role of provider of clients/internals, cultivating group work and nurturing team spirit, possibly also, with convivial meetings outside of offices and working hours. The best way, to guarantee the development of the company, is to pursue the objectives, through the satisfaction of its collaborators.
In internal marketing, we try to “sell” the work to employees, both stable and occasional, and, in general, to all the company’s collaborators, who will have to contribute to meet the interests of the end customer. Therefore, the company must sell the work of the product to the staff, offering a specific salary price, which the employee will pay all five with his commitment to achieve the results. Even if, in part, the employee has already paid the company, putting his resources at his disposal in the search for the workplace, he won his trust, overcoming the selection and tries to give his best to daily. Therefore, it is a mutual relationship: the company pays the employee for his services and the employee, in fact, pays the company to find and maintain his position,
What is the importance of internal marketing?
In our opinion, internal marketing is almost as important as external marketing. It may be a cliché, but your internal staff is your business, they are a big part of your brand. It is important that each and every employee needs to understand the direction and vision of the company and truly believe and live the brand. A romantic statement, but if they’re not passionate about your brand, it will show in their work.
Probably self-explanatory, however, internal marketing is about treating your staff like your customers and communicating clearly, selling them on the company’s vision. You can take it as far as you want, but at least the company’s strategic goals and team strategies need to be communicated and visible within the company; This gives everyone direction, and something to be a part of. Internal marketing offers the following benefits:
- It ensures that staff effectively buy into what the company wants to achieve and that they are more effective at what they do.
- Informed staff are generally “engaged” staff: they have a purpose for working.
- Happy staff equals happy customers.
- Internal marketing helps companies provide better customer service.
- Employees feel more motivated and experience greater job satisfaction.
- They are empowered to make decisions within certain guidelines and begin to feel more respected and valued for their contributions.
- This feeling leads to a greater sense of belonging to the “team”, as well as responsibility and responsibility of employers.
- Staff conflict decreases and people have better dispositions at work.
- Companies benefit from increased employee satisfaction and retention.
- Increased compliance with standards and protocols
Now, who wouldn’t want to work for a company with a culture like the one above? And what does it really require? Openness, flexibility and the desire to do things better for better results. It’s a mindset.
This article is a general information sheet and should not be used or relied upon as professional advice. No responsibility can be accepted for any errors or omissions or for any loss or damage arising from reliance on any information in this document.
How to do a good internal marketing?
When you advertise to customers, each ad is part of a larger campaign, and each campaign is part of your overall marketing strategy. Nothing is unique, and the same should go for your internal marketing.
All scheduled communication and point of contact employees have with leadership or human resources should be part of a deliberate strategy.
Beyond that, someone needs to own that strategy: be the person who is ultimately responsible for internal marketing. With multiple department heads, executives, and other teams communicating with employees, it’s almost impossible to have a coherent internal marketing strategy without a single owner of your strategy.
From this strategy, you need to have a proper internal marketing plan, detailing specific internal marketing campaigns with their own marketing goals, metrics, and reporting.
When a new hire starts, you want them to hit the ground running, and internal marketing is a key part of that. While typical onboarding focuses on helping employees learn to do specific job tasks, that’s no longer enough.
Great Onboarding uses internal marketing to help new team members get up to speed on the product, brand, and mission quickly. It’s more than just helping them do their jobs, it’s about getting them excited and investing in the company’s brand and mission as well.
Consider this your formal invitation to revisit that onboarding strategy and make sure internal marketing is a key part of it. Solicit feedback from recent hires on what worked and what didn’t during their onboarding. Ask them to describe the brand, mission, and product in their own words. If your explanation isn’t what you expect, find out how your onboarding can better serve your internal marketing strategy.
How to do internal marketing?
The ways we conduct marketing and communications may change over time, but the principles behind them do not. That explains why a fifteen-year-old article in the Harvard Business Review, titled “Selling the Brand Within,” still rings true today. That’s right: a business-related article originally published in January 2002 is still relevant and useful in 2017.
The article is by Colin Mitchell, formerly a partner at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather and now Global Vice President of Branding at McDonald’s, and discusses internal marketing. Internal marketing, just like it sounds, is marketing that happens within a business or organization.
If your business is thinking of launching an internal marketing campaign, it’s important to have a strategy in place, just as you would for an external campaign. We’ve used Mitchell’s insights from the HBR article, as well as our own internal communications experience, to compile five steps to creating an internal marketing strategy.
First, what exactly is internal marketing and why does it matter?
Internal marketing is when a company markets its products, services, and brand to its own employees. Instead of “selling” to consumers (external marketing), the company sells itself to its employees, treating them as internal consumers, which they are.
Internal marketing is important because it leads to greater employee engagement in the first place. It’s one thing for an employee to work for your company for a paycheck, but another for them to truly believe in your company and what they do. When the latter is the case, employees are “motivated to work harder and their loyalty to the company increases,” writes Mitchell. Engaged employees are also happier employees.
How to improve internal marketing?
Employees who feel deeply connected to their work and your company’s overall mission are more likely to represent your brand in a positive light. Employee advocacy begins with employee education and engagement.
When employees feel disconnected from their work, they are more likely to look for other opportunities. And they certainly won’t go out of their way to speak positively about the company or the work they do.
The benefits of internal marketing extend to many aspects of the business. Some of the main benefits include:
- Reduced employee attrition. When employees feel valued and feel that their work is important, they are less likely to seek greener pastures.
- Lower hiring costs. Organizations perceived as great places to work don’t need to spend as much money to attract top talent.
- Higher productivity. Employees are more likely to focus on producing great work when they feel they are contributing to a worthy mission.
- Better employee satisfaction. Acknowledging the hard work employees do helps them feel proud of their accomplishments.
- Better company cohesion. Employees have a better understanding of their expectations and long-term goals when they lean toward a clearly defined mission.
- Stronger lineup. When the broader company goals are widely understood, there is a greater sense of alignment between leadership and team members.
- Improved customer interactions. Clients want to work with companies they believe in. Mission alignment shows customers that your business is consistent and authentic.
In short, it depends. Agencies typically handle multiple clients at once, so if you go with the wrong agency, your projects may not get a sufficient amount of time dedicated to them. You also lose a lot of control over the content creation process, so choosing an agency without the right experience can do more harm than good.