What is internal marketing?
Everyone is familiar with external marketing. It’s TV commercials, event sponsorships, and product placements in popular films. The goal: Convince consumers to buy goods or services.
What’s less common is the concept of internal marketing. This involves applying principles and strategies found in external marketing to internal corporate communications. It’s bringing the best of what happens outside of a business—raising brand awareness and boosting likability—inside. It’s marketing internally.
In a sense, every professional internal communicator is already practicing internal marketing—even if they don’t think of it that way. They’re asking their colleagues to read announcements and attend training sessions. They’re reminding staff members to submit expense reports before the deadline. They’re trying to get people to pay attention and act.
Borrowing tactics from external marketing can help internal communicators achieve the results that matter to them—and, by extension, to the company as a whole.
Internal vs. external marketing
To define the term in more detail, below are three key ways internal marketing differs from external marketing.
1. Audience:
External marketing speaks to the public. It’s aimed at customers, both current and potential. Internal marketing, however, is meant for employees.
The two audiences may overlap in some aspects—age, location, income level—but remain distinct groups with a different relationship to the company.
2. Objective:
As noted earlier, the goal of external marketing is to generate more revenue for the business, whether that’s through more sales or subscriptions.
Internal marketing, on the other hand, strives to establish a healthy flow of information between employees and departments. It seeks to keep workers informed about where the company is going and their role in getting it there. It’s about building trust through transparency.
3. Responsibility:
While the marketing team, together with outside PR and advertising agencies, tend to handle a company’s external marketing, it’s less clear who’s responsible for managing internal marketing.
Is the HR department in charge? Should the marketing team lend its expertise on certain projects? Is there a dedicated team of internal communicators who can lead the initiative?
The answer, of course, depends on the individual organization.
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Internal marketing examples
Many forms of internal marketing exist. Regardless of a company’s size or resources, below are four ways any professional communicator can start applying internal marketing techniques today.
1. Research:
As the saying goes, know your audience. Marketers are focused on understanding everything they can about their customers. Their hopes, fears, desires, and motivations.
In the same way, internal communicators should seek to understand their colleagues. What are their challenges? How are they feeling about the new vacation policy? What would make them happier at work?
The more professional communicators know about their audience, the better they’ll be able to speak to them in a way that resonates.
2. Branding:
Although internal communicators don’t need to go as far as creating a new logo for their department, they should incorporate the power of branding in everything they do.
This means picking a certain style of presenting information and sticking with it. Examples include a unique color palette, series of recurring images, or introducing signature charts to help make sense of complicated data.
Strong branding signals to readers you’re serious. You care about the details. You’re a professional. You’re reliable.
3. Tone of Voice:
Similar to branding, external marketers aim to establish a specific tone of voice in their messaging to stand out from the crowd. Internal communicators should do the same.
Rather than shifting from formal one week to casual the next, it’s best to settle on a manner of writing that remains consistent.
Over time, this will build familiarity and shape expectations, making communication with readers more effective.
4. Selecting the Right Channels:
Every good marketer knows some mediums are better at reaching some consumer segments than others. If they want to engage younger people, video games or TikTok are good bets. For older people, however, traditional TV or a print magazine might do the trick.
Internal communicators should ask themselves the same question. Depending on their organization’s workforce, is it time to start a podcast? What about a weekly newsletter or in-person Q&A with a company executive every other Friday?
On the flip side, which channels are losing their luster? What means of communication should come to an end? Constant evaluation of how you’re fostering dialogue will keep conversations feeling fresh and vital.
The benefits of adopting an internal marketing mindset
The advantages of embracing the mindset of an external marketer are many.
If employees are reading company updates, responding to feedback, and generally keeping in the loop, they’re better prepared to pivot if necessary. This could mean taking advantage of a new opportunity or solving a problem that requires everyone’s input.
Well-informed employees operating in a healthy work environment are also more likely to understand the company’s mission and feel valued for their contribution. This leads to more productivity, higher satisfaction, and lower turnover. It has a way of attracting more high-quality talent, too.
How PoliteMail can power internal marketing
One major component of external marketing left unmentioned until now is measurement.
Anyone running a major consumer-facing advertising campaign to sell more sunglasses or movie tickets will have a mechanism in place to monitor how well the campaign performed. Without a way to track the results, it’s impossible to say what worked and what didn’t.
Likewise, internal communicators who use PoliteMail can track how many employees are opening their messages and actually reading them. Using hard data, they can adjust an email’s length and the time they send it to generate the best performance. Use our benchmark data to compare your results with industry benchmarks and devise internal marketing campaigns to improve your results.
Armed with figures like these, internal communicators can tap into the same toolkit external marketers have been refining for years to turn everyday messages into campaigns that truly engage employees.
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