Internal Marketing: Why Your Company Should Prioritize It

Learn everything about internal marketing and why your company needs to prioritize it right now.

Over recent years, the world of marketing has been (and continues to be) completely re-shaped and directed by digital technologies and the internet.

This is not to say traditional marketing does not have its place still, but the development of new marketing technologies coupled with the adoption of new marketing strategies continues to accelerate.

You’re probably familiar with many of the new marketing trends, terms, and strategies in current rotation, including:

Inbound Marketing: It’s about attracting customers through relevant and helpful content and adding value at every stage in your customer’s buying journey. Via inbound marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media.

Outbound Marketing: A more traditional form of marketing (or at least one with a longer history), where a company pushes its message out to an audience. Outbound marketing focuses more on the traditional forms of marketing and advertising like TV commercials, radio ads, print advertisements, trade shows, outbound sales calls (cold calling), etc.

Account-Based Marketing: A new strategy and trend in the marketing world that’s gaining a lot of traction and attention. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is about marketing to a specific company (account), or sometimes to the individual (generally depends on the marketer’s sophistication, really), with a personalized message/content. The idea is that the more targeted the effort the better the results.

These are just a few examples of the top marketing strategies all of which can play in an important role in the success of your marketing (others that come to mind, depending on your industry include influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and external marketing).

Yet one of the most important and burgeoning forms of marketing is internal marketing. As we’ll explore, internal marketing is particularly relevant to B2B companies looking to boost their lead flow and reach a larger audience.

What is internal marketing?

Internal marketing is the promotion of a company’s objectives, mission, products and services to its own employees.

Essentially, it’s your company marketing its products, services, and brand to its own employees. Where instead of “selling” to the public or potential consumers, your company instead sells to its employees.

The purpose is to improve employee engagement within, increase overall brand reach, and also that employees can now provide value to potential customers because they believe in and understand the company’s goals and vision themselves.

Internal marketing is based on the idea that customers’ attitudes toward a company are not just based on the product or services, but the overall experience they have with the company. This can mean customers interactions with various employees in different departments (not just customer service teams) or prospects engaging with employees online via social, email, forums, etc.

Traditionally, internal marketing efforts will be led by HR folks, but to take internal marketing a step further, initiatives from the marketing leaders will be essential for success and of course, for growing the brand too.

Common internal marketing tactics

As mentioned above, a lot of what internal marketing was (and is) has to do with informing and educating employees on the company. This will primarily and traditionally be in the hands of the HR teams.

Some example internal marketing efforts include:

• Educating employees on the company goals and values
• Encouraging employee input on corporate policies and leadership, allowing open dialogue and accepting any criticisms
• Nurturing communication and collaboration among employees
• Ensuring employees know that their contributions matter and are essential to the success of the company.
• Opening up the product or services to employees to use and get involved in

However, internal marketing has become more than just that. In fact, the term and strategy should be slightly re-defined to not only selling the products or services to your employees but getting your internal workforce to become an extension of your marketing and sales teams.

Now more than ever, getting employees involved in the marketing and sales process will greatly benefit the results of your overall business.

[Click to Learn How To Take Internal Marketing to the Next Level]