By Tim Sweeney
The Missed Opportunity of Internal Marketing
A brand’s employees are, in many cases, an overlooked asset group in marketing efforts. We asked the marketing leaders from two companies to explain their strategy in making their employees a priority. Now you can maximize the potential of your workforce to build brand power.
As a marketer, you may spend long days and sometimes sleepless nights deep in thought about new ways to connect with your target audience. But what if there is another audience much closer to home that you aren’t targeting at all? Often, a major asset that is underused and sometimes ignored is lurking across the hall from your marketing department—your fellow employees. Why would you market to your own employees? For starters, company morale. If employees believe their job is simply a job, it will show in everything they do and say to every person they connect with daily. On the flip side, if the workforce believes in the vision and values of the company and is proud to be part of the team, they often deliver customer products and experiences that are over-the-top and go out of their way to spread the word about brand accomplishments and products.
When you factor in that today’s employees have growing social networks on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it’s hard to argue the idea that more than ever before, the best ambassadors for your company are the people in your company. Employees, after all, are face-to-face with suppliers, customers, and the buying public. But in order to get the most out of this undervalued asset, internal marketing needs to play a role.
“The key to effective internal communications is authentic honesty and transparency,” says Jill Thomas, Chief Marketing Officer at Innisfree Hotels, a company that has made marketing on an internal level a top priority. “You want your team members to communicate with you this way, and you should show them the same respect. The same goes for consumers, of course. I think the more honest and authentic you are, the less likely it is that an internal communication initiative will backfire.”
David Weekley Homes has won a number of awards for being a best place to work. The home-building company believes strongly that its internal culture is a large reason why it has been able to withstand the ups and downs of the housing industry over the past four decades while maintaining a positive business reputation. Much of that centers around letting employees know that the company has a sincere interest in their well-being and the communities they live in.
“We believe that we rank highly as a company for all generations because we offer competitive benefits and amazing perks that appeal to a variety of age groups,” says Lyda Akin, the company’s Vice President of Marketing. “In addition, we know that team members of all ages like our unique workplace culture that allows them to give back to our communities through the volunteer and philanthropic efforts of our CARE program.”
The company is heavily involved in nonprofits, such as Habitat for Humanity, Ronald McDonald House, the National MS Society, and Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, which are committed to education, family values, and youth development. They even give employees time off during the workday to volunteer with charities that are important to them.
“Our team members are bringing back a sense of community to our neighborhoods and cities by devoting their collective resources and talents to many worthy causes,” Akin says. “We definitely see them as brand ambassadors. When they are happy and feel they are valued, not only do they provide a wonderful home-building experience for our customers, but they also are more likely to discuss their happy workplace with family and friends.”
Like employee benefits and a willingness to contribute to the community, transparent internal communications has been an important part of creating the company’s rewarding workplace culture for the past 40 years. That includes everything from measuring important milestones to discussing details about a project with a manager. “Keeping team members informed about all aspects of company operations provides a solid foundation,” Akin says. “We do this by providing an open line of communication that allows us to focus on achieving success and reaching our current and future goals.”
TELLING STORIES
Creating a desirable culture through experiences like the ones mentioned above is a great first step, but how can you share them with the members of your workforce who might not be aware? Thomas says to start by applying to your internal storytelling the same best practices that you use to communicate externally. “It’s no secret that the most important thing in any marketing initiative is an understanding of your audience,” she says. “It’s about gaining an empathetic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve; observing, interviewing, and engaging with your users; identifying their pain points, feelings, and fears; reframing assumptions; and defining the challenge. In fact, I think it is a bit easier, because your audience is easier to identify.”
Since you should understand the audience who is your workforce, the next step is determining how to communicate with them. Thomas points out that, like consumers, Innisfree’s employees are inundated with information. They are also multigenerational, meaning they access technology in different ways. So while internal marketing, just like external communications, requires making choices, it also needs to be seamlessly executed across multiple channels.
“When we started this process, my goal was to get everyone using the same channels to communicate,” Thomas recalls. “It didn’t work, because our team members are widely varied in terms of their comfort with technology. We have people who are using Internet Explorer 5.0 and don’t know how to process an email attachment, while others are constantly on the go and work primarily from their mobile phone. We have some team members who are Microsoft Office power users and others who prefer G Suite (Google Drive, Google Docs, etc.).”
So that Innisfree’s staff members can access the brand messages where they are comfortable, internal communications are done across a variety of channels. A company intranet houses a great deal of brand content for employees to consume, but they are also not afraid to adopt new technology and communication styles, such as Slack. The company is even exploring the idea of computer-screen kiosks in break rooms for team members who do not sit at a desk or use a computer during their workday. Small groups can also test new channels and push working ones throughout the organization.
“I think the key is to not strive for a one-size-fits-all solution unless you have a homogenous, tech-savvy team,” Thomas says. “We found a lot of times, the only way to cut through the information overload is in-person training and workshops. These are time-consuming and tedious, but I don’t think we could have engaged our employees in our intranet without them.”
David Weekley Homes sends a quarterly newsletter, WeekleyPress, to each team member’s home, allowing them to share it with family members. It serves as an opportunity to share company and individual happenings, achievements, news, awards, announcements, fun photos, and more. “Each issue contains a letter written by David Weekley to team members and their families as well as information about company-wide happenings from the previous quarter, such as the latest product developments, expansions into new cities, exciting events in our team members’ lives, and tips for health and wellness,” Akin explains.
Deciding whose shoulders it falls on to create all this great internal marketing content can sometimes create friction between marketing and human resources, the group that has traditionally been the publishers of internal messaging. While admitting that collaboration between the two teams is crucial, Thomas nevertheless believes that the marketing department needs to push the envelope so that the cautious approach normally associated with HR doesn’t erode the dynamism of your internal marketing campaign. “Internal marketing, like all marketing, is built on great content, which is created in the marketing department,” she says. “One example for us was removing the legalese from our orientation booklets.”
To build your internal communications plans, start with a content marketing strategy that includes an editorial calendar. “We do this so that our team members know that there will always be something fun, fresh, and interesting to engage with on our internal channels,” Thomas says. “And we brainstorm content production just as we would for any ongoing consumer-facing campaign.”
Above all, Thomas says, you need to be entertaining in what you churn out. “Technology and information overload are blurring the boundaries between our work and private lives,” she says. “If you want to grab their attention, you need to stand out and entertain. It has to be engaging and fun.” (See our accompanying sidebar, “Internal Marketing Tactics,” to learn how Innisfree communicates to its internal audience.)
HAVING THE RIGHT TALENT
To build an effective internal marketing strategy and create content that is “engaging and fun,” you’ll need the right people on that marketing team. At Innisfree, recruiting creative talent into a traditional business is a challenge, so top-level management had to protect the idea of marketing internally. “In Creativity, Inc., author Ed Catmull calls it ‘protecting the baby from the beast,’” Thomas says. “In our business, the beast is operations. They are output driven and are wired to keep things on track and on budget. It took them a long time—and an internal communications strategy—to come around to the idea of needing a corporate storyteller.”
Early on, the company’s CEO defended internal marketing efforts from the inevitable cynicism of the operations teams. That gave the group time to learn and fail, without the pragmatic leaders in the organization pressuring them to fall into line with how things have always been done. To build and protect a place where smart culture thrives, Innisfree created an internal digital agency with a culture that respects and engages in Innisfree’s corporate culture but is also different.
“We integrated some corporate policies so that our culture appeals to creatives,” Thomas explains. “For example, we allow them to wear whatever they want to work. We are task driven, so as long as the work gets done, the creative team can flex their office hours as they wish. Most recently, we adopted kittens. We also have a separate physical space in a different building, with a creative aesthetic and spaces where we can sprawl and brainstorm.”
There was controversy internally around that decision, but Thomas believes the separation has enabled the team to recruit and maintain creative talent who would not thrive in a work environment designed for hotel operators. Thomas reports that the agency now stands on its merit, demonstrates a return on investment, and is winning the respect of “the beast.”
“Our internal marketing initiative helps our team members align with our corporate mission, vision, and goals,” she says. “Internal marketing supports a degree of transparency that provides our team with a degree of comfort about communicating without fear of reprisal. Working with team members to empower them to play a role in external marketing is the next step.”
