Why Internal Marketing Is More Important Than External Marketing

Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of the JMMB Group. Speaker. Producer and Host of The Internal Marketing Podcast.

If there’s one thing most business leaders can agree on, it’s the fact that we had our first employee before we got our very first customer.

There’s a good reason that it often happens in this order. Companies couldn’t hope to deliver a great brand promise or customer experience without their employees. In other words, it underscores the crucial role that employees play in a company’s value chain; yet, too many companies are not giving internal marketing to employees the focus that it deserves. If that’s your company, there’s a chance your brand-building and revenue growth are hurting as a result.

Before I dig any deeper, let’s level on what internal marketing is. The most commonly used definition is akin to a management philosophy that’s focused on promoting the company’s mission, purpose and products/services to its employees to enable and empower them to become more effective at living the organizational culture, delivering on the brand promise as ambassadors and being external advocates of the brand.

Let’s face it; for all the money that companies invest in communicating to their target customers about who they are, what they do and why they’re better than the competition, marketing and sales strategies will be negatively impacted and their brands will be proven to be inauthentic if the experience that those customers receive doesn’t line up with the promise made. In short, if your employees aren’t motivated or empowered to be effective brand ambassadors and advocates, then your bottom-line goals will be dead in the water.

How does internal marketing build the company brand and drive growth?

It’s important to recognize that happy, engaged and brand purpose-aligned employees help deliver unique value propositions and experiences for your customers. Interacting with the Apple brand is a great example of how this shows up. When customers walk into an Apple store, they’re usually guaranteed an experience that is unique and consistent with the brand promise, all delivered by their awesome team of representatives on the front line and supported by those in the middle and back offices.

In a hyper-competitive world, your company must be able to deliver a strong value proposition in a way that always stands out. Relying on your most valuable asset—your people—means that investing in internal marketing is critical.

Furthermore, employees engaged through internal marketing are more likely to become emotionally connected to the brand. This comes out in how they interact with each other and your customers. At the heart of marketing is understanding and driving behavioral responses in your target customers. It’s the same with internal marketing, where employees are another kind of target audience that needs to be engaged and motivated to respond in ways that benefit the company and all its stakeholders, including those very same employees.

This approach can help better ensure that employees deliver your brand promise to customers through a proud association with the company with which they work. Money can’t buy an employee base that’s emotionally connected to the company brand.

Customers trust your people more than your brand.

Trust in institutions like government, the media and certain businesses has been trending down in recent years, with more consumers expressing that they prefer to trust people they know and like, especially those within their own communities. Consequently, customers will faster believe what your employees have to say about your brand and its offerings as opposed to believing your official marketing and corporate communication messages at face value.

Like it or not, our employees are part of communities themselves. All it takes is a few conversations in a grocery store aisle, at the gym, or (worse) on a job and recruiting website to do damage to your brand that’s going to be difficult to repair. Employees are the representative voices of your brand; it’s your responsibility to make sure they only have good things to say and are inspired to share them.

Employee brand advocates help drive revenue.

Engaged employees who promote and advocate for the brand externally can better drive sales revenue, no matter the role they play in the company. Target customer leads that are generated through employees convert at a higher rate and faster pace than the leads generated through your marketing campaigns.

People prefer to do business with people they trust (your employees) than they would with a faceless brand. Any questions that your target customers have about your brand, its products or services are quickly answered and concerns abated when they are engaged by your employees early in the buying cycle. Even for companies in the B2C space, sharing the faces of an engaged workforce who are promoting the brand to their communities, helps to create an army of authentic brand advocates creating earned media that would be difficult and expensive for an official marketing campaign to replicate.

It’s hard to attract and grow target customers who are raving fans of your brand if you haven’t done the internal marketing work to ensure that your employees are raving fans of your company brand in the first place. Engaged employees who are powerful brand ambassadors and advocates can help more efficiently and effectively build your brand and drive growth.

How about rerouting some of your external marketing budget to internal marketing efforts? To begin, do some deep-dive research to assess how engaged employees are in the company brand. Then, move to implement internal sensitization activities that are geared toward educating employees about the company’s purpose and value proposition(s), which are some important first steps to helping them become powerful advocates of the brand.

While this is just a glimpse into how you can perfect your internal marketing strategy, I’ll cover more of the “how” in my next article.

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