How To Boost Your Content Strategy Using Internal Marketing
One of the biggest challenges we face as content marketers is getting the right people to see and care about our content.
We not only want greater content visibility, but we also want to build relationships with potential customers.
It’s a never-ending battle that few of us win.
What if everyone in your organization could be involved in the content creation and promotion processes in some way?
What if people in your company (outside of the marketing team) could become brand advocates?
There’s a solution that makes these things possible.
It’s a solution that few content marketers consider when creating a content strategy.
Two words. Internal marketing.
What Is Internal Marketing?
Internal marketing is the process of getting employees to buy into the mission, vision, values, and culture of an organization. It flips the marketing conversation from the customers to the employees.
I recently interviewed Kerry-Ann Betton-Stimpson, owner of the Internal Marketing Podcast. One of the truth bombs she dropped during our interview was that employees should be top priority.
They’re the people charged with fulfilling the brand’s promise each day. The quality of customer care deteriorates if employees aren’t happy and aren’t connecting with the brand’s core values and messaging.
Our responsibility as content marketers in this internal marketing framework is to ensure that the brand’s message is clear to employees. We need them to buy into the message so that they can feel empowered to use their personal brands to spread the word.
Internal marketing quote by Kerry-Ann Betton-Stimpson
Internal marketing isn’t an up-in-the-air, theoretical, or far-reaching concept. It actually works!
Real-Life Examples of Internal Marketing In Action
Example 1
Ashley Faus, Content Strategy Lead of Software Teams at Atlassian, recently shared with me a true story of internal marketing in action. Someone saw a LinkedIn post by an Atlassian employee about one of the company’s products.
This potential customer was intrigued and immediately wrote a comment asking an Atlassian marketing employee to reach out to her.
Ashley viewed this as a golden opportunity. Here’s what she did…
Checked out the person’s profile and discovered that this potential customer was interested in Agile systems.
Responded to the person’s comment with a list of relevant articles and other content assets on Atlassian’s website that would be interesting to her based on her experience with the Agile framework.
The commenter was so impressed that she reached out directly to Ashley, became a paying customer, and invited someone from Atlassian to speak at an event.
Ashley summed up this powerful interaction perfectly when she said, “Having employees engaging is so key to building relationship and trust with potential customers.”
Example 2
Laura Erdem, Account Executive at Dreamdata.io, unexpectedly created a viral LinkedIn post that lead to more business for the company.
She was so excited that she shared the results with the Dreamdata.io team. Six of the team members joined her in posting quality content on LinkedIn frequently.
The aim was to collectively get over 300,000 post views. If they did, the company would treat them to dinner.
They achieved far more! Their posts got over 520,000 views! They expect these views to provide greater brand awareness and ultimately more business in the long-term.
All organic. Nothing paid (except the cost for the well-deserved team dinner ☺️).
4 Steps For Creating A Strong Internal Marketing Strategy
You can benefit from the power of internal marketing if you know how to implement it correctly. Kerry-Ann mentioned four critical steps you can follow to get the process right.
Check For Clarity
Many organizations invest large sums of money in employee training with some of that training focusing on sharing the company’s mission, vision, and values. It’s fair to assume that employees would be very clear on these three things after engaging in these training sessions.
The reality is that these core elements of a company’s brand messaging often get lost in the fray. That’s why you need to do a temperature check to understand:
Whether these core elements are clearly understood by all employees
If there are any gaps so that a strategy can be implemented to address them
Get Support From Leaders
An internal marketing strategy won’t work if there isn’t leadership buy-in. The company’s leaders need to understand how this investment will lead to more sales. So, getting buy-in goes beyond presenting them with the information you unearthed in step one.
You need the company’s leaders to understand the two biggest benefits of internal marketing:
It costs far less than traditional advertising
Employees already have meaningful relationships with potential customers. This makes it easier for them to become genuine brand advocates.
Leaders will also want to know what’s in it for the employees. How’re you going to get employees to buy into this idea and become the brand advocates they’re meant to be?
Employees benefit from internal marketing from the perspective of building their personal brands. I’ll discuss this further later in this article.
Lay Down The Law
Be clear about the policies and procedures that will govern your internal marketing efforts from the get-go. There have been many instances of employees losing their jobs because of things they’ve said on social media.
Do you remember Justine Sacco? She was the Senior Director of Corporate Communications at IAC in 2013. She posted an embarrassing tweet while boarding her flight for her vacation in South Africa that year. Little did she know that the tweet would lead to her losing her job.
This is what the tweet said, “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” She had only 170 Twitter followers so she didn’t expect that tweet to lead anywhere. That one mistake completely changed her life.
This is just one of many cases where social media was inappropriately used by an employee. You want to avoid instances like these at all costs. That’s why you must be clear about the company’s:
Social media policies and procedures
Guidelines for how employees should build their personal brands
Do A Trial Run With A Small Group
Testing is the final step before launching your internal marketing strategy company-wide. Ask a few willing employees to participate in your pilot project. Here’s what you should do once they’ve signed up:
Train them
Provide them with the technology and tools they need for success
How To Help Employees Build Their Personal Brands
I had a conversation about personal branding with Winston Henderson, the Content Marketing Guy, a few months ago. He said, “Personal branding is the new degree and content is the new resume.”
Personal branding quote Winston Henderson
That’s a powerful statement. It’s essentially saying that how you build your personal brand can be more effective at opening up opportunities than your college degree. But, you need the right content for your personal brand to see results.
Kerry-Ann suggested two ways a company could approach helping employees build their personal brands:
Tie the content they create directly to the content the organization creates
Give them free rein to build their personal brands based on their passions
The team at Dreamdata.io, for instance, had the flexibility to create whatever felt natural to them. They posted about a wide range of work-related and personal topics.
Both of the options Kerry-Ann suggested have their pros and cons. Regardless of the option you choose, encourage your employees to focus on the one thing they want to be known for. That should be the focal point of their personal brands. After all, a personal brand is really about the person.
Employees who effectively build their personal brands are better able to build the know, like, and trust factors with people in their circles than the larger company brand. Here are some tips to help employees find their one thing and build strong personal brands around it.
What About Their Jobs Excites Them?
Your company is filled with brilliant people. They have knowledge to share based on their experiences and deep-seated passions. Help them share it.
For instance, let’s say your company is in the financial services industry. One of your willing volunteers for your internal marketing pilot project is from the risk analysis department. He’s passionate about helping people identify investment risks so that they can better match their investments with their risk tolerance.
You could encourage him to spend 15 minutes each day creating text-only posts on LinkedIn that inform people about the risk analysis process. There are people interested in investments who will follow him over time and engage with his posts. Some of them will reach out to him for support which then leads him to bring business into the company.
Provide Them With the Tools They Need To Simplify The Process
Employees tend to shy away from anything marketing related because they feel it’s the responsibility of the marketing team. They also don’t want to take on anything else that seems like more work and a tremendous burden on their time.
Squash these concerns by providing everyone interested in participating with the tools they need. Hello Scribe is an artificial intelligence tool you could suggest for those who are fearful of writing. Kerry-Ann has a podcast episode with the founder of Hello Scribe that you can listen to for more information.
Several other software programs exist that can simplify the content creation process. Do your research to find the tools that would be a good fit for the needs of your organization.
Create A Content Repository
A content repository is a central place for storing all your organization’s content assets. You can create simplified versions of your blog posts, podcasts, videos etc. and place them in your content repository.
This makes it easier for employees to find content that resonates with them and share it directly on their social media accounts. A simple way to keep track of this repository (and give everyone within the organization access to it) is to create a cloud folder, such as a Google Drive folder, in which all these simplified content assets are stored.
Don’t forget to encourage employees to share the content directly on their social media accounts rather than using external links. Social media algorithms prefer content that’s natively uploaded. Native uploads tend to get greater visibility.
Laura from Dreamdata.io also mentioned an interesting LinkedIn feature. It gives employees access to content created by the content team that they can use on their LinkedIn profiles. Here’s what she said,
LinkedIn company pages have a special tab for just internal employees. The content team can put posts there and employees can just pick up and post if they are out of ideas.
LinkedIn My Company Tab On Company Page-min.jpeg
Final Words
Internal marketing can provide powerful support for your content marketing efforts if done correctly. Take the time to prepare and execute a solid internal marketing strategy before completely rolling it out to the entire organization.
Also, ensure that you listen to the feedback from everyone who participates so that you can provide them with the tools they need to successfully build their personal brands in a way that benefits the organization.
Want to learn more about internal marketing? Check out my full interview with Kerry-Ann by clicking the play button below.
Subscribe to my Youtube channel for more insightful content marketing conversations.