It has long been accepted that marketing communications is essential for communicating with clients, stakeholders and the wider business community. Internal marketing or communications, meanwhile, is critical for the communication of values and messages to employees; as a result, it should be recognised as being as important as externally focused marketing.
There are many essential roles performed by ‘traditional’ or externally-focused marcoms for organisations of all sizes, including conveying key product messages, generating brand recognition and developing sales leads.
Internally, there are a number of specific objectives that internal marketing is utilised to deliver. However, three of the most prominent or important are the communication of marketing messages, motivation (employee) and management.
Ray Jones, head of communications at the CIM, says organisations stand to make significant gains for their marketing by communicating internally. “Employees are essential to the reputation of any organisation’s brand. This is particularly true in the B2B sector, where close relationships between customers and one or two key members of staff can be developed over long periods of time. It is therefore essential that they understand the values and beliefs of their organisation. Initiatives that can improve this understanding should be considered an important item on the marketing agenda.”
Considering that employees essentially act as advocates, both in and out of work situations, communicating brand and product messages to them and gaining commitment is therefore vital to enable them to pass on any kind of knowledge or messaging to customers and clients.
Sue Stoneman, MD at employee engagement consultancy NKD Group, sees the motivational benefits of internal communications. “Internal communications is important for employees at two levels. Firstly, it helps them to understand their job and where they sit in the organisation. Secondly, it helps them to understand and feel committed to where the organisation is going and how it wants to progress towards that.”
She continues on the utilisation of internal comms for management. “If you can get employees to engage, they are reportedly 30 to 50 per cent more productive than if they are unengaged, and they contribute more to the business. You’ve got people who are advocates of the company, like unpaid sales people, who have got to the point where they feel valued and important and can see where what they do every day makes a difference to how the company performs.”
Choose your medium
While internal marketing may have a variety of objectives, depending on the business and its challenges, there are four key channels through which companies communicate from the inside out. Each has different strengths and weaknesses and may be more suited to meeting particular objectives, for example: spreading product knowledge, general employee motivation, communicating structural changes (i.e. rebranding/mergers) or for internal infrastructure changes.
1. Face-to-face
Of all communications channels, face-to-face communications is one of the most important. This may be conducted in the form of meetings, workshops, discussion forums or simple meet-and-greet sessions, and is best used in combination with other methods, to enhance management-employee relations and ensure messages are communicated effectively and precisely.
Face-to-face communications can also provide a platform through which employees can voice queries, opinions or worries about changes within an organisation. The range of face-to-face techniques is vast and undoubtedly something as fundamental as a simple meeting would not have the same effect as a large conference. However, face-to-face can be used in companies of any size, fitting appropriately with varying budgets.
Nick Wake, head of marketing communications at motivation solutions company Grass Roots Group, which has worked with O2, comments, “Face-to-face communications should be encouraged. No amount of centrally-driven communications, the best Intranet or newsletter in the world is ever going to change an employees’ perception that communications is poor if they never have face-to-face contact with management. If the line manager is a poor communicator, no amount of great stuff is going to compensate for that.”
Stoneman at NKD concurs, “Ultimately, human beings are social animals. If you want a human being to do something, they like to feel that they’ve had the opportunity to be involved; you can’t just tell people to live the brand, you have to help them understand it, put them in a room, conduct some experiential stuff with them and they will be flying out the room living the brand. While other communications methods can be effective, face-to-face is the strongest mechanism we’ve got.”
BT Wholesale recently restructured its IT department, utilising a mix of communications channels both internally and externally. Webcasts, teleconferencing, pod and video casts and the Intranet were all used extensively. However, as Phil Exon, CRM programme lead at the company, comments, face-to-face was the most important. “Some of the leadership started compiling blogs, but it all came back to key meetings and face-to-face contact. This helped remove cynicism and doubt and allowed follow-up with other channels.”
When should you use it?
Communicating with employees in a face-to-face environment is a must for every company on a regular basis, but some messages will require this to be more formalised. Organisational change is a good example where speaking directly to staff can allay fears, help reassure personnel and quell bad feeling before it arrives. This can prove crucial in maintaining staff morale, and therefore productivity.
However, for specific marketing-related messages, more formal and regular face-to-face interaction is vital. This includes sales conferences, regular team meetings and company days out. The beauty of face-to-face communications is that the only investment it may require is time.
2. Email
As a communications channel, email is cost-effective, easily utilised and trackable and is a widely accepted and popular medium, for both internal and external marketing. Denise Cox, newsletter specialist at Newsweaver, comments, “Email and e-newsletters are extremely cost-effective, particularly with the software available; you can take huge complex projects and handle them in one location. It’s very immediate. People are very comfortable with it and are comfortable with checking them at work and at home.”
She continues, “There are so many uses for email. For instance, if someone has just joined a company they might receive a starter pack, but instead they could receive a series of emails taking them through the internal communications steps, guiding them where to go if they have any questions. Email is an important tool and it’s going to remain very strong. Every time a new channel comes up, email is compatible with it.” However, the proliferation of email and the extensive amount of spam received by recipients, can work against email as an internal communictions channel.
Chris Wilson, head of B2B at Loewy, comments, “Email can be fine, but if you send too much, too often, it’ll all get ignored. Systems such as Concep Campaigner [email solutions] can help as you can track who reads it, who doesn’t and who deletes, etc. It does have benefits – it’s cheap, quick and trackable – but use too much and no-one will open it. Ever.”
When should you use it? The strength of email is its immediacy and its cost, in terms of production and distribution, therefore it is likely to prove effective when communicating regularly with a large, dispersed audience, such as a sales force or maintenance engineers. However, the downside is that it can also easily be ignored and at worse deleted. Like most mediums, it is most effective as part of an integrated package; as Wilson of Loewy testifies, “On its own, email will never work.”
3. Intranet
Internal websites – or Intranets – can communicate many different types of messages to employees, keep them up to date with company developments and encourage teamwork.
Wake at Grass Roots, comments, “Intranets are good because they are the first thing an employee sees when they turn on the desktop in the morning. It’s an immediate opportunity to communicate information and a clearly-structured site can enable employees to find what information is relevant to them and keep abreast of useful news and information.” However, the potential of Intranets is being overlooked as a communications medium.
Cox at Newsweaver comments, “I have seen several studies where Intranets are being extremely underused and if a company spent the time and the effort creating it, they would be able to push out internal communications successfully. The HR department should have access to it and could ensure corporate messages were sent out.”
Richard Bush, MD at Base One, concurs, “What happens is that everything goes on the Intranet and it becomes a passive place; it’s a bit like saying ‘we don’t have to do any more marketing as we’ve got an Intranet’. They can be useful for finding out, for example, who is responsible for HR within a company. However, it’s not an interactive engaging environment. If it is about changing people’s behaviours, perceptions and attitudes, it needs to be more creative, impactful and engaging.”
When should you use it? Intranets succeed as an internal communications or marketing device in organisations with large workforces and a regular requirement for information updates; which will almost certainly be carried out online. Put simply, if individuals aren’t regularly online, the site will go unseen, no matter how good it is.
4. Hard copy
While electronic channels are quick, easy and widely utilised in the communications sphere, more traditional hard copy forms of communications (e.g. newsletters and internal magazines) are still being used to convey messages and important information to employees.
Loewy developed an internal magazine for Carphone Warehouse, as a way of reaching a large number of people within the organisation. Wilson comments, “Magazines can be a good communications channel if you have geographic dispersion. As always, it depends on the content; make it interesting, compelling and personal. The key reason why they work is that most of a typical employee’s day is spent on, well, work; not reading ‘internal things’. A magazine can be read on a train, bus, etc. That’s why more and more companies are cutting back on ‘internal broadcast email’: people just don’t read that stuff at work, they’re too busy.”
However, Bush at Base One is less enthused, “Too often, it [internal comms] is something done inhouse by someone on a Mac, it’s a newsletter of four A4 pages and it’s simply the latest news, wins, leavers and joiners: maybe with a wedding or new arrival thrown in for good measure. This isn’t doing your employees justice.”
A key point when considering the distribution of an internal magazine – as with other communications channels – is to ensure that the written communications fit with the brand tone and style, as well as just the logo.
When should you use it? Printed publications are a big investment, in terms of print and distribution, but provides a far deeper level of interaction than their online alternatives, and are therefore more effective in delivering the required messages. They are particularly suited to communicating with a large internal workforce, who are located centrally, enabling quick and easy distribution and consumption.
Out with the old, in with the new?
Although electronic means of communicating internally – and, arguably, externally – are quick, easy and cost-effective, it seems that more traditional means are still as effective and popular. The importance of meeting and interacting with staff face-to-face cannot be underestimated, but while it can prove effective, no communication channel should be used on its own.
Bush at Base One comments, “Like external marketing, it’s about getting the right mix. Awareness of the brand positioning might be best achieved through posters, while challenging people about how they feel about their jobs may involve an interactive tool and keeping people updated on the latest strategy developments might be best communicated through a live webcast or event.”
Therefore, internal communications should be viewed as just as important as external communications, if not more important when considering how employees affect the spread of brand values and company visions. Internal marketing should therefore not be ignored: it’s just a question of finding the right combination of tools.
