Internal marketing: essence, functions and goals

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

In recent years, the world of marketing has been (and continues to be) completely redesigned and focused on digital technologies and the Internet. This does not mean that the traditional type is no longer relevant, but the development of new technologies, coupled with the adoption of new strategies, continues to accelerate.

You are probably familiar with many of the new trends, conditions and strategies in the current rotation, including:

• Inbound Marketing: It's about attracting customers through relevant and useful content and adding useful information at every stage of the purchase for your customer. With inbound marketing, potential customers find you through blogs, search engines, and social media.
• Outbound Marketing: A more traditional form (or at least a longer-historical variant) where a company pushes its message to an audience. Outbound marketing focuses more on traditional forms of marketing and advertising such as commercials, radio ads, print ads, trade shows, outbound(cold) calls, etc.
• Account-Based Marketing: A new strategy and trend in the marketing world that is gaining popularity and getting a lot of attention. It is associated with the marketing of a certain company (account) or sometimes with an individual (usually depending on the complexity of the strategy) with a personalized message or content. The idea is that the more targeted efforts, the better the results.

These are just a few examples of the best strategies that can make a big difference in your advertising success. However, one of the most important and growing forms of promotion is the internal and external marketing environment. It is especially important for companies that seek to increase the flow of their customers and reach a wider audience.

Why is this so important?

One of the oldest and most common problems in business is the lack of alignment between sales and marketing. As a result, internal marketers often face a similar problem - the mismatch between the internal marketing environment and the external one.

Why is this a problem? This can be very difficult to understand, experts say, but it ultimately threatens employees' perception of the company's integrity. If your organization tells employees one thing and the outside world says another, staff trust in the brand can suffer. Consequently, their participation and quality of work may also suffer. This can be felt in practice, as it can lead tothat employees will not be able to fully satisfy customer requests.

Encourage your internal marketing target group to do relevant research and meet with relevant colleagues to coordinate messaging. It doesn't have to be the same - internal messages require a different language than the external one, but the general information needs to be consistent. Make sure the interaction exists before the team starts creating campaign materials, which is the next step in the promotion process.

What is internal marketing?

This type of marketing is the promotion of the company's goals, missions, products and services to its own employees.

Essentially, your company is selling its products, services and brand to its own employees. In this case, instead of "selling" to the public or potential customers, your organization is selling to its employees.

The goal is to improve employee engagement, increase overall brand reach, and the understanding that staff can now add value to potential customers because they believe and understand the goals and vision of the company themselves.

Internal marketing is based on the idea that the relationship of customers to an organization is based not only on a product or service, but also on the overall experience with it. This could mean customer interactions with different employees in different departments (not just customer service teams) or prospects of interacting withemployees through social media, email, forums, etc.

Traditionally, internal and external HR marketing efforts are led by HR leaders, but to take it one step further, leadership initiatives will be needed first. This is essential for the success and, of course, for the growth of the brand.

Providing exceptional customer service is just as important as providing exceptional products.

According to a survey conducted by experts, 78% of consumers refuse further sales transactions because they received poor service. Even if they would like to buy a product or need it, they were so frustrated with working with this or that company that they put off the purchase.

In this context, the actions of the company's employees can be seen as the most important elements of the internal marketing environment. They come first, tailoring the organization's marketing strategies to the needs of each client they work with. Their attitude, appearance and approach convey all the information about the company they represent.

If an organization wants to provide a great customer experience model, it needs to train its employees to provide it. But finding a workforce that fully meets the company's goals and is enthusiastic about them is not as easy as some expect. Businesses must make serious efforts to disseminate timely and relevant information so that every employee workson the achievement of common goals. A disorganized workforce and an inconsistent relationship between them are easy ways to lose business. That is why the internal and external marketing environment are equivalent.

What is this marketing?

From an internal marketing strategy perspective, employees are seen as "internal customers" who must be convinced of the company's vision and set up in exactly the same way as "external customers". The goal of internal marketing is to align every aspect of an enterprise's internal operations in order to ensure the delivery of quality customer service. If a company can operate in a consistent and standardized manner, it can provide better service to its customers.

Internal personnel marketing is based on the idea that the attitude of customers towards the enterprise is based on their experience of interacting with it, and not just on the impressions of the products or services provided. Every time someone interacts with an employee, it affects their overall satisfaction. Everyone who works from the salesperson all the way to the phone support technician helps shape the customer experience. Therefore, customer satisfaction is highly dependent on the performance of the company's staff.

For example, Apple has a unique organizational culture that emphasizes innovation, creativity and expertise. In order to promote it, management is very selective when it comes to recruiting employees and is extremely meticulous in the process of recruiting them.learning. Apple understands that the best way to promote its brand image is to create a positive image for every employee, especially those who work with customers. Anyone who has been to this firm's store knows that the employees are experts in the products they sell and are available to answer an endless amount of questions. They are smart, open to dialogue and knowledgeable, which reflects positively on the reputation of the company as a whole.

Who runs this?

Human resources specialists typically lead internal marketing campaigns. And this is the right approach. Since internal marketing of personnel is aimed at increasing the value of employees, well-established communication between the organization and employees is important. Their main responsibility will be to disseminate information about the company's goals and strategies, as well as training and support to help employees achieve these goals.

Strictly speaking, any organization can implement an internal marketing campaign. Even the smallest businesses can train employees to project the vision and goals of the business. So imagine a small bakery that trains its staff to be ready to greet customers with a smile and a positive attitude while providing service. Aligning employee attitudes with the mission of the business is critical for any company that wants to engage with its customers.

However, usually these are large firms that invest the most in the analysis of the internal environmentmarketing and develop appropriate strategies. Since they have a huge number of employees, often working in separate departments and offices, it is more difficult to apply a corporate culture. Firms with thousands of employees working in R&D, sales, marketing, manufacturing, and logistics must make a concerted effort to educate everyone about the company's marketing goals. Retailers, restaurant chains, and other companies that interact with a large number of customers will be especially interested in internal marketing. They need to create an organizational culture that spreads throughout the organization and develops its own designs for clients.

Tactics and analysis of internal marketing should be based on the following basic postulates:

• identify each area where the organization comes into contact with the market;
• allow executives to provide feedback on internal marketing and HR issues;
• use newsletters or own video courses to spread awareness and strengthen organizational culture;
• make marketing strategy a feature of employee training programs;
• ensure access to information as often as possible;
• incentivize employees based on their performance;
• strive to provide comprehensive and ongoing training programs for employees at all levels;
• put the brand as the basis of your argument toworkers could also associate it with their personal success;
• use technology tools such as blogs, bulletin boards and Wikipedia to spread the word about their activities;
• Create individual marketing programs for each department, so messages for salespeople will be different from information intended for IT staff;
• highlight employee success when new beginnings or sales goals are achieved;
• encourage cooperation between departments.

Internal Marketing Environment Factors

Of course, with any good strategy to be effective, you need to develop a plan of action. This not only ensures that you don't blindly enter the process, but that you can find areas that may need to be improved or changed.

Internal marketing tactics and system should be carefully laid out, and by following the steps below, you will be well on your way to maximizing a robust internal mechanism within your company.

It is important to form your team correctly

Initial involvement of HR leaders is important for good processes and communication with employees. However, first of all, it is important that business leaders or management have the best understanding of the essence and strategy of the brand. They will help create a work culture, communicate the mission of the company and best hire employees who specialize in certain areas.products or services. Before you can start anything else, it's important that your team work together.

Review your actions

As a general rule, whether or not you have a formalized system in place, your company probably already has some form and system of internal marketing in place. Unfortunately, things may not be so good. This is a good time to identify and evaluate aspects that are considered internal marketing tactics.

From there you can start to understand if the movement you started is working, what needs to change and how to make it more correct, or you need to start from scratch. A good way to evaluate this is to ask all employees what they know or don't know, what their views on the company are, etc. This is very important in the aggregate as it helps to start correcting any problems.

Align marketing messages and provide open trainings

After collecting information, you can better align the internal marketing of the organization and get everything centrally. Of course, it is desirable that employees have their own personal opinion when it comes to how they talk about the company, but they should all have a similar perspective on the product or services.

There should also be training sessions and open forums where workers can openly offer ideas, ask questions and provide safe criticism. By getting this kind of interaction, you will have trust and create a dialogue between you and the staff. Also, it allows your company leaders to sharematerials and encourage everyone to take action on behalf of the brand online and offline.

Make sure everyone is involved

Again, a good deal of new marketing allows employees to actively participate in online exchanges and interact through social media, email, chat rooms, forums, etc. This is usually a huge part of internal marketing. Many companies try to simply send their staff a newsletter consisting of the latest content or news.

To facilitate the participation of all employees in such interactions (especially companies with 200 employees or more), an advocacy program will be critical to the effective operation of internal marketing. It will be effective to create your own resource on the Web dedicated to this aspect. These platforms serve as a central location for sharing useful content, new company information, personal content from third-party sources, and advertisements that employees can directly use on their social media right from the running platform.

When everything is up and running, keep working

Even after you have a formal internal marketing strategy in place, a great work culture, employees connected, and engaging online on behalf of the brand, you still need to be open to feedback and work on improving tactics.

Keep having trainings or meetings for open discussions, correcting processes if something is broken, constantlykeep employees in the loop and take their thoughts seriously. Understand that your work will never be too comfortable if mistakes or obvious improvements are overlooked. External and internal marketing of personnel must work continuously and in constant conjunction.

How the plan should work

Marketing in the domestic market is one of its most complex forms. It has to do with creating compelling and meaningful messages that are communicated between each department and employees within the company. The best way to effectively internal marketing is to create a comprehensive plan.

As an example, consider Wachovia, one of the five largest banks in America. It was formed in 2001, after the merger of two smaller banks, forming a large financial institution that suddenly had to create a corporate identity for itself and instill it in the workforce. To help them enhance the image of the entire company, they developed a plan and their own internal marketing environment for the organization, which had positive results.

The first step in any plan is to set clear goals for your internal marketing strategy. This can be anything from increasing brand awareness among employees. In the case of Wachovia, their goal was to provide excellent and seamless customer service as they went through the merger of several banks.

Once goals are set, plans can be made to achieve them. They canbe complex and comprehensive or relatively simple. If a company wants to raise awareness of a new product, it is necessary to make presentations at staff meetings. But if there is a need to fundamentally change the culture of their organization, they may need to add additional staff, reorganize departments, or develop new product lines.

In the case of Wachovia, exceptional customer service was their ultimate goal. They did this by providing comprehensive training programs and using new technologies to increase efficiency. Their staff was ready to provide the services expected by customers after the merger.

Before the plan is put into effect, employees need to get comprehensive data on its goals and objectives. Everyone in the company needs to know what the goals of a given plan are and how they will be achieved. Organizations can use departmental meetings, newsletters, corporate retreats, and blogs to help spread this message.

The plan must be available to any employee at any time. This step is important because internal marketing aims to raise awareness and focus efforts. Employees should feel like they are part of the plan and their feedback and ideas should be respected.

Many companies also offer incentives, such as bonuses or extra vacation days, to help motivate employees to achieve goals. Wachovia reached out to its employees by offering extended maternity leave and benefitsfor families with children. They also concentrated on acknowledging their employees as one of the reasons for their own success.

Once a plan has been put in place, professionals must closely monitor and evaluate the results to determine if the action was a success. Many internal enterprise marketing efforts use surveys and employee feedback cards to understand how employees feel about the companies they work for. Wachovia has developed its own survey to track employees' attitudes towards loy alty, job satisfaction and company policies. This helped them align their brand messages with their organizational culture. Today, Wachovia consistently receives the highest customer satisfaction scores of any major bank.

Marketing communications professionals are experts at crafting messages that are informative and engaging. Their job is to find the words, images, and ideas that will best connect the company's marketing goals with the public. Usually they are customers, but in the case of internal marketing, they are employees.

Education and experience

All professionals must have at least a bachelor's degree in marketing. Many of them also hold advanced degrees, complemented by years of experience in the industry. Additional public relations training will help them develop better marketing solutions.

Human Resources serve as the liaisonbetween the company and its employees. They will attract and train new employees, develop the corporate culture and respond to any problems that arise in the workplace. Dissemination of information about the company's policies, initiatives and goals is another important feature of their work. Most internal marketing management uses these departments to distribute their messages.

Any manager will need at least a bachelor's degree in human resources management. A degree in marketing is not needed, but it will be extremely helpful. HR managers must communicate with employees in the same way that salespeople must convince customers. Additional education in business administration or public relations may also be of value.

Brand managers will oversee marketing efforts for one brand. Their responsibility is to create an identity for the brand and then communicate this to customers through advertising. They will look at everything from the way a product is packaged to its price and how it is presented in television ads. The brand manager will educate other employees of the company about the brand identity and marketing strategy.

Such employees must have the appropriate education. This is typically a senior marketing position and many brand managers provide training in advanced marketing strategies. Team management experience and delegation of responsibility will be critical for any effective manager.

Internal marketing is one of the most difficult types of marketing because employees have more information about companies and their products than any client. The insider's eye will always be especially perceptive when the claims are about products or services. Convincing the population of something requires a thoughtful and comprehensive approach to marketing. A degree in advertising is vital to the effective functions of internal marketing.

Closing word

When employees believe in a brand and participate in your company's initiatives, they tend to be motivated by their work and are more likely to become influential marketers and salespeople (brand advocates), spreading the word about your products.

This is why internal and external marketing and having a good strategy are critical to the success of your company's brand. If employees are ignorant or unaware of the goals, products and services of the organization they work for, there is a huge performance gap with customers and prospects.

An important aspect to keep in mind when looking at the internal marketing environment of an enterprise is that it goes well beyond human resource and communication initiatives. With the growth and importance of social media and potential customers being able to take a closer look at information online, your marketing executives can help other employees to participate in various discussions.

The above should help youunderstand why internal marketing factors should be a top priority in your company. In addition, the description may help you adjust the current internal strategy (if it is already set).