Internal marketing - managing your company vision during expansion

Brand positioning is an essential part of any marketing strategy. It’s how your company establishes its unique identity and determines where it sits in the market in relation to other businesses. It encompasses a company’s ethos: the ‘message’ it wants to send or the ‘mission’ it’s on. Not just what it sells, but who it is.

Once established, it’s essential to convey this messaging to the outside world. But it’s also increasingly important to communicate your values and mission within your own business.

Internal marketing is the idea that a company’s brand needs to be sold to its own employees, its ethos filtering through to every level of its day-to-day operation and shaping the organisation itself. So why should you have an internal marketing strategy, and how can you put it into action?

A cohesive vision

The argument for internal marketing is two-fold. Firstly it serves to engage your employees; communicating your vision and creating the basis for a thriving company culture. Secondly, if your workforce understands the business mission, it allows them to take ownership of the brand and ‘sell’ the business to anyone they meet. The two go hand in hand.

A clearly stated vision, properly communicated, makes sure everybody is on the same page. If we’re more engaged with our work, we’re happier, and when we’re happier we’re more productive. In fact, research by Professor Andrew Oswald, Dr Eugenio Proto and Dr Daniel Sgroi from the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick found that happy employees are 12% more productive than ‘normal’ people. The cynic in you may well baulk at such a black and white evaluation, but there’s little doubt that a happy workforce is preferable to an unhappy one.

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A strong internal marketing strategy also makes sure the emphasis isn’t constantly on the business owner to do all of the talking, motivating and insisting from up above, because the brand or vision is ‘owned’ by the entire team.

This means that as the company grows, its vision remains unified. Having everyone carrying the torch makes it easier for a business to scale.

Putting it into action

So what are the strategic and operational considerations you need to implement an internal marketing strategy?

• Write it down. Absolutely essential. Too often a company’s vision is solely in the business owner’s head; it’s imperative to get this down on paper. Easy to say, of course, harder to do. We may well explore this topic in a later post but, in brief, you need to start from ground zero and ascertain the core values you want your whole business to espouse. What is your business all about? Where are you going? Who are you? These are big questions, and getting to the bottom of them may feel like pulling teeth. But they’re important things to ask. When was the last time you took a day out to really think about, for want of a better phrase, the big picture?

Once you have this, write it down and set it out in an official document.

Further reading: How to write a mission statement

• Communicate with your team. Make sure your employees know what your mission is, what the goals are and what your company values are, but also keep them abreast of new, exciting developments in the business. This could be done via a monthly newsletter, a company-wide meeting or a digital bulletin board. What things should you be communicating? Business mentor Tom Zendor suggests the following:-

– Press releases
– Product and service information
– Advertising (including audio/visual)
– Trade show attendance
– Significant customers
– Major orders
– New hires
– Customer endorsements
– Public news about the company, including significant events
– Selected financial information

• Host internal events. Host staff events that help to convey the company message and allow your team to share in the spirit of things. These can be synchronised with external marketing campaigns or follow internal successes. And don’t discount charitable pursuits. Supporting a charity that resonates with your business and employees is both fulfilling and effective at unifying staff.
• Find simple ways to express company ethos in day-to-day operations. For example, if you run a health foods company, give your team free fresh fruit.
• Encourage active participation. Make every team member feel like they are able to contribute to a positive end goal. A motivated team will want to come up with their own ideas. Ask for input from all levels: the insights you get from employees ‘at the coalface’ can be invaluable for improving your business practices. If you’re asking for feedback, make sure it’s acknowledged.
• Measure the results. As with external marketing, you should always measure the success of your marketing campaigns. How do you measure employee satisfaction? Ask. Be it regular feedback, one to one sessions, anonymous surveys or all three, the most effective way to get a feel for how your team is feeling is by asking.

The key is communication, and if executed well, internal marketing will help you to manage your company vision, unify your team, and grow exponentially as a business.