When it comes to marketing, we tend to look outward. We build strategies to engage and bring people into our world to show them what we offer. Once we draw them inside, we want to keep folks there and make them devoted members of our brand community.
But what happens when your manufacturing business engages a prospect and gets them to engage with the brand, but internally, your team needs to be fluent in your brand's story, community, or purpose?
The customer or manufacturing partner may leave, and they do so quickly.
Customers these days are informed and intelligent. They will know when your marketing could be more authentic, and often the first sign of this is engaging with a staff member that needs to be more engaged themselves.
Our fixation outward needs to be tempered by some brand introspection.
Time and treasure spent drawing people inside while our employees are disengaged or ignorant about your brand culture and values is wasteful. Companies need to market internally to their employees so that they, too, believe in the brand; it's tough to ask a potential customer to buy in when your team isn't a brand believer and can't articulate why your company is excellent.
Companies must look inward and allocate more energy and resources to internal marketing and creating internal brand advocates. Selling your brand and its culture to your employees is critical to building brand loyalty in the public market.
Well, it's a simple concept: In addition to marketing your brand outward to your customers, you turn these efforts inward toward your staff to build or improve brand awareness and loyalty.
In a 2002 Harvard Business Review article—yes, 2002, but it still resonates today--author Colin Mitchell summarizes the importance of "Selling the Brand Inside": "Why is internal marketing so important? First, it's the best way to help employees make a powerful emotional connection to the products and services you sell. Without that connection, employees are likely to undermine the expectations set by your advertising... We've found that people who care about and believe in the brand are motivated to work harder, increasing their loyalty to the company. Employees are unified and inspired by a common purpose and identity."
Again, when boiled down to the basics, if there is a disconnect between what you market to the public and what your staff communicates to leads and customers, you have a BIG problem.
This BIG problem is wide-ranging because it is about more than just marketing. It also impacts staff productivity, retention, and recruiting new talent. In short, poor internal marketing and weak internal brand cultures are problems not just for sales. Operations are impacted as well.
Let's talk about how weak internal marketing, fractured business cultures, and disjointed internal branding impact these areas of your business.
Weak internal marketing will rear its ugly head within your sales process. It doesn't matter if you have SalesForce or HubSpot and all the automation and software in the world.
People sell. People buy. Ultimately, a person persuades (or doesn't) another person to accept (or not). Marketing might be able to attract hordes of leads. The question is, can your sales staff keep these leads engaged to close them?
Internal team brand loyalty and cultural buy-in breed authenticity, which helps engagement and lead nurturing. Without internal marketing, authenticity diminishes over time, and engagement suffers.
If you have an effective internal marketing strategy and constantly improve your internal brand culture, you create an environment where staff members are not just working for a paycheck. They are working for a wage and because they believe in your company.
Mitchell, in his Harvard Business Review paper, goes on to frame the importance of internal marketing this way: "We have found that by applying many of the principles of consumer advertising to internal communications, leaders can guide employees to a better understanding of, and even a passion for, the brand vision. Applying these principles enables employees to 'live' the vision in their day-to-day activities. And when employees live that vision, customers are much more likely to experience the company in a way consistent with what you've promised."
At Illumine8, we are sometimes hired to assess a company's branding. As it's presented to the market, we often find that the brand needs to be more cohesive, meaning a coherent brand narrative is not projected to the public. The website takes a particular approach, emails go differently, and print materials take another tack. For a lead or customer, this confuses and prevents deeper engagement.
When a company looks inward, this fragmented brand image likely exists among staff members. Marketing is projecting the brand this way, sales sell something different, and customer service teams deliver the brand in another way.
In both cases, the damage is done to sales performance, but there are consequences for operations as well:
We've looked at the damage the lack of internal marketing can do. Let's summarize some of its benefits:
Finding the resources, time, and human capital to focus on internal marketing can be challenging. However, ignoring internal marketing isn't an option for manufacturing companies that want to grow. Always remember, internal marketing can be passed on to more than just your human resources person or department. Marketing expertise is required to do the heavy lifting required to build a strong program.
We can help. Reach out to us today. We'd love to learn more about your company and how we can help create an internal marketing campaign or improve an existing program.