What’s “Under the Hood” of Your Marketing Strategy

Companies often focus on the external elements of their marketing plan, such as lead generation, conversion to sales, and revenue. Consider having an internal communication component in your plan.

Internal communication indirectly impacts your targets in two major ways. First, if your internal process doesn’t provide the right (or promised) customer experience, then any marketing you do externally will get trumped. You can spend anything you want on marketing and if the experience is not what it should be, the negative word-of-mouth will nullify your efforts. Internal communication should be used to refine the customer experience.

The second way it impacts your targets is through your employees. Your employees have a direct impact on customer loyalty and your business’s growth, especially if it is based on building off of your existing customers. We all know that selling to existing clients is more profitable in the long run. Internal communication helps you develop your employees into loyalty development officers.

A good internal communication strategy can be broken out into two areas of focus: environment and behaviours.

Your company environment should be set up for your employees to succeed. Do they have the right tools? Do they have pride in their workspace? Have a third-party organization conduct some research on your behalf to gauge this. Theme the responses and change one or two things that you think will have the biggest impact.

Behaviour is more complex. If there are internal behaviours that you need to change or tweak, consider an approach that uses three ingredients (as recommended by Dan and Chip Heath in their book titled “Switch”):

1. Appeal to your team’s left brain by giving them concrete direction that is attainable. There is a big difference between saying “we need to provide better service” and “return each call within two to four hours.” Build a list of three to six tangible action items that your team needs to do in the next year.
2. Appeal to your team’s right brain by giving them an emotional outcome. For example, “by providing better customer service, you’re positioning yourself as a caregiver, someone who can solve problems for people…”
3. Give them a process to follow. If you give them all the steps and processes to follow, then they’re less likely to spin their wheels and get stuck. Think of forms, guidelines, checklists—any documentation or flow charts that will help them see how to get to the outcome.

Don’t forget to measure the success of your initiatives through an internal survey. The survey can help you track your employees’ satisfaction of the work environment and tools you’ve provided them.

Internal communication is an important component of loyalty. Which organizations do you know of that have the perfect balance between internal and external communications?