How to Deliver a Successful Internal Content Marketing Strategy

As the point of connection between the brand, its customers, employees, and other partners, marketing is uniquely placed to drive growth and create brand value. 

We are in an age of unpredictability where attention is at a premium and your main competition is your customer’s last best experience. To deliver on today’s customer expectations, marketing needs allies at all levels of your organisation. To achieve your business goals, HR and marketing can join forces to deliver an internal marketing strategy, delivering content marketing campaigns for people working inside and alongside your organisation.

Your customers don’t differentiate between departments, so everyone in the organisation needs to understand their role in delivering excellent customer experiences. Employees from sales to customer service, product or service innovation to finance, technology to HR, all have a contribution to make in the customer journey. Without effective engaged employees and cross-functional collaboration with people across all levels of the organisation, your marketing cannot cut through or reach its full potential.

Fortunately, building relationships is what marketing is all about. Its job is to connect, engage, and motivate people to take action. 

So, while most B2B marketing strategy articles focus on ways to connect with your external audience, today we want to turn things around. Marketing skill, content marketing and marketing automation can all be used to your advantage to drive the behaviours of your internal audience to deliver an irresistible brand experience.

An Aligned Internal Marketing Strategy

With an increasingly broad potential remit, the first step is to ensure that the marketing strategy is aligned with the organisation’s key objectives. Chief Marketing Officers need to work with the rest of the company’s leadership to develop a shared strategic vision and understanding of the scope of marketing’s role. 

Research from McKinsey shows that winning the support and confidence of their C-Suite colleagues is vital to creating the conditions for marketing’s success. High-growth companies are seven times more likely to have a CMO who is capable of fostering robust, collaborative partnerships across the C-suite. They describe these ‘Unifier CMOs’ as:

"...masters at fostering cross-functional collaboration. They ensure that marketing has a clearly defined role in the eyes of C-suite peers; they adopt the language and mindset of other C-suite executives; and they articulate how marketing can help meet the C-suite’s needs. They also establish mutual accountability and a shared vision with other executives. Sought after by peers for advice, they have a seat at the table when critical decisions are made, have broad profit-and-loss (P&L) responsibility, and are often involved in defining the company’s strategy."

From these strong foundations, and with agreement on marketing’s priorities, the senior marketing team is able to develop impactful strategies that ensure that decisions made by the C-Suite cascade and drive activities. Without them they are likely to struggle to reconcile the difference between expectations and experience, both for internal partners and external customers .

This level of clarity and buy-in from the leadership is also vital for driving a top-down culture of the whole organisation sharing marketing’s mission. When everyone understands they have a part to play in communicating the brand’s positioning, values, and purpose, and are working to amplify the same message, that cohesive customer experience suddenly becomes possible.

Bringing Everyone Together

Successful CMOs unify the C-Suite and transform other leaders into champions of the marketing mission, but they can’t do it alone. Marketing needs to work as a team to support their star player and to create favourable conditions for this culture to take root throughout the entire organisation.

Think about your internal marketing efforts in the same way as you would any other marketing campaign.

Understand your target audience

Using the same content marketing tactics and ABM strategies you would employ for external executives, marketing can work to engage the internal leadership and help bring them onboard. To do this effectively, you need to understand the mindset and needs of each potential ally. 

It might be helpful to define the pressures they are under, the objectives they need to deliver on, and their particular interests and passion projects. From there, you can outline how marketing drives growth and serves the organisation’s broader goals and objectives in terms that matter to them.

In the same vein, you have to understand the needs, concerns, and challenges facing employees across the organisation by asking, listening, and acting on your findings.

Offer training and encouragement

Encouraging your employees to talk about the company on social media and share brand campaigns will help to improve your company’s visibility and reach. Greater presence will, in turn, help to achieve other marketing goals, such as increasing website traffic, brand awareness, and lead generation.

However, for most people to feel comfortable representing the brand, you’re going to need to share your communications expertise. Create regular internal communications, including email marketing campaigns, blog posts, and employee social media channels, to help educate on the brand’s positioning, values, and services and foster engagement.

People at all levels of the organisation will also benefit from your assistance in creating a professional LinkedIn profile that they’re proud to share. For more senior members of the team this might mean using professional writers to create compelling biography and mission statement, as well as regular articles. For everyone else, marketing can provide on-demand training on LinkedIn best practices and template profiles to work from.

Don’t add to their workload

It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t already have enough on their plate and who is keen to take on additional responsibilities. If you want active allies, just communicating why you need their help isn’t going to be enough. You’re going to have to provide practical assistance. 

Make it enjoyable and mutually beneficial for people at every level to get involved and become brand advocates. Create assets for external marketing that make it easy for employees to share and promote the company in the brand voice. 

This could potentially be delivered informally, however for larger teams this might prove unwieldy. In these instances, a more formal employee advocacy program might be more appropriate for getting your internal marketing working smoothly. 

Build professional profiles

Executives with strong personal brands are influencers – not only within their departments but within their industries. (In the case of truly charismatic leaders, their influence can extend further into popular culture). 

Help the C-Suite, senior managers, and specialists in the organisation to build their personal professional brands and amplify your message.

Recruit high profile people from across the organisation to front industry articles, guest posts, and speaking events but do the leg work for them. Have a member of your team or your content agency interview them, write the piece on their behalf and in their voice, and give them final sign off.

If you have someone who is comfortable on camera, plan content that capitalises on their presence. This might look like a traditional webinar, or a live event on social media - like the weekly Ask Me Anything events Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri hosts. 

Use automation

Marketing automation technology is most often talked about in relation to your external audience, but it can also be used to understand when people have received and opened internal emails. It can even track when important training assets such as intranet pages, pdfs and videos have been viewed. 

Simplify and Streamline Your Internal Marketing

The marketing department is expected to play a pivotal role in delivering growth, brand value, and customer experiences. While this requires marketing to align its strategy to deliver on business objectives, it also requires the rest of the business to get on board with and support marketing’s mission. 

It’s time to break down the silos, start working as a team. As one of the connectors of the company, it is marketing’s role to take the lead. You need to engage your colleagues, from the C-Suite on down, and motivate a change in culture that delivers the unified customer experience your b2b buyers expect.

1827 Marketing’s expert strategists can help you develop innovative and effective internal marketing campaigns to engage the C-Suite and build interdepartmental partnerships.

With our innovative cloud-based online marketing platform, it is easy to coordinate with different teams, wherever they are in the world. Through effective partnerships and cross-functional collaboration, your marketing strategy can reach its full potential.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you.