Internal Marketing - Creating a Powerful Brand

What is Internal Marketing?

 Internal marketing is the act of dealing with your businesses internal customers: your employees. It is your job to actually implement cultural change. Internal marketing is about providing communications to help the employees identify with corporate objectives. What this means is showing your employees your brand's goal of being marketing orientated. This would help develop your employees' attitude and behaviour towards their own role.

The Importance of Improving Your Internal Structure.

The most important thing to your business' success in this day and age does not come from your external communications. No matter how low your prices are, how awesome your website is, your success starts at home. Only by managing your employees well and by streamlining your internal structure and processes do you have any hope. Informing them about policy changes is not internal marketing. Your employees must feel that they are learning, not just being instructed. Their needs must also be met when doing this. There is no point handing out a company-wide policy if Brad from Sales says it's impossible and Jade from accounts says that it would triple her work-load.

Goals of Internal Marketing

Every internal marketing process is going to be different depending on where you start out, your office politics, and even a higher-up who might have an unwillingness to change. That being said, the more evidence you can provide and even if you change small things at a time, little by little, here are your goals all laid out for you.

• Gain the support of your key decision makers.
• change the attitude and behaviour of your employees.
• Understand what your employees' value and their beliefs, and gain their commitment to change.
• Acquire the necessary personnel and financial resources.
• Overcome inter-departmental/functional conflict.
• Change the culture.
• Educate, motivate, and satisfy your employees.

Internal Marketing Segmentation

We have written a piece on marketing segmentation before if you want to go check that out. Doing segmentation internally is a little different. It is similar though, as you are separating your internal stakeholders into groups with similar needs. They might be based on where they are in the process line, their attitudes towards the business, their knowledge/expertise, or even their level of enthusiasm for your new marketing plan.

By splitting them up into manageable chunks, you can help relay the right information to the right people. You can motivate different market segments in unique ways and even find out what they value as a way to help them push for change. This is using the internal marketing mix.

The Internal Marketing Mix

Likewise with market segmentation, we have covered the marketing mix before. That was entirely about external communications; now let's talk about what it means to look internally.

Product: Strategy, marketing communications plan, values, job role, behaviour, values.

Price: The psychological cost of adopting different values, loss of status, uncertainty.

Promotion: Two way communication is needed, notice boards, meetings, sales competitions, rewards.

Place: physical venues, training sessions, social occasions.