Episode 292: How's your internal marketing?
In this episode, Fiona discusses the importance of internal marketing in small businesses and shares 5 ideas for incorporating it. She also emphasizes the importance of creating a human connection within the business and involving employees in the company's goals and growth. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Importance of internal marketing and its definition
Confusion between marketing and digital marketing
Internal marketing is often neglected in business strategies
Examples of internal marketing
Importance of having an onboarding process
Highlighting the importance of celebrating employee milestones
Bringing staff along on the journey by sharing plans and goals
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
"Maybe you don't even have staff, but maybe you have people that are close to the business. They're contractors or they are manufacturers or people you've got a relationship with within your business, but you're not focusing on how are you marketing to them. And again, people can sometimes confuse that every bit of marketing you do has to result in a sale. And you feel like, I'm paying the manufacturers and they're not selling they're not buying anything from me. They are working with you and their impression of you and your business is part of your brand reputation that is going out into the marketplace and is a form of marketing. That's the word of mouth marketing. And we often think of the word of mouth marketing as only positive word of mouth Marketing can also be very negative."
Welcome to episode 292 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. Today you are reading a coaching episode where I'm going to dive into one area of marketing. I think so many small business owners fail to think about it. If you are someone that wants to get your marketing a little bit more human and connect with your audience in a deeper way then stay tuned.
The other thing I should mention is, I'm not sure if you can hear it, but I'm being joined on this recording by a whole troupe. I think there's another word for this, a whole flock of birds outside my window. I have got cockatoos and kookaburra and a couple of roses looking down at me right now. They are making some noise, but they're welcome. It is their land after all. I'm just passing by and on that of course, I should also acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on this beautiful land I'm looking out at right now as I record. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledged that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's episode.
As I said at the start that today's coaching episode is all about marketing and if you want to take notes, you can take notes. If you are listening to this somewhere that you can't take notes, know that you'll always be able to find the show notes, which are a full transcript of these over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast. And for today's episode, will have another forward slash 292 as this is episode 292. Today I want to talk about internal marketing, what is it, why you need it, and give you five examples of internal marketing that you can use in your small business. I am somebody who has worked in marketing for a long time and worked in a brand. And I have to say that all of the stuff that I've put out about marketing, the Marketing for Your Small Business course, all of that has a very big brand component to it.
I think what's happened in the last 10 years is that we have confused marketing with digital marketing only. Rather than looking at marketing, which is connecting with your audience through various mediums as a bigger, more holistic thing, looking at it like that rather than when I talk to people and sometimes they're like, “I need help with my marketing, and we drill down,” it's like you're thinking you need help with Facebook ads. That's what you're talking about when you talk about marketing rather than looking at the bigger picture of marketing, which is creating brand loyalty and getting people to connect with your brand overall. When I talk about marketing, just know that it's got a large brand lens on it. With that being said, let's get back into what I was talking about, which is internal marketing.
I think that is an area people just do not focus on ever. I have to say, even people that are in very established businesses with a large volume of staff. I don't feel that when I look at marketing strategies or marketing plans from different people from all sorts of different industries, internal marketing is given that much time or space. What is internal marketing? Internal marketing is the marketing that you're doing internally like the name suggests in your business to help create that connection and that love and that loyalty with your suppliers or with your employees or with other people that work within that business. What we can so often do is just focus on external marketing only. Similarly to brand values or when you're looking at your values and your beliefs as a company, I'll often say to people, "Okay show me how they externally align."
People can rattle off all sorts of ways. We're all about female empowerment. We can see that we do international women's day and we have a percentage of our sales go to this cause or whatever it is. And yet internally that alignment with that value is not there with their staff. Let's say for example, prior to Anthony Albanese, who's the Australian Prime Minister, making it a legal requirement as of August 2022, that you have to have domestic violence leave policy. Very few companies had a domestic violence leave policy, let alone paid time off so that people can figure out what their next steps are or can go and seek help or refuge until August last year, I would say that was missing from 98, even 99% of businesses, even if those businesses were ones that proclaimed that they were very much aligned with the value of looking after women.
That misalignment happens all the time between internal and external when it comes to values. And it's also something that I feel personally, this is my own opinion is also missed a lot when it comes to internal and external marketing. Internal marketing is not looked after. What do I mean by examples of this? When you're thinking, well what does internal marketing look like? It can look like your onboarding procedures, it can look like staff training, it can look like all sorts of things. I'm going to go through five of those. If you have staff, even if it is just one staff member and maybe they're remote, I have Yricka who works with me, she's remote, and she's amazing. I would hope that she does think that we do a little bit of internal marketing and it's also with suppliers that you may have, maybe you don't even have staff, but maybe you have people that are close to the business.
They're contractors or they are manufacturers or people you've got a relationship with within your business, but you're not focusing on how are you marketing to them. And again, people can sometimes confuse that. Every bit of marketing you do has to result in a sale and you feel like, I'm paying the manufacturers and they're not selling they're not buying anything from me, they are working with you and their impression of you and your business is part of your brand reputation that is going out into the marketplace and is a form of marketing. That's the word of mouth marketing. And we often think of the word of mouth marketing as only positive word of mouth marketing can also be very negative. You've got to think about in terms of your marketing, how are you marketing holistically? And internal marketing is part of that.
A list of five areas that you could think about doing more in if you're not already. And again, these are ideal, but you should have at least one or two of these that you are focusing on or that are part of your marketing plan for the next 12 months. The first thing, and I touched on it very lightly before, was the onboarding process. When people come into your business to work for you, what is your onboarding process like? Onboarding is the way you board people onto or into your business. Things like setting them up for success. And again, people will be like, that's not marketing, that's business operations or business systems. I am very much of the Milan Kundera way of thinking about marketing where there's a famous quote by Milan Kundera that says, the business can be divided into two areas.
I'm paraphrasing here, says it a bit better than me, but your innovation or marketing. Either you are making a product or offer and you're innovating on that or you're telling people about it. Those are the two areas. Everything I see, in business systems, is why I talk a lot with clients about business systems as a huge part of your brand and a huge part of the marketing. If the systems don't work, your marketing can have amazing messages, but if that promise isn't real because your systems don't work to support it, it goes down the toilet and your reputation is damaged. To come back to the first point of onboarding, you want to make sure that when people are joining your business, particularly employees, there's a great onboarding process. I'm sure we have all gone into companies where the onboarding process was non-existent.
If you were lucky a computer or a desk to sit at will be given. Maybe it was when you worked in retail and you were just put straight onto the shop floor with very little training or very little understanding of how their business operates, what are their goals, what are they trying to achieve, what are their values as a brand, who's their audience? We just forget sometimes when we're putting people into a role that we want to set them up to succeed because ultimately if they succeed then our business succeeds. And yet our onboarding processes can often be virtually nonexistent. Or I've seen other people where they've got onboarding processes but they're not updated so they haven't been updated in five years. Maybe something massive has happened to the company and that hasn't been included.
But also with the onboarding process, it's not just about training and getting people up to speed on the DNA of the company, it's also creating that human connection like you're trying to do with all your other types of marketing. For example, I was talking to somebody a couple of years ago now and this person and I are acquaintances and they have quite a large company now in Australia and we were talking about their staff and they were saying to me, “We're up to 50 or 60 staff.” And I was like,” Wow, that's massive.” From where they came from to that is huge. And I said, “What do your staff think of you?” And the person jokingly said, “I think they're a bit scared of me, to be honest.” And I said, “Why?” And they said because they only meet me if things escalate to a negative degree and then they have to meet me.
And I said, but don't you have an onboarding process? Like, don't they meet you when they start at the company? And they're like, no they don't. And it led to this whole conversation where I was like, wouldn't it be great if you wrote them a letter? Yes, 50 or 60 staff, but they're not all coming in at once. Maybe you've got five people that's five letters. That's not that hard to write five letters or five little welcome cards because if you've got a welcome card from somebody who owns the company, they're going to be super inspired. Maybe they join the company because they think what you've done is just incredible. Maybe they've got their own ideas for doing something similar in the future. Maybe you remind them of somebody in their family that has also gone for is really ambitious and gone for gold.
Getting that letter that has been customized, tailored to them, and handwritten, that's just such a special thing that I think we don't think to do. Likewise, maybe on their first day, there's a cupcake waiting for them or there's a lunch that other people in the group, in the family, or in the business as well. Sometimes it feels like a family has brought in, maybe everyone brings a pot lunch and you share and you talk and they get to know people on a human level. Again, I feel like this is something that is not done enough. People start and everyone's like, we're so busy, we needed you yesterday. And we failed to have that human level of connection to bring somebody on and make that starting point with the brand, the business as good as possible.
When you are nurturing a new customer, you are trying to show your best self. And yet we don't always do that when people start with us at a company. That's one example of onboarding. Other things that could be done for onboarding, I mean just simple stuff. Making sure that you've got your contract sorted, making sure that people are aware of what you expect from them. Making sure that if you do have brand DNA documents or anything about the brand, how it started, why it started, that that is relayed to them. I was talking to a client this morning who's bringing somebody on board and I said you've gotta remember they don't know anything about your business. Yes, they know a bit about it, they might've looked online for 10 minutes, but they're not going to know a huge amount about your business.
If you can even create some Loom videos to be like, this is what our online store is, these are the key categories, these are some mood boards in Pinterest about our ideal audience, or this is what we roughly do on Instagram. We also are using Pinterest or TikTok or whatever it is, giving them again through video and through your voice narrating over that Loom video for example. Or any screen sharing you give them that human connection and allow them to get up to speed and to be able to succeed in their role. Onboarding is a huge one that people don't think about when they think about internal marketing. What does our onboarding look like? When people enter into this company, whether they are an employee or whether they are a supplier or a contractor, they have some idea of who we are.
I remember when I got my job at my last employed role, it was a senior role and a recruiter sent cupcakes on the day that I started. I thought that was such a cool thing because she sent them to me, and I'm not going to sit and eat 12 cupcakes at my desk being like, “Hi, I'm the new person I'm not going to share.” But she had in there a note like thought you could share these around and get to know people. And I was like, that's great, I mean she's a recruiter that's what they do. They know all about this stuff. But it was such a good idea. And then I did get to talk to people and we all had a cupcake and we all chatted.
But I can't say that that company necessarily, I'm trying to think, I think we did go out for lunch, I have to give them credit where credits you. But I feel like in a lot of companies you do go in and you feel awkward and it's your first day and you're worried about what you're wearing and all the stuff and should just make that a little bit easier even if people are working remotely for you. It could be organizing something that they're going to receive on their first day, whether it's through Uber Eats or something else, like something small. It doesn't have to be expensive. Or it could just be a video that's like, “Hey, I'm running to a meeting right now, but I just wanted to say I'm so excited that you're starting today and I cannot wait to get to know you more”, from the founder, for example.
That could be done on your phone, it could be done anywhere. There's no excuse as to why these things aren't being done, except that I think people just don't, they just forget about doing them. That's the first one. Onboarding processes when we think about internal marketing, the second one, similar to this is making sure that you are celebrating things like birthdays or milestones. If people have been with your business for a year do they have something? I remember when I walked into Warby Parker headquarters in New York, I was at this amazing Fast Company conference and we went into the headquarters and they had balloons up, they had these blue balloons up on people's chairs like one said three, one said five, one said one. And they were people who were celebrating an anniversary that month with the company.
The person that had a five-year balloon, I mean that's also telling everyone around them, like this person's experience, this person knows their stuff, they've also done a good job, that's why we've kept them on for five years. And it was a way of celebrating them. They also had cake and they had other ways to make a birthday celebration for people to say, you have helped us, you have been helping us build this business for this amount of time and we want to publicly recognize that with everyone here. Celebrating things like birthdays, celebrating things like milestones, celebrating when people have hit a certain target that they needed to hit. And not in like a staff member of the month thing, but in a real connected way.
Even if it's as little as getting somebody to come into your office or going out for a coffee in the morning and just saying, “Hey, I just think you're doing an incredible job and I just want you to know that and that you are helping us build this business and we couldn't do it without you” and all the things because those small conversations, they might seem small to you, but those are the things that stick in people's minds and remind them that I love where I work, I feel respected, I feel valued of where I work.
And again, I feel like it's something that can easily be missed in the busyness of the day-to-day. If you are listening to this and you have staff and you haven't done any of these, it's not to put blame on you and make you feel bad. Maybe think about what could I do today. What small thing could I do today? Maybe I'm going to, when I get my coffee I'm going to get somebody else's coffee or I'm going to get them a little biscuit or whatever and just be like, just wanted to say thanks, and thank you so much for everything that you do because we can't build our businesses and we can't scale them without other people. That's the second one. Birthdays and milestones. Making sure that they are on the calendar and that you are reminded of this. And also I think one thing that does get annoying sometimes at businesses is that I know some places I've worked, if there are a lot of people and there are a lot of birthdays, it feels like you have to donate money like every two seconds to somebody's birthday.
I think what should happen if it can happen with the business is that the business takes that amount of money and says, “You know what, for every new person that comes on every year they get a $50 allowance for their birthday or they get a cake from here and they get this type of present, whatever it is, whether it's a voucher, whether it's not a cash present, maybe it's something else, but that it's not on your other staff to make that person feel good on their birthday. It's you, you have brought them on, they are your responsibility in terms of creating an amazing environment for them. Remember this is marketing. Maybe doing the calculations and thinking for every staff member, can we afford to put aside $40 per staff member or $30 or $20 per staff member to get them something fun and maybe get them something that's personalized or feels good for them?
Again, it doesn't have to be massively expensive, but I think it's something that businesses, we expect our people to do incredible things for us and to come up no matter what else is happening in their life, they should turn up, they should do their work, they should do it to an amazing degree every single time. And yet we don't think of small things like making sure that on their birthday they get X, Y, z or even on their birthday that they get a day off. I know with the VAs that I've had, I've often said, when's your birthday because we'll put that in the calendar and make sure you don't have to work. Like you shouldn't work on your birthday. That's my own personal opinion. I don't work on my birthdays, but I know that that can be hard to scale, especially if you've got important things happening around certain months and people can't take days off.
But it's something to think about with birthdays and milestones. How are you celebrating? How are you building that connection internally through your internal marketing and your systems? The third one really important again, people be like, “Oh my god, this is all costing so much money.” But you want to think about how much money you spend on your external marketing, like how much you spend on that versus your people, and making sure that they feel great and happy and content and excited to come to work. The third one is upskilling and looking at things like training budgets. Again, people are like, this isn't marketing, this is business operations. As I said at the start, I feel like marketing encompasses all of this. If people are hating their job and then they go to a barbecue and somebody says, "Oh you work there, what's that like?"
Whatever comes out of their mouth is a form of word of mouth marketing. And you're going to make this as good as possible. The other thing is that through this point of upskilling or training budgets you're investing in your own business by investing in your staff. Again, in that last employed role that I was in, I remember saying to the MD do we have a training budget for staff? And they didn't, they had a training budget for more senior staff. And again, I think this is something that gets missed a lot is that more junior staff often are the people that need the training. They are the people who maybe this is their first or second job and they need the training more than other people. Plus they usually have a lot more, not always, but they're a lot more eager and excited to do training whether that's even if it's just a weekend class.
Thinking about in terms of creating an amazing place for people to work and creating an amazing brand that has great internal marketing, whether that's with the employees or with your suppliers that you are thinking about upskilling. An incredible example of this that I think is fantastic internal marketing is during the pandemic, and this is open because I did interview this person and they talked about this, I think it was on my podcast or maybe they talked about it on somebody else's podcast, but Sage and Clare, an incredible brand out of Melbourne. During the pandemic, they have a lot of stockers and what they did was that they opened up training to those stockers. Of those stockers who had bricks and mortar stores that were selling their product some of them or a lot of them had to move online or maybe really rejuvenate their online site.
Sage and Clare through their own means created a portal for people to have training for those stockers to have training on how to get the most out of your Shopify. They took all of the information that they know about running their own business largely online and shared it with their stockers. Their stockers were able to feel like they were getting help from somebody who had done this and done it really well. And the brand agent Sage and Clare was also strengthening those relationships. That is an incredible example of this point of upskilling and training and using that as part of your internal marketing. Now I happen to know the founder of Sage and Clare's, Phoebe Bell, and I don't think that she sat down and was like, this is very strategic and it's going to help us. I think she genuinely was like, I want to help people right now that and I, and how can we do this? Because that's just the type of person that she is.
But if you're looking at skills and training in your business, think about do we have a training budget for our staff. Do we allow people to upskill? Even in my business, I have one main staff member that you have other people on the periphery that we work with every so often. And the staff member that I have, my OBM Yricka, I have bought courses and sent them to her and been like, "Hey you told me that you wanted to upskill in X, Y, Z so I bought this course, here's the login." She also has free coaching with me about her own business so she can schedule that in. She's very nice. I mean not very nice, she can be a bit modest and sometimes she'll be like, "No, I didn't want to schedule it in because you're so busy."
And I'm like, "No, schedule it in, this is your business." She gets free coaching. Every VA that I've worked with can get free coaching from me and we sit down and we go through her own business and how's she going to make her money and what are her goals and what does her time blocking looks like and all of that. All of those are elements that add to internal marketing but also add to the overall contentment that I hope that she has with working with me and being part of our company. I love how I said this was going to be a short episode and it's not at all. Number four goes with this as well. Lunch and learns. Lunch and learns is a very corporate term, but lunch and learns can work well in a small business as well.
What does that mean? It means people within the company may decide to teach everyone in the company about something. Let's say you are the social media manager of the company. You might decide to do a lunch and learn for the rest of the company to come and learn about TikTok and what's changing with TikTok, is it going to be banned in the US? All these sorts of things. And you could do that as part of the training for the rest of the company, but also you're allowing that employee to, and even if they're a contractor or a remote worker, two upskill to build their own profile and to get practice at public speaking and presenting and training. A lot of the time if you talk to your staff, a lot of them would love to have that opportunity to be able to like, one, I'd like to build my profile within this company.
Two, I'd like to show my skill set, and three, I'd like to get the practice of pulling together a mini workshop or a presentation because maybe they've never done that and they've wanted to pitch themselves to be on a panel or to do things like that. But they haven't had the opportunity to practice it somewhere first. That could be something. The other thing you can do with lunch and learns is to bring other people in. And again, let's say you didn't have employees, but you have a whole bunch of suppliers and manufacturers. You might invite them to an event and have somebody present. Another great example of this actually another great example is from a company called Character + Distinction in Melbourne. They are a PR and comms firm headed up by Kate Dinon, who is now at Culture Amp, but still part of that company.
One of the things that they did really well with both of these training that 0.3 and 0.4 are that their employees were allowed to choose any conference in the world and go on the proviso that those employees also when they came back, presented to all of their clients about key findings that they've learned. If they go South by Southwest, they come back and they might do a presentation on this is what Google was saying and this is what so-and-so was saying, and this is the trends that we saw. They're sharing that information and it's a way of internal marketing because you are incentivizing those staff by getting them to go to whatever conference they think is awesome. But also you're sharing that with your clients. You're doing a form of internal marketing through the event of sharing what was learned at that conference.
That's number four to really think about lunch and learns or profile building within your business. Again, another great way of internal marketing. And then the fifth, which is important and has summed up everything that I've just said is to bring your people along on the journey with you. We always talk about marketing bringing your customers and clients along on the journey, showing them the process of what goes into making a collection or showing them behind the scenes on a trip that you went to source fabric, or showing them how you have written a book. I know when I wrote my first book, Passion Purpose Profit, I would put on Instagram stories. Here I am at office work printing out my first draft, or here I am about to go into Hardie Grant in Richmond and see the cover designs.
I brought people on that journey so that when you present the book, you have marketed that book in a way. Even though the book hasn't been around that physically yet you have marketed and brought people on the journey. I feel like people understand how to do that externally to a degree. I don't think that people necessarily understand in small business how they should be doing that internally as well. What does that look like? It looks like sharing your plans. You don't have to share every single financial with every member of staff or anyone that you are contracting remotely, but say this is where we are trying to go. This is why we are trying to do that. These are our goals. This is where we want to get to and bring people in on the journey. Just to recap those five ideas that you can think about when it comes to internal marketing, your onboarding processes, and making sure that there's a human connection in them.
Number two, celebrating birthdays and milestones in a beautiful considered way.
Number three, upskilling and setting training budgets for your staff or for people involved in the business. Number four, thinking about things like lunch and learns or having events where you share learning and e-education with your clients or within the company that also allows for profile building within the business. And then the last number five is to bring them on the journey.
That is it for today's coaching episode. All about internal marketing and why you need to do more of it in your business. I'll be focusing another episode coming up soon on another major part of marketing that people fail to think about. And for that, make sure that you hit subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. As I said, if you wanted to go through this in text format, you can find that plus any links we mentioned over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/292. If you found this useful, please share it with a friend and if you've got two seconds to spare, please leave us a review. It just helps us get found by other small business owners who most likely need a bit of help with internal marketing as well. Thank you so much for reading. I'll see you next time.
