Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from our upcoming book This Won’t Scale. You can sign up to receive the book (yes, a real physical book) when it ships here.
The best marketing channel that no one talks about is marketing internally to your team.
At Drift we believe that marketing is everybody’s job — it’s not just the people with marketing in their titles.
And if you think that everyone outside the marketing team understands what you do and is naturally inclined to promote the company’s work to the rest of the world, you’re dead wrong. Because the hard truth is that no one cares about marketing. And that’s because too often they don’t understand its value.
One of the most important parts of our job as marketers is sharing our work to the company and explaining why what we do matters.
In fact, when I first started at Drift and was asked to get up in front of everyone to share what I’d been working on, I could’ve just listed the things I did, like, “I wrote a blog post and tweeted four times.”
Instead, I told a story. I explained that the way people buy in B2B has changed. Today, before even agreeing to meet with a salesperson, people like to read stuff online, listen to the company’s podcast and check out their blog.
These pieces of content help build trust among the target audience. And since Drift didn’t have a blog before I started, I told everyone that I’d spent my first week writing the first post and getting the blog live on our website.
And that’s exactly what internal marketing is all about: Getting in front of people and explaining why what we do matters to the rest of the company. And perhaps what they can do to help.
Because at the end of the day, if you can’t get the people inside of your company to believe your message, how will you convince outsiders?
It’s simple math, really: If you have a marketing team of three in a company of fifty people, wouldn’t you rather have all fifty people making noise about the brand than just the three?
But while this makes perfect sense on paper, not many companies are investing in internal marketing. Either they don’t understand what they’re missing out on, they don’t put in the time for it or they just assume that people will naturally contribute to marketing when they feel like it or have the time.
So at Drift, we try to bake internal marketing into everything we do and make it part of our weekly rituals as a company. The marketing team joins the weekly sales meeting at 12 PM every Monday, and the marketing team presents every Friday at 4 PM at our company Show & Tell.
And we take both of these opportunities as seriously as we would an external speaking opportunity because the mission is clear: Get people onboard with what we’re doing.
If building marketing into our weekly meetings and rituals is the number one secret to internal marketing, support from the management team at Drift is number two. Without their unconditional support, it would be impossible to borrow a busy engineer for a quick video shoot, convince the whole company to tweet about a new product, or have everyone record LinkedIn videos on launch day.
Want to learn more about Drift’s internal marketing efforts?
