Learn Why Your Internal Audience is as Important Your External Audience
One thing that is constant in building a successful business is the need to always be learning. The same concept applies to your career. Each day, week, month, quarter, and year you have new experiences. These experiences teach you important lessons, skills, techniques, and strategies that will help you fine tune your business or entrepreneur career.
Internal Product Marketing
For this week's blog post, I'm going back 7 years to an experience where I learned the importance of internal marketing. I was a Director of Marketing at AtTask now Workfront. Over a quick few years, we had acquired some great enterprise customer logos. For most of the company, they where just awesome logos, but we know that each of these customers had awesome stories to tell and we wanted to tell them. We developed a internal product marketing strategy to change this.
From External to Internal
As marketing professionals, almost all of your efforts are focused on the external audience, the message, the campaign, and the brand to name a few. This audience is important to the success of your marketing campaigns and company. There is also another important audience that cannot be missed as you develop strong marketing within your organization. I call them the internal audience.
Internal Audience
I define the internal audience as the departments that are within your company. For this post today I am going to narrow the internal audience to those that talk to your prospects and customers.
The Internal Product Marketing Questions (How You Doing?)
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to see how your internal product marketing efforts are coming.
1. Is there a consistent message being told across your internal audience?
2. Does your internal audience know your value propositions?
3. Does your internal audience know why your company is better than the competition?
4. Can the internal audience quickly tell success stories of your customers?
To help answer "YES" to question #4 in our organization, we developed customer success story posters. We put these up where the internal audience could see them, read them, learn them, and incorporate them into their pitches. We wanted to keep them simple yet powerful. So we summed up the benefit in one word and their story in one to two sentences.
Results
Within a week of putting these posters up in our company, you could hear the internal audience using them in their pitches. This was a great way for our company to help the internal audience be more effective and consistent with their pitches and messages. It also made our value props and customer success come to life.
Here are a few examples of those posters:
