Why Internal Marketing is Essential for Company Success with Charlie Riley

Marketing is the one function that probably touches arguably

more areas of the business than others. Marketers are being asked to do more and

more. You have to be a financial expert. You have to be a product expert.

You have to convert sales. You have to tell stories. You have to

retain customers.

That's good. And welcome to a new

episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew, and I'm your

host, Brett Deister. Please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite

podcasting apps. The five star review really does help with the rankings. Let me know

how I am doing. But this week, we're

talking about internal marketing and how it's just as important,

and you should be probably be focusing on it as external marketing. I know this

is a big thing because most people kind of ignore it. It's on the back

burner because you always wanna make your sales. But, anyways, I have Charlie

with me, and he is the first head of marketing at on screen measurable

outdoor advertising advertising platform

has been the first marketing hire at six

organizations in marketing and sales at seed stage startups up

to 200,000,000.

Welcome to the show, Charlie. Thanks for having me. I appreciate

it. That's the first question to all my guests is, are you a coffee or

tea drinker? I'm an iced coffee drinker. I don't drink

hot drinks, but I do drink, iced tea

or I Iced tea occasionally, but, more of an iced coffee person.

So are you, like, like, iced coffee, cold brew,

or does it really not matter? Because they are actually brewed differently.

Yeah. I'm not a I I don't know that the the full nuance of all

of them, but, I I I like both. So,

usually an iced Americano is what I go with. Well, I mean, the difference

is that just cold brews just brewed in a room temperature or

cold. And so that's why it's called cold brews. There's no heat involved, and then

ice is usually traditional way, and then you just kinda ice it down.

Learn something new. Thanks. I appreciate it. You're welcome. And I gave a brief summary

of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you

do? So I'm the head of marketing at OneScreen dot

ai. We are a measurable out of home or

outdoor advertising platform. So we help, brands,

utilize brand marketing, in in their demand gen

execution. I've worked at a number of

different companies in different sizes in in a range of

industries. So, yeah, I've been first marketing

hire a couple times, and I've, you know, really tried to lean

into, I've worked on that. I've been very

fortunate to lead sales teams, even though my background is more in

marketing. I've led sales teams a couple of times now, so I have a deep

appreciation for understanding how hard that role is and how

much marketing works directly with sales

and customer support. It's not it's not just

siloed functions there. Everyone has to work together. And

so, yeah, I think that the topic of internal marketing, especially

with what I do now, where we're working with sales teams, we're working with support

teams, we may be helping with product launches. It's really

it's really important for marketers to understand

how our work supports and helps other functions. So I've I've been kind

of talking about that or or appreciating that for over twenty

years now. Why do you believe that internal

marketing is just as important with external marketing for a company

success? Marketing

is the one function that probably touches,

arguably more more areas of the business than others.

You know, marketers are being asked to do more and more. You have to be

a financial expert. You have to be a product expert. You have to

convert sales, you have to tell stories. You have

to retain customers. There's there's a piece to all of that.

And so you have to know a little bit about everything. You have to be

able to to snorkel in most functions and then deep dove

into other areas. And I think depending on the

function or the the maturity of organizations,

everyone has their interpretation or assumption of what marketing is, and

especially, you know, everyone has an opinion of what good marketing looks like.

And so I think it's important as a marketer to work

to really listen and understand first and foremost what people think

marketing is and how that they're that role

supports or contributes to what they do. And

then you have to utilize that to make sure that they understand,

how long it takes to do certain executions, how that's going to

impact their role, how they can help support marketing, because

it is a team game. It's it's a team effort, especially when you're working very

closely with sales and customer support. But you have to dive

into understanding the product. You know, you have to be able to tell

that that in a different way than maybe an engineer does,

or to talk about how a product or a solution,

why a CFO cares about it versus maybe a salesperson or

a marketer. So you just you have to be a communicator.

That's what marketing is first and foremost. And you have to not only think

about your audiences are not just external from your walls or

from your company, but you have internal

constituents too that you have to help all get on the same page

because it's going to reduce the cost to go out to market. It's going to

make it your job easier, and it's going to make them

understand, how you what you do day to day and how it helps the

company. Can we say that internal marketing does help employee morale and

productivity because of just how

just checking in with employees a lot of times and making sure that they

have what they're needed to be supported is just as important

as just making a

sale. Yeah. That's a that's a good maybe secondary

benefit to being a good storyteller. You know, you're

gonna hopefully you're gonna be involved with internal

communications alongside HR departments,

or operational departments because there is there's a lot of ways

that, marketing can help to,

extend the story. So, you know, when you launch a big campaign and

for us, you know, that's launching a campaign with a customer is doing a

big out of home, campaign. So they might be doing a big brand

launch. They might be doing a product announcement. It's a

very visual product. What we have, we've got billboards, we have bus wraps, we

have all these different executions that we build for someone. It's a fun

story. It's it's it's exciting to see that go live. It's exciting

to see that out in the world. We like to share that internally,

but we also have to help the other departments understand

how how their work contributed to us getting to the the the

angle. We have to we have to help maybe tell the story

of how do they find us? We have to ask those types of questions.

Where did they come from? Like, what was their main goal and how do we

contribute to that? Because that's going to help,

sales think about how they're messaging differently. That's going to

help, marketing where they spend their dollars or where,

like where they're advertising. So those types of stories are

important to think about the whole the whole story, not just what your

function does. But, yeah, when you talk about morale, I think that's one of those

areas where it's like, hey, let's look at this, execution we just

did. We just did a lot, a large, campaign for a conference.

Let's champion that and let's call out who contributed to that because I

may not know the day to day details of what someone on a planning team

does. But I can start to appreciate that more and start to

understand how long it takes to build an out of home plan. I can

understand how long it takes, to source with different

vendors. So that goes into my mind as I'm as I'm planning

maybe how we talk about a case study or use case. And

so I think it all comes back to just having an

appreciation for what other functions do and wanting to help

champion that because marketers, you know, their inherent

skill set should be able to be able to tell stories in a way

that can communicate to different learning styles.

And has it changed a little bit since we have more remote and hybrid workers?

Because I mean, past before, everybody had to come into

work. Now some companies are requiring you to come back to work five days a

week. Like Amazon just announced this past week, they're like, y'all have to come

back to work. But how has it changed with internal marketing if you don't have

everybody in the office five days a week now? And

then of remote and hybrid models, it's it's even

more paramount that internal marketing's and it's just

executed and there's a structure to it. I think, you know, everyone in

the company should be able to tell your elevator pitch. Everyone, there should

be consistency there, and it's just you may have to roll it out differently.

But you also have to keep in mind some employees may may have never

met each other. You're working in different time zones. There's different styles

and structures there. So being a part of helping understand what

the expectations are and contributing that in the

different learning styles that they have. You know, for someone in

remote, it may not be where you're just sending them a text

document. Maybe you're recording a Loom video and sending that because there's a little

bit more asynchronous ability there or it's just they're a visual

learner. So I think just like marketing

externally, you have to think about the executions you use and you have to think

about the different formats you use. So it's the same thing, I think, internally,

especially, but it's probably even more important as not everyone's in

the same office building or in the same location all the time. You have

to reinforce that you have to reiterate that message. And that's where I

think different learning styles comes into play with that.

And how can internal marketing help ensure consistent messaging across both

internal and external communications? I

think that's where a good example of that of that would be is,

not operating in a vacuum when you're launching a marketing campaign.

Launching that internally first because one, it's going to get everybody excited.

Like, here's what we're doing. Here's all the here's all the executions we built. Here's

what this is going to look like. But you get other people to buy

in, you get some, you get people's excitement there.

You're also not asking everybody to give their opinion because making a decision as

a group, a group thing can definitely

prevent some progress there. I mean, there's some feedback you might get,

but, you know, you take that in stride. It's like, Hey, thanks. We appreciate that.

Here's maybe the rationale of why we did it this way or why we're

messaging this way. It helps you to educate on the

theory and the the execution of of what a marketing campaign looks like.

But that's gonna help sales because they're gonna see the the use cases

that you're using. They're gonna to see the emails that are going out so they

know how to respond to that. So it's important to keep people

involved early on in the process. It gets them excited internally. And then

when it goes out in the market, you can then report on that. You can

give updates. But it's very important to keep everyone in the loop early

on, versus it being a surprise to, other departments

internally. You're trying to do all this

messaging to have, like, the different types of personality come in and help you

figure out if this is the right messaging, because you're gonna have different groups of

people with different diverse thoughts, and then they'll all disagree with each other, but

at least, you know, like where all these diverse thoughts are going with this

messaging, because I mean, as marketers, we can create this message. We

think it's awesome. And then all of a sudden we bring it out to the

wild and it's like, well, that didn't work so well. I

mean, as we know, marketers, you're not gonna bat a hundred

or, you know, a % every time, some

campaigns are just not going to hit. I think there is a trap

of asking for opinions from everybody.

If they're not the intended audience or they don't know enough about

the intended audience, there's going to be

a bias towards what they like. And, you

know, no offense, but somebody in accounting might not be your ICP. They

might not be the person you're trying to talk to. So while they they may

have an opinion about that, they're not the intended

audience. And so you have to take that into my into consideration.

You also have to take into consideration ideas are going to come from everybody.

You'd be silly not to take ideas from other places and other

individuals that may not sit in the marketing team. However, you have to

just there's a balance there of, you know, too many

cooks in the kitchen or just too many ideas versus

we're going to go with this. This is our hypothesis. We've made a decision on

this. Here's why we're going to learn from it. But but I've

had great ideas coming from someone that's, you know, no marketing degree

whatsoever, but they just they had a really good idea and you're like, Oh, I

could see that work. So that's important. And I think you want to champion that

as well to say, Hey, look, this idea came from someone in the product team.

We never thought of that. And look where this got us to. So I think

that's one of those things you can help champion for other people to contribute because

they they should feel like they should contribute. And nowadays

everyone has a voice. Everyone has social channels that they're active on.

There's not you shouldn't have the expectation of everybody wanting to share your

news. But you can champion those that do want to because

they're going to extend the voice of who you're talking to.

And it may start to reduce your your overall marketing costs. And what are

some of the common mistakes companies make when implementing internal communication

initiatives? And how should they avoid these?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think as long as it's not a one way

conversation, and as long as it's not well, we told

you that once. I think you have to continually communicate,

the same story over and over again. It's just it's just like external.

Nobody's going to make a buy unless you're selling T shirts or something

very transactional. Most people don't make a decision or a buy

or are in a buying position at that time when they hear

your message the first time, you have to continually communicate that over and over

again. And then when they're ready to execute on that or when they're

ready to understand that, they hopefully think of

you. So I think a couple areas that,

are not probably going to be effective when you're trying to build an

internal marketing communication program or plan is if you just say it

once and then think everyone retains it. If you do it in the format in

one format and you don't keep into consideration

how other people learn or absorb information, I think that's a

way that you can fail in that, and or just

not be open to feedback. I think it's a marketer's job to listen

and to digest and to

disseminate information in a way that,

in different ways that people can understand. So if you are just,

you know, closing that idea down, it's like, no, no, no, we're like, we come

up with the ideas here in the marketing world. You're going to fail and you're

going to turn people off, too. I mean, like everyone has good ideas. It doesn't

mean it's always going to be the best idea for their execution, but

you you should be open to those types of things within within reason.

So, I mean, what I'm hearing is even if you're the maybe the boss of

somebody, don't talk down to them, talk parallel to them or, like, equal to

them. So your messaging should be equal even if you're the boss,

but still have that separation. Or if you're the same point, just talk equal

to them. Because when you talk down to people, people are like, Well, I'm not

going to do anything about this. Yeah, I think that I mean, that's just human

nature in general. You don't don't be a jerk. You know,

like, I think keep in consideration that sales what

sales is doing. It's difficult and it's important, and it's equally

as important as what marketing is doing. We're here to help each other.

So sales team, here's why I think that our marketing

team should sit on your calls. Here's why we should talk to your customers because

we're going to pick things up that you may not. You're going to hear something

different than than we're hearing it and we're going to use it in a different

way. Not, you know, if I said that to a market, a sales

leader like, Hey, we're going to sit on your calls without

context, that seems like a forced entry there

that seems confrontational. Hey, I really want to understand

better how we can change up our landing page and we I want to use

the words that our customers are using. So would it be okay if we

sat if we listen to your Gong or call recordings or if we did,

or if we could go out on some sales calls like framing it in a

way where it's, Hey, I'm trying to help you out and it's going to make

all of our jobs easier. Yeah, you just, you know, I think it's as

simple as just try not to be a jerk, and which is, you know, how

we should all, live in life, I guess.

And and and in what ways can a company measure the

effectiveness of their internal marketing strategies?

I think when you when you can see cohesion between teams,

when you can do things like,

when you can think about, like, requests that come into

marketing and maybe, you know, depending on how you kind of keep track of that

or structure it, but, I think there's some efficiencies of scale

that could come with, maybe not having so many

rush requests and maybe the education around

a salesperson coming to a marketing team. I need a sell sheet,

which happens probably very often. You know,

the first thing I would do is ask, well, what do you what do you

actually try to accomplish? They do. Do they specifically ask for a sell sheet

or do you need a reason to follow-up and like they're just a tangible

type of of learner? Do we not have enough information on

our site? What's what? What are we trying to get across them?

Because we may have another execution for you that's already built, or we may have

a different way that you can deliver that. That's a track

that's easier to be tracked than just handing someone a PDF.

So there's a lot of ways to think about that. But I think if one

of the ways that I've found in the past that there's been some efficiencies there

is that the rush orders don't always come into marketing. It's

there's an appreciation for I understand how long things take or I'm

going to plan out ahead of time because I know how long things take versus

a mad scramble at the end. So those are some ways where I think, you

know, you're just going to see you're going to see a better relationship between sales

and marketing. You're going to see maybe some bottom of funnel or

middle middle of funnel closing better because we're just getting better

at executing on what the needs are versus working in silos. I

think those are a couple of ways that you can say, hey, this is working,

we're all we're all, you know, whatever the analogy you want to use, rowing our

orders on the same direction. Or I always butcher analogies like that.

But you know, you can pick whatever analogy you love the best,

but, that sort of teamwork model, you can just you

can see that working together. You can see proactive communication happening

like, Hey, we heard this from this prospect. They

referenced that, that one campaign you ran.

That's a good sign of that. People are working back and forth, and it's

not just a one way street. And how does technology

and digital communication play a role in facilitating internal marketing

strategies? Like, do you guys use email marketing, maybe

internal podcast, private podcast, videos? Like, what do you use

specifically? Yeah. I think it depends on the the size

and structure and and of each company. You know, I

think email marketing is one way that, you know, there was

a company I had worked for in the past. We actually

had a daily email that we put out, and it was it was called what

we know now. And the whole theory behind that was we had all these different

departments. This is when we went remote. So everyone this was sort of a

new structure for everyone. And we try to communicate

what we knew at that point about a lot of the changing landscape

of things, of just what each different department was working

on. And it was a great model because

everyone was used to email communication. It was simple to put

together. It took some time, but the the ROI on that was

was incredible because people felt more connected.

We also put some fun things into there too. So it wasn't just, you know,

being hit over the head with business information all the time. There were some

you got to learn about your employees more, your coworkers,

especially sitting in a work a remote environment. So, it

really depends. I mean, it's like don't try to boil the ocean, find

what works for your organization. If it's email, if it's Slack,

if it's, you know, like I said, Loom videos at the end of the

week. I've I've used those before just to kinda give people a heads up on

what's going on. Find what works for you. But, you know, you don't

have to I wouldn't focus on the technology or building out a

big structure. I'd focus on telling that story first. And if if it resonates

great and you can always expand upon it. Successful and

then experiment on other things, maybe to enhance it if need be.

But if not, don't try to, like, reinvent the wheel

again. Yeah. You don't need to buy a lot of technology. You

probably are using things in ways that people communicate. But just remember, everyone

has different learning styles like a long you know, some people might

want the too long didn't read bullet version and some people want the

documentation. So think about the different styles that you're using with with

people. And that goes for external marketing too. You know, everyone's gonna

have a different learning style outside your company.

The success of internal marketing programs.

A good internal marketing program without leadership buy

in. I think everyone has to be on the same

page that we're all working together. Sales and marketing are not

enemies. They're working cohesively. They're working with

customer support. You know, product

now is, you know, like a a newer term for product marketing,

but that function needs to be integrated with, the

different departments. They need to be able to understand what's coming down

the line and be able to tell that to prospects and the customers. So there's

retention there with current, excuse me, with current

customers and customer support, but then there's prospecting with sales. So

if that buy in isn't there and there's not appreciation of, like, why why

does this team need to be in this meeting and why what are we trying

to do? Then it's it's gonna fail.

How let's say some company you're trying to get the

leadership to Dubai and how do you convince them? Because sometimes it's like,

well, why do I need to do this type of a thing? Because everybody has

a long list of things to do or not do, or they think they're busy

or they actually are busy. But how do you get that buy in? Because sometimes

it is a little difficult to be like, hey. Look it. We need you guys

to do this because, I mean, you are the leadership and people look up to

you for this. I think you have you have to think

about what's important to them. So

a CFO or a finance person is going to care about,

they're going to care about budgets. They're going to care about ROI. They're going to

care about, probably more in an analytical way. And

so if you can help them understand,

listen, we're gonna spend a lot of money or time on these

marketing campaigns. If we operate in a silo, there's

a good chance that we may not be as effective because we are not

understanding the feedback from the customer feedback loop from

sales. So if we can do this, but if we don't hear

back from them, we're gonna maybe use the wrong words

and on our communications, and it's not gonna resonate

with our buyer and they're gonna go somewhere else. So that's like you have to

think about what's important to them. The sales team may

say, like, well, we need to book, you know, we want to book more meetings,

not just awareness. Well, okay. That's great. Like,

help us understand which, like, which

prospects are not converting and, like, give us enough of

a sample size so that we can maybe make some deductions around, hey. We

shouldn't maybe target this segment because we're learning that they're just not ready

to buy yet or this industry is at the wrong sales cycle.

So let's focus on other ones. If we can help them understand

what they're motivated about, and usually that's like selling more and

getting a more a higher paycheck. Well, how do I help them do that?

I'm going to help them find the right prospects, but I need I need some

feedback from them first. I care about what motivates

them. And so when they see that you're intrinsically

motivated to help them out, then I think that there's

a two way street there. So I think you just have to, you know, you

can't say, well, here's here's why, because I'm telling you so. I think you have

to put yourself in their shoes. And, again, this goes back

to like common sense marketing or just telling stories.

But think about what they care about and how do you tell the

story in a way that they they're like, Oh, yeah, Okay, then that makes sense.

And how can internal mark internal marketing help a company achieve

its business goals and objectives in the long term? I think we talked

about a number of those things there. I think you're just you're going to,

you're going to work faster. You're going to be on the same page with other

teams, especially when it comes to go to market. So when sales,

customer support and marketing are all rowing in the same direction,

you're going to execute faster. You're going to hopefully spend less, to

acquire new customers and you're going to keep them because you're finding the

right people. So I think, you know, I I it's not

easy and it doesn't happen overnight. But when everyone understands what we're trying to

accomplish, when everyone understands the buy in around what marketers are trying to

do, you can hopefully get sales quicker and you can keep

customers longer. And, I mean, for those companies that haven't really done

or done internal communication very well, what is kind of like

your rundown of, like or like your two bolt thing about, like, why why

is it so important for them to start now? I don't think you want any

department working in a silo. I think, you know, how often are they talking to

each other and how often are they sharing ideas? It's

important and it shouldn't be a blame game. It shouldn't be sales did this. Well,

no marketing did this. We're all in it to learn together. So I think

the the sooner that everyone can buy into that idea of we don't

need to spend every minute together. We don't need to have meetings every day,

but we should be sharing back and forth of how we get

better as a go to market, group or or or function,

it's gonna it's gonna it's gonna deliver dividends. Alright. People are

listening to this podcast and wondering where they can they find you online to learn

more about what you do and how internal communication is so great. Yeah.

I mean, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So, you know, if you if you search

for Charlie Riley on LinkedIn, happy to connect there or,

or check us out at 1screen.ai if you're, interested

in outdoor advertising. That's, you know, where I'm focusing my

time now. So, trying to help build some internal internal

marketing and external marketing for for our organization to do, measurable out

of home. But, yeah, you can find me there or or or like I said,

I'm active on LinkedIn. Alright. Any final thoughts for us for our

listeners? No. Thanks for having me. It's, yeah, I think

marketers marketers are asked to do a lot. So the more that you can help

get others on board internally, you're going to have more champions

that, you know, that get that moment of how you're helping them out.

You know, just be a good listener. It's kind of it's, you know, table stakes

for marketers. Alright. Thank you, Charlie, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew

and sharing your knowledge on why internal marketing is just as important as

external marketing. Thanks for having me. And thank you for listening. As

always, please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps. Leave

a five star review. It will always help with the rankings. Let me know how

I am doing. Join me next week as I talk to another great player

in the PR marketing industry. Alright, guys. Stay safe. Get to understanding

how you can make your internal marketing better, and see you next

week. Later.