The difference between marketing to your employees and communicating

A year ago, a colleague at a Fortune 500 company started using MailChimp for internal communications. He eventually canceled the service because too many employees were unsubscribing. It raised an interesting question: should we treat internal communications like marketing? After all, don’t we use technologies like mass email, social platforms and personalization in both disciplines?

While I’ve encouraged HR teams to think like marketers, internal communicators should go beyond their marketing relatives in relevance, response rates and impact. Here’s why.

Bite-size or buffet?

Communications and marketing have converged to solve a shared problem: a crisis of attention. A common argument is that attention is fractured between too many competing, distracting mediums. That, in turn, has created tension between the convenience and accessibility of short-form content and the depth and length of comprehensive communications.

On one hand, bite-size communications are colonizing newspapers, magazines, marketing videos and business emails. On the other hand, there’s nothing “snackable” about a 10-hour Netflix binge or the three-hour-long podcasts that often top iTunes charts. Human attention spans are not the problem.

The divergence of bite-size and buffet-size content suggests that attention is contextual, not fixed. Communication is less about the size and more about how it’s received and why. And internal communications and marketing don’t necessarily obey the rules of other genres. We’re vying for a different kind of attention.

A big request

Novels, Netflix and the news usually don’t ask you to do something that you don’t feel like doing. We engage passively and are asked for nothing but our ears and eyeballs. Internal communications and marketing have demands.

After all, the point of internal communications and marketing is to influence what people feel, think and do. They cost the recipient in time, attention and energy (plus money, in the case of marketing). They compel people to make choices.

Whatever rules of virality govern entertainment and news, internal communications and marketing do not follow them. That’s probably why internal communications and marketing both evolved to provide short-form content in ongoing campaigns. We recognize that driving people to act—even in their own self-interest—takes persistence. Getting someone to binge on Netflix doesn’t.

And the differences

Internal communicators and marketers have cross-pollinated strategies to overcome a shared challenge: producing actions and behaviors in a distracting marketplace of attention. The differences, however, are vital to understand if internal communicators are going to outperform marketers—and we should.

First, internal communications have data that marketers can only dream of obtaining. Consider the information you get from compensation and benefits packages, performance metrics, peer evaluations, and resumes alone. You know your audience better than any marketer.

Second, the response rates in internal communications and marketing are drastically different. MailChimp, which failed my Fortune 500 friend, says the average email open rate across industries on its platform is 20.81 percent, and the average click-through rate is 2.43 percent. Internal communications would be dysfunctional at those rates. A good click-through rate for internal communications is at least 20 to 50 percent, if not higher.

Third, although we compete against information overload and noise, internal communicators have significantly more material to communicate. A company-wide strategy or program cannot, like a marketing campaign, be distilled to a catchy, snackable tagline. We must hold someone’s attention for enough time and do so over time. Our efforts don’t end with someone clicking “buy.”

What we have going for us is relevance. We, unlike marketers or entertainers, are part of the same organization as the people with whom we communicate. We hopefully share a culture and a collective purpose. Different from marketers, our call-to-action benefits both parties in meaningful ways. Although we may use technology and strategies reminiscent of marketing, we don’t seek one-sided profits. We seek a common good.

Closing the internal communications gap

As a Silicon Valley CEO, I know that it’s hard to communicate with a diverse, dispersed and multi-generational workforce. While others may view technology as a digital distraction, I see it as the answer to internal communications.

Communication technology has the power to distract or engage, clarify or confuse, move or pause. We’ve taken on short-form, campaign-style communications, not media binges, because getting people to notice us isn’t enough. We need people to act and recognize that we look out for their interests.

While internal communicators should feel comradery with marketers and learn from them, let’s not mistake our shared tools and tactics for shared purposes. We make life better for employees by being advocates of great employee experiences, not by being marketers.

Read more:

• 5 benefits communication tips for brokers in 2019
• 4 tactics to ramp up employee engagement
• Behavioral enrollment, part 1

Keith Kitani is CEO and co-founder of GuideSpark.