Your Internal Communications Team Is Actually a Marketing Team

Someone asked me yesterday about how I transitioned from Marketing into Internal Communications. And honestly, I’ve never ever thought about it because I think that Internal Communications IS Marketing - just internally. 

Every all-hands, every Slack announcement, every “quick update from leadership” email - it’s all marketing. The audience just all happens to have a badge. 

I didn’t even know internal communications was a thing until I started working at bigger companies. And even now, in most organizations, it’s vastly overlooked and underutilized,  treated like an admin function to “make the deck pretty” rather than what it actually is: the connective tissue between executive vision and the daily work happening across the company.

I used to run marketing. Now I run internal comms. And the longer I do, the more I realize I never actually changed careers. I changed audiences.

Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first. - Simon Sinek (Start with Why)

The skills are identical.

In marketing, I obsessed over knowing my audience - what they cared about, what they ignored, what made them click versus scroll past. In internal comms, I do the exact same thing. Engineers don’t want a 600-word preamble before the actual update. Sales wants the “what does this mean for my pipeline” line up top. Customer support needs the talking points, not the strategy deck. 

If you wouldn’t blast the same email to enterprise buyers and SMB customers, why would you send the same all-hands message to every function in your company?

Every single piece of communication needs to hit your audience exactly where they are, addressing what THEY care about. 

In marketing, I segmented. In internal comms, I segment. 

The tools are basically the same.

Editorial calendars. Messaging frameworks. Brand voice guidelines. A/B testing subject lines. Tracking open rates and engagement. Building campaigns with a hook, a middle, and a call to action. Storytelling. Crafting a narrative arc across multiple touchpoints so a message actually lands instead of getting lost in the noise.

I used these for product launches. Now I use them for org changes, benefits enrollment, strategy rollouts, and CEO updates. Same playbook. Different stage.

The techniques carry over completely.

Repetition. Multi-channel reinforcement. The rule of seven. Leading with benefits, not features. Burying the lede is a sin in both worlds. So is corporate jargon. So is talking at people instead of to them.

Why does this matter? 

According to IBM, 72% of employees admit to not fully understanding their company’s strategy. 74% feel they’re missing out on company information and news (Trade Press Services). And only 29% of workers are very satisfied with the quality of their employer’s communications (USC Annenberg/Staffbase).

If I meet one of your employees in line getting coffee, they should be able to tell me what they do and what their company does. In one clear sentence. 

They should be able to tell me how their work is a part of the bigger mission. 

I don’t care what their job is. 

I don’t care if you’re a multi-national conglomerate. 

There should be one vision, one sentence. That everyone is on board with. 

It really is that easy. 

Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients. - Richard Branson

Gallup’s research shows highly engaged employees deliver 23% higher productivity, 51% lower turnover, and significantly better wellbeing. Companies with strong internal communication practices are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their competitors.

And 63% of employees considering leaving cite poor communication as a factor. And in this job market, you cannot afford to have your staff underperforming or checked out. 

Translation: when people understand the bigger picture and feel connected to it, they do better work. When they don’t, they leave - or worse, they stay and quietly check out.

This is exactly why I see internal communications as the team that puts the final piece together: connecting executive-level vision to the daily work of every person in the company. We’re the bridge. The strategy on the boardroom slide is meaningless until someone translates it into “here’s what this means for you, here’s why it matters, and here’s the part you play.”

Internal comms is the hype speech before the big game. It’s the locker room moment that reminds everyone why they’re here, what they’re fighting for, and why their work matters. Without it, you just have a bunch of talented people running plays without seeing the bigger picture.

An extra bonus? When you have good internal communications, you can’t help but end up with good external communications. 

When every employee actually understands the strategy, the priorities, and the why behind decisions, something powerful happens - they start telling the story themselves. The salesperson on a call. The engineer at a conference. The recruiter on LinkedIn. The new hire at a dinner party. Each one becomes a channel that your marketing team might never reach. 

Trusted, scalable, free.

(from a marketing perspective, this is called a goldmine) 

You cannot out-market a confused workforce.

In summary? 

Internal comms isn’t HR-adjacent. Don’t bring them in after decisions have been made, invite them into the decision-making process. The best internal comms are marketing - to your most important, highest-leverage, most influential audience. The people who already wake up every day, representing your brand, whether you’ve equipped them to or not.

Treat it that way. Staff it that way. Measure it that way.

Because every employee is either amplifying your story or muddying it. There is no neutral.