Stop sleeping on internal marketing

There are two kinds of “busy people” in life:

Busy people, and people who want you to know how busy they are.

You know what I’m talking about with my group two people; they wear busyness like a badge of honor. They talk about it so much that you can’t help but question what fills their day.

IMO, many marketing teams fall into this camp. They spend more time talking about being busy than what they’re doing and the contributions they’re making.

In the process of doing so, their function is made to feel abstract. Other departments question the purpose of marketing and underestimate the value it brings to an organization.

As marketers, we don’t need to prove that we’re busy. We need to prove that we’re busy making an impact.

Internal marketing may feel like too big of an undertaking to prioritize, but you can’t afford not to. Especially when you don’t have to overthink it or onboard expensive employee advocacy software to make it work.

Here’s how I’ve made it a core part of our strategy with a few simple actions.

How it started: the Metadata years

As I see it, internal marketing—at its core—is all about showing off your work to the company, even if the work isn’t finished yet. You’re trying to:

1. Excite the company – Build momentum and hype around what marketing is working on.

2. Create alignment – Make sure your team is aware of marketing initiatives so they can talk about them with customers and prospects.

3. Gather feedback – Involve your company in shaping the final product by seeking input during the creation process.

At Metadata, I started something called “Marketing Show and Tell”. Every week, typically Fridays, I’d record quick, two-minute Loom videos that showcased the most important thing(s) I was working on.

The idea was to not just talk about what I was doing, but to frame it in terms of how it could help other teams, like Sales and Customer Success.

You have to make it clear what’s in it for them, your viewers. Otherwise, no one’s going to care.

Making the videos informative and entertaining to watch (hello, marketing 101) also helps.

I started including a little Easter egg at the end of each video—usually something funny or self-deprecating. This helped me see who was paying attention all the way through.

Over time, every team member started recording their own show-and-tell videos. This exposed employees to the different faces of our marketing team and the many facets that fell under our umbrella.

How it’s going: my UserEvidence approach

When I joined UserEvidence, I knew I wanted to take my internal marketing efforts a step further—especially because I started as a team of one.

If I could supplement a small marketing team by garnering support from the rest of the company and making them feel like an extension of marketing, I knew it’d make my job significantly easier.

The show-and-tells are still going strong, but now we don’t just show off what we’re working on in any given week—we actively market our roadmap at the beginning of each quarter.

With these roadmaps, we share our marketing OKRs relative to the company’s larger goals, the major projects we’re tackling, what we’re not tackling, and how our initiatives directly impact the work across different departments.

One thing worth noting is that last quarter, I made the mistake of planning for 100% of marketing’s capacity. In doing this, I didn’t account for the good ideas and suggestions we received from other departments after the fact.

Now, we’re sharing plans for roughly 70% of our capacity—leaving wiggle room for feedback, timely events, market changes, internal changes, etc.

The actual “sharing” part is done through Slack updates, Loom videos, and a quarterly kickoff meeting where we more formally present our roadmap to the entire company.

A record of everything we share is also kept readily available and up-to-date in Notion.

The big picture

The ultimate goal of internal marketing? Turning the entire company into your marketing team.

When people feel connected to the brand and understand the value of marketing initiatives, they naturally (and proactively) become advocates.

You don’t always have to tell them to copy and paste a social post on their LinkedIn page; they take charge and write the posts themselves.

You don’t always have to explain why your recent blog post matters; they’ve already shared it with relevant prospects.

It’s not just the marketing team driving brand awareness; it’s everyone in the company, from sales to support.

If you can get your team excited and bought in, they’ll be your biggest promoters without question. To me, that’s a priority worth making.

Stuff I’m learning (and digging) this week

• UserEvidence ROI studies—We launched this new product yesterday to help B2B marketers quantify the impact of their product’s value using verified customer outcomes. Think Forrester TEI reports at a significantly lower cost and without all the nickel-and-diming to use content externally.

• beehiiv’s newsletter platform—This is the first official send with beehiiv for this newsletter. I’m still learning my way around (like that test email I sent 🙈). My favorite part is you can publish previous editions so new subscribers get access to every newsletter they missed before signing up.

• Content Lab from Goldcast—Goldcast released a new Brand Voice feature that makes it easy for small marketing teams like ours to repurpose video content with AI. I uploaded our brand voice guide and the last three sends of Evidently to create my voice profile. The AI got it ~90% there right away.

Opinions are cheap. Proof is gold.

In episode 16 of The Proof Point, our three guests—Jane Menyo, Cache Walker, and Leslie Barrett—pooled their years of customer marketing experience into actionable advice for building and scaling your own customer evidence program.

My biggest takeaways:

• Customer marketers shouldn’t act like they work for the company they do. To truly succeed, they have to think like a consultant.

• If your customer marketing department is operating without clear metrics, they’re more likely to be seen as a fluffy, “feel-good” function. Tracking customer engagement will give your efforts more weight.

• Data isn’t only important for measuring internal impact, you also need data-backed customer feedback to make an impact with buyers. Hard proof = credibility.

Listen on Spotify, Apple, or head over to YouTube.

UserEvidence, who?

UserEvidence creates customer evidence content for go-to-market teams, generating verified competitive intelligence, product stats, and ROI data.

Happy customers help you credibly prove the value of your product.