Marketing: Where to start (this may surprise you) Part #2

My previous message introduced Internal Marketing:

An enterprise-wide initiative of means educating, inspiring and engaging all the people that your corporation employees on your Brand, product, technology and vision.

How? In a nutshell:

1) You face the "invisible elephants"--all the things that your employees have been wondering about but are sure that you won't deal with. Be vulnerable, truthful.

2) Share the vision, give your "elevator speech" and urge your employees to create their own elevator speech. After all, they deal with most customers, the sales channels and they combined, have a huge base of influence and the clearer the message to them the better the results you'll get.

3) Educate the employees on the Brand, the products (how many of your employees have actually tried/used/driven/experienced your products or services?), and the technology (or design).

4) Educate employees on the customer. Not just their demographics, but their psychographics.

5) Celebrate. You may ask celebrate what? Any company has things to celebrate if they look deep enough. Rally your people to the cause by celebrating those performances that best demonstrate the behaviors you want to see going forward.

If you engage your employees first through internal marketing, it will intensify the external investments being made in ads, marketing, PR and the like.