How new leaders can use internal marketing for success

If you’re a new team lead, manager, “head of”, “VP of” or CXO, you have to be amazing at internal marketing to be perceived as a strong leader and make your first 90 days a success. 

When I joined HelloFresh, UK as head of data & BI, I had a massive challenge — the business didn’t really understand what a data team did. This is a common problem for tech teams in non-tech businesses, but I’ve also seen it be a challenge for teams with murky definitions like growth marketing, product marketing and customer success.

If the business doesn’t understand what your team does, you will end up frustrating your colleagues and peers. The underlying reason for their frustration stems from your inability to say no the right way.

Saying ‘no’ to other teams is a privilege afforded to those who communicate their priorities effectively

Saying ‘no’ is a necessity for new leaders, but doing it the wrong way will be damaging to your internal relationships. 

Often when you’re starting a new leadership role you will be swooping in on a team that may have been under-resourced for a long time and people will have been defining their own expectations of what your priorities should be for weeks and months in the lead-up to your start date.

In your first 90 days, you’ll probably be shoe-horned into a myriad of calls and meetings that will leave your head spinning and your priorities as an individual and a team in complete disarray.

If you’re lucky, you’ll avoid people pinning specific outcomes on you and your team before you’ve even understood how those outcomes will affect the business’ success. But for plenty of new leaders, people will start expecting outputs and results before you’ve got clarity.

So how do you say ‘no’ the right way when you’ve only just arrived?

Internal marketing is fundamental if you want to say ‘no’ to people politely

The answer is internal marketing. Your goal is to have your colleagues and peers understand what you’re focussed on, that you’re acquiring knowledge, and that you’re defining a new strategy for your team.

You need internal marketing because as a leader, you’re not just trying to get a few people on your side, you’re trying to get an entire company or department on your side.

Practical tactics for successful internal marketing

In marketing, the concept of seven touches is fundamental to getting a prospect to know your brand. 

If you apply this concept to you and your team, you need to remind the people you work with seven times what your priorities and strategy are, and they’ll start to support you. 

1. Share posts and learnings on LinkedIn: Add anyone you meet in the first 3 months on LinkedIn and use your posts to raise your internal profile.
2. All hands meetings: I ran the entire business through my team’s role and priorities.
3. Strategy drops during meetings: Subtly remind people what your team’s priorities are regularly in meetings.
4. Strategy cheat sheets: A one-pager that explains your strategy will pay dividends. Constantly iterate on it as a mechanism for ongoing communication.
5. Say no and follow it up with a clear explanation that aligns your priorities with your strategy.
6. Celebrate success but tie it to your top-level OKRs. If there are public Slack channels at your company for celebrating success, these can be really effective posts.
7. Support your marketing team by offering to write public-facing blog posts that explain something technical for prospects.
8. Piggy-back on your company’s internal monthly newsletter.
9. Use senior leadership meetings to repeatedly re-establish and re-align their support for your strategy. Be intentional about these updates on the strategy as you iterate on it.
10. Set up 1-to-1 coffee catchups with other managers: Use that opportunity to explain your strategy, without the call being set with a specific outcome or goal in mind.
11. Email a quarterly/monthly progress report to anyone who has worked with you recently.

The long-term opportunities from internal marketing

One of the long-term benefits of internal marketing early on in your new role is that a lot of the suggestions above are tactics that can be used forever. By creating these systems and using them before expectations build up and you’ve established your position, you’ll be able to keep them going for your entire career with the company. Trying to establish some of these mechanisms after that initial honeymoon period will be much harder from a change management perspective.

Additionally, some of these tactics, like posting on LinkedIn, or supporting your marketing team will pay long-term dividends for your personal brand and potentially your employer’s brand for recruitment or sales and marketing purposes.

Tom Bruining is the co-founder of HowdyGo – Interactive Product Demos. You can follow his bootstrapped journey on LinkedIn.