Don't sleep on internal marketing… (Dave's Newsletter)

WHAT WE'RE HEARING

Internal Marketing Is The Most Underrated Skill You Can Have as a Marketer

Editor's Note: Want to be an effective VP of Marketing or CMO? It's not always about the sexiest marketing campaigns. Oftentimes as you grow in your career, the marketing skills that got you there aren’t the ones you will need to lead a team. Being the “leader” of marketing for the company comes with a lot of explaining and teaching. But don’t roll your eyes at it - that’s literally the job. Unless you're the secret super genius CTO who doesn't have to manage people or take any meetings and can just code all day, you must become a top notch communicator if you want to be an effective marketing leader (emphasis on leader). You need to be strong in-person, over Zoom, on video, and in writing. Group setting or 1:1. This edition is dedicated to the art of internal marketing.

Marketing is one of the most misunderstood operations inside of a company.

It touches everything. Product, Sales, CS, Support, Strategy. And because everyone writes and communicates in their day-to-day lives, everyone has an opinion about what marketing should and shouldn’t be doing.

But thinking they understand marketing and knowing what your marketing team is working on - and why it matters - are two different things.

Sound familiar?

You have to control the narrative, show what you're working on, and articulate why it matters.

Clear and confident and compelling communication internally is one of the reasons I was able to advance my career quickly. I didn't realize it at the time, but this matters a lot - because if you can't get the people inside of the company fired up about what you're doing, what makes you think customers will ever care?

You can be the greatest operator behind the scenes but as the marketing leader, it means nothing if you can't communicate.

The Real Job Nobody Talks About

Inside the company, the CFO wants to know how much everything costs. The VP Sales is on you about leads. The CEO is standing up in front of the board next week and she needs to show growth. But oftentimes, great marketing takes time. Beyond this month.

You have to educate people on how good marketing works.

I have a ton of product ideas, but I have no idea how design and engineering work. So they have to explain that stuff to me.

The same is true in marketing. It is a true skill, a craft. And when deployed properly, it's a strategic growth lever for the business.

Which is exactly why you need a strong POV on what great marketing looks like. You have to be able to teach your company, to earn the trust of the CEO, CFO, VP Sales, board, and internal teams. Don’t get defensive. Don’t get flustered. Take the time to articulate the company’s marketing strategy to them. With real examples from your life of business buying.

For example: I used to show the CFO (in terms he’d understand) how great marketing works. I sat down and asked him to give me some examples of products he’s bought in the past—finance, payroll, HR tools etc. Then mapped out our customer journey and explained how people in our market find products and make buying decisions. Too often we jump right into the channels and the tactics. I don’t want to have a Google AdWords discussion with my CFO; we should be talking about strategy.

And here's the thing: you get freed up to do great marketing when you're not under constant pressure to deliver a direct response on everything you do.

When every activity is not measured by the exact ROI, you're able to do things that stand out, generate awareness, capture attention, build trust, create loyalty.

Word of mouth is the most powerful thing a brand could have. But you don't get it when ringing the cash register is the desired outcome from every brand touch point.

You must be able to articulate what good looks like and why marketing is not just direct response.

I Sucked At This Too (Which Is How I Know It’s Possible To Get Better)

I learned this the hard way in my early days at Drift.

We had "show and tell" on Fridays where people would present what they worked on. I was the only person doing marketing at the time. Everyone else was an engineer or designer. People who had really cool, tangible things to show.

My first week on the job, they're like "all right Dave, what did you work on this week?"

And I said, "uhhhh I wrote a blog post."

It was the most humbling experience because it was just dead silent. Nobody cared, nobody understood why that's what I'd done.

What I learned was, blog posts are just a tactic.

The next week I came back with a whole presentation and shared: "Our goal right now is to build an audience, and we're trying to build web traffic. The way we're going to do that is through organic content. If we do this right, we'll eventually be able to generate X trials a month, and Y customers."

Same work. Completely different response.

Because I connected the tactic to the business goal.

How to Level Up Your Internal Marketing ASAP

Being a great communicator starts with the end in mind. It's not about what you want to say. It's about understanding how to guarantee the audience understands.

If they didn't understand that's on you. If they are confused or bored, that is on you.

Some systems I like:

Slack: Sharing screenshots, work in progress, teasers. Make marketing visible without forcing people to attend meetings. Post the new ad creative before it goes live. Share the landing page mockup. Drop a "just shipped this email" note with a screenshot. The goal is to create a steady drumbeat of "here's what marketing is working on" so when someone asks "what does marketing do all day?" people have already seen it. Bonus: you'll get faster feedback and catch issues earlier.

Weekly, monthly, quarterly recaps: What's a good update?

I always like to share:

• A reminder of what our big goals are for the year, and how the marketing goals map to the company big goals
• What we got done this month / this quarter, with progress toward goals, and calling out any highlights
• What we are working on this month / quarter – launches, events, dates, deliverables. Show people what's coming

Take any opportunity to present to the company you can get: All-hands meetings. QBRs. Team offsites. Lunch and learns. If there's a slot, take it. I prepped more for internal presentations than almost anything else and it paid off. Why? Because it builds reps. You get better at talking about your work. You learn which messages land and which don't. You build credibility. Plus it helps you practice for talking to customers. If they don't believe you internally, customers never will.

Create cross-functional check-ins: This is where you can share anything that’s on your mind that the rest of the company might be able to help contribute ideas to. There are a lot of smart people inside the company. How can you get them on board to help out? Marketing can be a whole company initiative if people are bought in. That's the dream scenario. Then you get messages from engineers willing to help you solve a technical problem you mentioned, or a designer reaching out to help tweak something.

Even if you don't run a full team today, is there an area of the business or marketing you can own and communicate about?

Work on writing a weekly update to your manager every Friday. Here's what we got done this week, here's what we're working on next week, here's what's working, here's what's not, here's where we're stuck. This can be an email or a 2–3 slide presentation with a Loom video.

Then, level up your presentation skills…

• Get the book "Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" by Carmine Gallo. This book breaks down Jobs' genius into tactics you can steal. Watch the 2007 iPhone keynote. Outline it. Your next pitch will level up instantly.
• Get the book "Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives, and Other Introverts" by Joanna Penn. For anyone who hates public speaking. You can be introverted and still be a great speaker. The book covers how to prepare, how to manage nerves, how to connect with an audience without pretending to be someone you're not.
• Find 2–3 great public speakers on YouTube and try to take your own notes re-creating their talk and their outline.

Start with one. Pick the system or book that feels most doable right now and commit to it this week. You don't need to master all of this overnight, but you do need to start.

“I don’t know what the marketing team is doing.”

This is most often the top complaint I have heard over the years both in my career as a marketing leader, and as an advisor working with founders and CEOs.

The marketing team is always busy; everyone seems stressed out – but I don’t really know what they are doing? How is this impacting sales in any way?

It’s not just about keeping the rest of the company up-to-date on the work marketing is doing. You also have to constantly share how it fits into the bigger picture and relate it back to the company goals.

Marketing's job isn't done when the campaign launches. It's done when the company understands why it matters.

If you want to be a top marketing leader, it's not about the cool marketing ideas and the big sexy brand campaigns. It's about this. Master internal communications.

– Dave

P.S. It’s worth saying this: all of the stuff I talk about above could also be the perfect reason for you to look in the mirror and NOT take a marketing leadership role.

Just like managing people and building a team, it's a completely different job than individual contributor. If you don't love this stuff or can't learn to love it or find the "why" in it, it's going to be a hard road ahead.

I'm still doing calls weekly with CEOs and Founders advocating for marketing, they still need education. It's part of the job.

So tell me. Does this land with you? How do you educate your peers about how marketing works? Not in a patronizing way, but explaining how customers get information, how they buy, why the long game matters? We’d love to feature you in an upcoming newsletter; reply back - Erin and I monitor all the responses.

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