Building a business customers love starts with creating a company people want to be a part of. One way to get buy-in from your employees is with an internal marketing plan that reflects your values and mission.
Dreamday, a Los Angeles–based PR agency that’s worked with a range of ecommerce clients (like Brightland and Fly By Jing), has done exactly that. In 2023, the company landed on Inc. magazine’s Best Workplaces list after a rigorous process that included employee surveys, benefits audits, and extensive internal marketing.
As Dreamday founder Lauren Kleinman put it, the goal is to create an environment where team members can truly “perform their best work.” Committed leaders and a genuine investment in people cultivates a strong corporate culture, which internal marketing then amplifies.
Read on to explore the internal marketing tactics that Dreamday and other companies—from ecommerce brands to ceramics manufacturers—use to sell themselves to their most important audience: their employees.
What is internal marketing?
Internal marketing is the practice of promoting a company’s values, goals, and brand identity to its employees. It’s an approach that treats staff members as internal customers, fostering a sense of belonging and alignment with the organization’s mission.
Unlike external marketing, which focuses on attracting and retaining customers, internal marketing aims to engage and motivate employees to deliver on the brand’s promises. An effective internal marketing strategy creates a workforce that not only understands the company’s objectives but also feels genuinely invested in achieving them.
Internal marketing efforts include activities designed to inform, inspire, and involve employees in the company’s journey. This might incorporate regular communication from leadership, team-building exercises, training programs, and initiatives to reinforce company culture. Here are a few examples:
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All-hands meetings or town halls with updates from leadership
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Demos and previews from the product development team
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Corporate awards for employees who exemplify team values
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Weekly Slack updates about happenings at the company
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Internal emails sharing the company’s impact on customers’ lives through quotes and testimonials
Benefits of internal marketing
Just as external marketing builds trust with customers through consistent messaging and engagement, internal marketing cultivates trust with another equally important audience: your employees. Investing in internal marketing can help you with the following:
Align employees with business goals
As organizations grow, teams often become disconnected, working in silos with their own separate priorities. Successful internal marketing tackles this challenge by sharing a unified message across all departments. Through clear internal communication, everyone from marketing to product development and customer service understands and works toward common objectives aligned with the company’s mission.
Boost employee engagement
Effective internal marketing helps employees feel like vital contributors to the company’s mission, not just cogs in a machine. Consistently communicate your business goals, achievements, and vision to transform passive workers into engaged stakeholders who understand their role in the organization’s success.
“I really believe that people bring their entire whole selves to work,” Dreamday founder Lauren Kleinman says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “If we can create happy people who are happy outside of work, they’re going to be happier at work and more productive and amazing employees.”
Retain and attract top talent
When employees feel genuinely valued and part of a larger mission, they’re more likely to stay with the company. Happy employees also become natural brand ambassadors for your company, sharing job openings with qualified friends and promoting the services and products of the company within their social circles.
Beyond strengthening your referral pipeline, engaged employees often celebrate their workplace experiences on platforms like LinkedIn. This helps attract candidates who align with your company culture while simultaneously reinforcing their own commitment to stay with the organization long-term.
How to build an internal marketing strategy
- Set specific goals
- Ask for employee input
- Codify your core company values
- Ensure buy-in from leadership
- Align internal and external messaging
- Lean into transparency
- Communicate across employee channels
- Invest in perks that communicate your values
- Develop social media guidelines
- Hire for cultural alignment
Building a successful internal marketing strategy requires the same rigor and thoughtfulness you’d apply to your external marketing efforts, yet some organizations overlook these fundamentals. Here are a few tips to help your internal marketing efforts succeed:
1. Set specific goals
Like any marketing strategy, internal marketing needs clear objectives to succeed. While fostering engagement and alignment with company values are worthy aims, your internal communications should work toward specific and measurable outcomes. How will you know if your transparency efforts are building trust if you’re not asking employees directly? How will you know if your culture is worth staying for if you’re not watching employee retention? Setting concrete goals helps you design focused internal marketing programs and measure their effectiveness over time.
Consider goals like these:
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Boost employee Net Promoter Scores (NPS) from 65 to 80 within six months
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Reduce voluntary employee turnover by 15% year over year
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Establish and achieve a 65% open rate for internal newsletters
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Boost employee referrals for open positions by 25%
2. Ask for employee input
You probably wouldn’t launch a product without customer feedback. Similarly, don’t create your internal marketing plan without input from your target audience. Your team likely already has specific information they want to hear from leadership, so start by understanding these existing needs.
Through surveys and conversations, explore whether employees feel recognized for their work, connected to the company’s mission, and equipped with enough transparency to perform their jobs effectively.
Do they want more updates about team achievements? Increased visibility into your company's growth strategy and decision-making process? More information about personal growth and development opportunities? Let employee feedback guide your strategy.
3. Codify your core company values
Your company values may be clear in your head. But if they’re not written down and consistently communicated, your employees are left guessing. Codifying values gives your internal marketing a foundation—a shared lexicon that guides behavior (and decision-making) across the organization.
Jono Pandolfi, founder of the ceramics brand that bears his name, developed core values as his company grew beyond the point where he could personally mentor every employee.
“We now have a set of core values for the company, which is really helpful, because I’m not as closely in touch with my team as I’ve always been,” he says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “They can refer to our core values from time to time to think more like I would think in certain situations.”
Those values—built on collaboration and positivity—are a messaging framework that scales with the team.
At Lulus, CEO Crystal Landsem took a similar approach, distilling the company’s culture into a memorable phrase: “All Voices, All In, Always Evolving.” The tagline isn’t just a slogan; it’s a reference point that employees can actually apply.
“What that means to Lulus is that it doesn’t matter where you are, what your position is. If there’s trash on the floor, pick it up,” Crystal says on Shopify Masters. “We had a warehouse flood. Everybody, including our founder, had a broom out there, and we were pushing water off the floor, and we managed to save inventory and save our peak spring season because we all just got in.”
Draft those values collaboratively in a Google Doc, pressure test with your team, then put them everywhere: pinned in Slack, linked in your JIRA workspace, and built into onboarding decks. New hires should encounter your values before their first day ends; existing employees should be reminded of them regularly.
4. Ensure buy-in from leadership
Effective internal marketing isn’t just an HR exercise—it requires genuine commitment and active participation from top leadership. When company announcements and updates come directly from C-suite executives and senior leaders, they carry inherent weight and authenticity that resonates throughout the organization.
“Culture does start at the top,” Lauren says. “If you’re not taking care of yourself, it’s going to be reflected in your culture.” Leadership buy-in isn’t just about approving internal initiatives; it’s about modeling the values you’re asking employees to embrace.
Messages about a company’s goals, strategic initiatives, or employee recognition programs land differently when delivered by those steering the ship, as it shows these initiatives truly matter to decision-makers. Resist the urge to hand this off to your lone HR person if you’re a small team, or relegate it to internal comms if you’re a larger company.
Leadership should host the Q&As, send the memos about big changes, and show up in the Slack channels—not just approve the messaging from a distance. By demonstrating that encouraging employees and fostering open communication is a priority at the highest levels, leadership transforms internal marketing from a nice-to-have into a core business strategy.
5. Align internal and external messaging
Your internal messaging and external brand promises need to align to maintain credibility with employees. If your company’s vision emphasizes customer satisfaction and transparency, your marketing team can’t design landing pages with obscure pricing, and your sales team can’t push aggressive upsells that compromise the customer experience.
Similarly, if you promote work-life balance in your recruitment materials, but your internal culture celebrates working late, this disconnect will quickly erode trust. When your actions, internal communications, and external messaging work in harmony, employees become genuine believers in your mission.
At Lulus, the company's internal culture intentionally mirrors its customer persona.
“She is hysterical. She doesn’t take herself too seriously,” says Crystal of the brand’s core customer. “And that’s very much how we are internally at Lulus. We’re all a little bit goofy, but we have a really great time doing our job.”
When what you project outward matches how people experience the company from the inside, employees can be more authentic brand advocates.
6. Lean into transparency
When employees don’t have information, they fill the gaps themselves—sometimes with assumptions that breed anxiety and disengagement. Kara Brothers, former president of the skin care brand Starface, sees transparency as a way to reduce the mental burden on her team.
“In the business environment, it’s really easy for individuals to guess. Guess what your leaders are thinking, what your peers are thinking, guess what the goals are. It takes a lot of energy and, for me personally, added anxiety,” she says on Shopify Masters. “So as much as possible, I try to speak the truth. I try to speak the facts as they stand today.”
“The truth will set you free. I don’t have anything to hide,” says Peter Dering, founder of Peak Design, about his similarly open approach, on Shopify Masters. “There’s no piece of information that I don’t feel I can share with the people who are willing to work for my company.”
Start by identifying the information that your employees are most likely to speculate about: finances, strategy shifts, and hiring plans. Then, proactively address it before the rumor mill does. Even when you don’t have all the answers, saying, “Here’s what we know and here’s what we’re still figuring out” builds more trust than silence.
7. Communicate across employee channels
Your internal marketing team (whether that’s HR or another dedicated task force) should take advantage of every available channel to reach employees where they are. A multichannel approach ensures your message reaches different types of learners and accommodates various work styles and schedules.
Peter uses regular Q&A sessions to keep communication flowing in both directions. “We have fireside chats, and it’s Q&A where it’s kind of ask me anything,” he says. “I still have not encountered a question that I won’t answer full-throated.” The format gives employees direct access to leadership while reinforcing that culture of openness.
Here are key examples of internal marketing channels and how to use them:
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Internal podcasts let employees absorb company updates on their own time, such as during commutes or while working on other tasks.
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Monthly newsletters provide a curated digest of company milestones, employee spotlights, and upcoming initiatives.
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Slack or other messaging platforms enable real-time updates and quick, informal communication between teams.
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Virtual all-hands meetings and town halls create space for leadership to share big-picture strategy and celebrate wins.
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Q&A sessions give employees direct access to leadership and encourage transparent dialogue.
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In-person events, like team off-sites, foster genuine connection and help remote teams build stronger relationships.
8. Invest in perks that communicate your values
Perks do more than compensate—they communicate what you stand for. The benefits you offer signal what your company actually prioritizes, not just what it claims to value. Generic perks send a generic message; thoughtful ones reinforce your culture.
At Dreamday, Lauren introduced a benefit directly tied to her own experience completing 200 hours of yoga training.
“We announced we’re going to be giving a thousand-dollar stipend and a week of [paid time off] to our entire team for anyone who wants to do anything that’s going to better themselves spiritually, physically, emotionally,” she says. The perk communicates that the company cares about employees as whole people.
At Jono Pandolfi, the ceramics company offers a perk uniquely suited to its workforce of working artists: access to the studio after hours.
“Having the team stay late, use the kilns, use the clay, work on their craft, is really cool,” says Nick Pandolfi, who runs operations. This is combined with benefits uncommon in arts production jobs, like health insurance, 401(k), paid time off, and an annual canoe trip. Taken together, the message is clear: We value you as artists, not just employees.
If you’re a smaller company not yet in a position to provide lavish perks, focus on alignment over extravagance. A quarterly volunteer day might make sense if you’re a social enterprise; flexible hours might matter more at a family-first company.
9. Develop social media guidelines
When internal marketing plays its role effectively, you’ll see improved employee retention, engagement, and brand advocacy. Enthusiastic employees often want to share their positive experiences on social media, creating a natural bridge between external and internal marketing efforts.
However, it’s important to establish clear social media guidelines that outline what can be shared publicly. For example, keep unreleased products and strategic plans confidential while encouraging authentic posts about company culture and approved initiatives.
While these guidelines should protect sensitive information, they shouldn’t be overly restrictive or diminish the genuine voice of your employees. It’s not uncommon for employee posts to outperform official brand content because they feel more genuine. A team member sharing a candid moment from an offsite or a personal reflection on company culture carries more weight than polished corporate messaging. Your job is to create moments worth sharing, then get out of the way.
10. Hire for cultural alignment
Internal marketing works best when your audience—that being your staff—is receptive to the message. Screening for cultural fit during hiring is not unlike targeting the right customer segment; you’re building an employee base that will naturally resonate with your values rather than resist them. This means treating your job descriptions, career pages, and hiring conversations as internal marketing previews. Give candidates a clear sense of your culture before they ever reach the interview stage.
Kara makes culture a central part of her interview process when hiring new team members for Starface.
“Through the hiring process, I ask a lot about culture. I ask a lot about how do you manage teams. How do you like to be managed?” she says. “Actually, having those tough conversations as much as possible during the interview process.” These questions help surface whether a candidate will embrace your company’s internal messaging or simply tune it out.
When cultural alignment isn’t prioritized, even talented hires can struggle. Crystal has seen this firsthand.
“We’ve had a couple of folks who have come through and just couldn’t connect,” she says about hiring for Lulus. “And they tend to not be able to stay because we actually really value and cherish that culture.” Internal marketing is easier when you’ve built a team that’s already bought into what you’re selling.
Internal marketing FAQ
What is internal vs. external marketing?
Internal marketing focuses on engaging and motivating employees within a company, while external marketing targets customers and potential clients outside the organization.
Why is internal marketing good?
Internal marketing aligns staff with company goals, boosts employee morale, and helps attract and retain top talent, ultimately leading to improved business performance.
What is an example of internal marketing?
organization’s vision and celebrates employee achievements, fostering a sense of belonging and purpose among team members.
How do you measure the success of internal marketing?
Measure internal marketing success by tracking employee engagement and alignment with business goals. Key metrics include employee engagement survey scores, internal newsletter open rates, attendance at all-hands meetings, participation in feedback programs, and employee retention. Strong internal marketing also supports external outcomes by helping teams better communicate value, support launches, and contribute to business growth.
