Internal marketing initiatives
Improving your organisations understanding and appreciation of marketing
This week’s Mehdeeka is all about extra curricular activities - but not side projects. Instead I want to go over a few initiatives I’ve experienced being a part of that at first I myself was skeptical of, but over time have shown to have huge potential impact on the business.
Some of these are purely for building relationships with other teams, some can be seen as a way to keep yourself accountable for work that always falls down the priority list, and some of these are really a way to actually get other people to do some marketing work for you!
Cuddle Club
I have written about Cuddle Club before, I think a few times at this point. It’s because I really believe in the concept. A cuddle is a gentle shove from a sales person to their prospect, either nudging them to continue down the funnel, or as an excuse for a touchpoint. Maybe the prospect has the contract and they’re taking a long time to sign it and the sales person wants to check in without saying “have you signed the contract yet”. Time for a cuddle!
“Hi X, I saw this article and thought you might find it interesting <link>. Enjoy!”
That’s a cuddle.
But, of course, sales people don’t spend all day reading articles from around the internet and keeping an eye on market changes - that’s marketing’s job.
Make a dedicated space for Cuddle Club (a Slack or Teams channel is great) and set up a format. I personally like;
Relevant personas
Keywords (this will make the channel searchable, so very important)
A suggested caption
The link
For the suggested caption, I try to write something that could be copy/pasted and not look too generic, or if it’s a big article I would pull out the top points of it as kind of a TL;DR and let people pick their favourite stat or quote to lead with.
This channel then becomes a searchable archive of marketing-approved cuddles, so anyone can come in and safely pull out a link that you know doesn’t talk about your competitors or anything undesirable.
The number one rule for Cuddle Club: the content has to be genuinely interesting, otherwise it’s just spam.
Company influencers
You might have a few LinkedIn power users (or any other social site). These people are great to utilise to further extend the reach of your company posts.
In a very similar vein to Cuddle Club, you can curate content for this group and coordinate posting. The scope for this content is a lot wider though, you’re allowed to brag here. It might be a press win, an award or nomination, a new hire, any sort of internal news is ripe for this channel, alongside the interesting articles from Cuddle Club.
Having this influential group talking about your company will both impact your audience and your other employees who might not be as active online; overall it’s great for brand.
Research and insights sessions
At Willow we run a fortnightly Market Insights session covering various topics. Originally it started as a way to regularly run some open thinking/inspiration style sessions with the product managers to introduce some more detail about the industries we sell to that could help them think of product improvements.
It has kind of gotten to the point where I’m pretty sure the majority of staff have this session in their calendars and we get all sorts of people attending depending on the topic.
The topics we cover include:
Customer industries and pain points
Competitive landscapes and product offering comparisons
Specific features and their use cases
Deeper dives into the “why” of certain aspects of the product
Explorations of adjacent or complementary products, services, and industries
We have a lot of subject matter experts so it has also been really nice to feature them in interviews, ask them to present a segment of the overall session, or have them present for Q&As.
For me personally, it has been a nice way to chip away at competitor analysis (which is part of my remit) on a regular basis, as this is one task that often falls off my priority list.
On a broader level, it’s been nice to see the amount of positive feedback we get, and the recognition that this is (in part, as it’s a collaborative effort) value that the marketing team is bringing to the business.