Most organizations treat internal communications and marketing like two completely different disciplines. Different teams, different budgets, different skill sets. One talks to customers. One talks to employees. Never the twain shall meet.
That's a mistake. And it's costing you.
The truth is that internal communications and marketing flex exactly the same muscle. The craft is the same. The strategy is the same. The best practitioners can do both. And the organizations that figure that out get better work from both functions.
The audience changes. The job doesn't.
At its core, marketing is about getting the right message to the right person at the right moment, in a way that makes them think, feel or do something specific. That's it. Strip away the channels, the budgets, the campaign briefs. That's the whole job.
Now read that back and tell me it doesn't describe internal communications perfectly.
Your employees are an audience. They have competing priorities, limited attention spans and a very low tolerance for content that doesn't feel relevant to them. Sound familiar? It should. That's every marketing brief you've ever written.
The mistake leaders make is assuming that because the audience is internal, the standards can be lower. That a town hall invitation doesn't need a compelling subject line. That a SharePoint page doesn't need a clear hierarchy. That an all-hands recap doesn't need an editor.
It does. They all do.
A marketing brain changes how you write internal communications
Here's a concrete example. Writing an invitation to a town hall or employee engagement event sounds simple. It's not. Most internal comms writers treat it like an announcement. They state the date, the time, the topic and move on.
A marketing brain treats it like a conversion problem. What's going to make someone actually show up? What's the hook? What do they get out of it that they can't get from reading the recap later? A well-written town hall invitation with a strong CTA gets people in the room. A weak one gets a half-empty auditorium and a leader wondering why no one showed up.
That's not an engagement problem. That's a copywriting problem.
And an internal comms brain makes your marketing stronger
The other side is just as true. Internal comms practitioners are experts at writing for audiences who didn't ask to hear from you, on topics they may not care about, in an environment full of distractions. That's a hard brief. And it builds a specific kind of discipline that makes everything else sharper.
The campaign thinking that good internal comms requires is indistinguishable from marketing campaign thinking. When I'm running an internal communications campaign — say, a multi-touch rollout of a new policy or a culture initiative — I'm thinking in exactly the same terms as a product marketer. What does the audience already believe? What do I need them to believe instead? How do I weave a consistent thread through every email, every SharePoint page, every manager talking point so it all feels like one coherent story rather than a series of disconnected blasts?
That's brand thinking. That's campaign thinking. It just happens to live inside the firewall.
What this means if you're hiring
If you're building a communications function and treating internal comms and marketing as completely separate skill sets, you're limiting yourself unnecessarily. The best communications professionals move fluidly between both. They know how to write a subject line that gets opened and a leadership message that doesn't make people's eyes glaze over at paragraph two.
Look for the muscle, not the job title. Someone who has written externally facing campaigns and internal communications has seen both sides of the same coin. That perspective is rare and genuinely useful.
The org chart can stay. But the silos? Those can go.
If you're looking for a creative strategist who has spent 20+ years doing exactly this, let's talk.