Summary: Take good care of your internal customers, your employees, and you’ll never have to worry about having enough external customers. 

The senior flight attendant was starting the routine safety talk: the bit about flotation vests and emergency exits that we ignore at the beginning of every flight.

“If we could have your attention, please, we would appreciate it – in fact we’d be downright shocked,” she said. Almost everyone on the flight laughed, of course, and without really noticing, we also listened to the safety instructions. And, like most of the other passengers on the flight, I became a satisfied customer.

From a management perspective, we can give some credit to the flight attendant’s personality. But, more importantly, we need to consider her work environment, and the fact that the airline’s managers put the same amount of money and effort into taking care of employees as they do for external customers. In other words, the managers think of their employees as internal customers.

So, if we were going to build an internal marketing program for employees, where would we start? What would we do? How would we do it?

Any plan for external customers usually starts by asking what they want. The same holds for internal customers. As we articulate our reasons for marketing to internal customers (setting objectives), as we figure out the goals of employees, and identify the best medium for communicating with them, we’re setting out a communication strategy. 

In terms of tactics, we’ll set out our subject matter in operational terms; in other words what subjects we’ll write and talk about. We’ll need to decide how often communicate this subject matter, and identify the tone we’ll take in our messages. 

Next, we implement the plan, based on the strategic and tactical decisions we made in the planning stage. And good internal marketing, like external marketing, would involve gathering feedback afterward. Remember, listening is an important communication skill, too!

To get and keep good employees, cater to them as you would to important customers, through internal marketing. Marketing to internal customers can be just as important as marketing to external customers.