May 14, 2025 • 28 mins
Welcome to another episode of Digital Coffee: Marketing Brew! This week, host Brett Deister sits down with Charlie Riley, the Head of Marketing at OneScreen.ai, to shine a spotlight on a topic that often gets pushed to the back burner: internal marketing. In this insightful conversation, Charlie shares why internal marketing is just as crucial as external efforts, explaining how it impacts company culture, boosts employee morale, and creates the alignment needed for real business success. With over twenty years of experience building marketing functions from scratch at startups and established companies alike, Charlie offers practical advice on fostering collaboration between departments, maintaining consistent messaging, and adapting internal communication for hybrid and remote teams. Whether you’re a marketing leader, sales professional, or just passionate about workplace dynamics, this episode is packed with valuable takeaways to help you strengthen your team from the inside out. So, grab your coffee (or iced Americano) and join us for a fresh brew of marketing wisdom!
Guest Bio:
Charlie Riley is the Head of Marketing at OneScreen.ai, a platform that specializes in measurable out-of-home advertising. With a diverse background spanning multiple industries and company sizes, Charlie has often been the first marketing hire, building out functions from the ground up. Beyond marketing, Charlie has also led sales teams on several occasions, developing a deep understanding of the synergy between marketing, sales, and customer support. Charlie’s experience reflects a hands-on, collaborative approach, ensuring that marketing works seamlessly across all pillars of a business to drive demand generation and brand success.
3 Fun Facts:
- Charlie Riley prefers iced coffee over hot coffee and usually goes for an iced Americano.
- At one company, Charlie’s team sent out a daily internal email called "What We Know Now" to keep everyone updated and connected, especially after going remote.
- Charlie has been the first marketing hire at six different organizations, leading marketing and sales teams from seed stage startups up to companies with $200 million in revenue.
Key Themes:
- Importance of internal marketing for success
- Cross-functional collaboration between departments
- Impact of internal marketing on morale
- Adapting internal marketing for remote work
- Ensuring message consistency internally and externally
- Common mistakes in internal communication initiatives
- Role of technology in internal communications
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Marketing is the one function that probably touches arguably
more areas of the business than others. Marketers are being asked to do more and
more. You have to be a financial expert. You have to be a product expert.
You have to convert sales. You have to tell stories. You have to
retain customers.
(00:29):
That's good. And welcome to a new
episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew, and I'm your
host, Brett Deister. Please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite
podcasting apps. The five star review really does help with the rankings. Let me know
how I am doing. But this week, we're
talking about internal marketing and how it's just as important,
(00:50):
and you should be probably be focusing on it as external marketing. I know this
is a big thing because most people kind of ignore it. It's on the back
burner because you always wanna make your sales. But, anyways, I have Charlie
with me, and he is the first head of marketing at on screen measurable
outdoor advertising advertising platform
has been the first marketing hire at six
(01:13):
organizations in marketing and sales at seed stage startups up
to 200,000,000.
Welcome to the show, Charlie. Thanks for having me. I appreciate
it. That's the first question to all my guests is, are you a coffee or
tea drinker? I'm an iced coffee drinker. I don't drink
hot drinks, but I do drink, iced tea
(01:34):
or I Iced tea occasionally, but, more of an iced coffee person.
So are you, like, like, iced coffee, cold brew,
or does it really not matter? Because they are actually brewed differently.
Yeah. I'm not a I I don't know that the the full nuance of all
of them, but, I I I like both. So,
usually an iced Americano is what I go with. Well, I mean, the difference
(01:58):
is that just cold brews just brewed in a room temperature or
cold. And so that's why it's called cold brews. There's no heat involved, and then
ice is usually traditional way, and then you just kinda ice it down.
Learn something new. Thanks. I appreciate it. You're welcome. And I gave a brief summary
of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you
do? So I'm the head of marketing at OneScreen dot
(02:20):
ai. We are a measurable out of home or
outdoor advertising platform. So we help, brands,
utilize brand marketing, in in their demand gen
execution. I've worked at a number of
different companies in different sizes in in a range of
industries. So, yeah, I've been first marketing
(02:42):
hire a couple times, and I've, you know, really tried to lean
into, I've worked on that. I've been very
fortunate to lead sales teams, even though my background is more in
marketing. I've led sales teams a couple of times now, so I have a deep
appreciation for understanding how hard that role is and how
much marketing works directly with sales
(03:04):
and customer support. It's not it's not just
siloed functions there. Everyone has to work together. And
so, yeah, I think that the topic of internal marketing, especially
with what I do now, where we're working with sales teams, we're working with support
teams, we may be helping with product launches. It's really
it's really important for marketers to understand
(03:25):
how our work supports and helps other functions. So I've I've been kind
of talking about that or or appreciating that for over twenty
years now. Why do you believe that internal
marketing is just as important with external marketing for a company
success? Marketing
is the one function that probably touches,
(03:49):
arguably more more areas of the business than others.
You know, marketers are being asked to do more and more. You have to be
a financial expert. You have to be a product expert. You have to
convert sales, you have to tell stories. You have
to retain customers. There's there's a piece to all of that.
And so you have to know a little bit about everything. You have to be
(04:10):
able to to snorkel in most functions and then deep dove
into other areas. And I think depending on the
function or the the maturity of organizations,
everyone has their interpretation or assumption of what marketing is, and
especially, you know, everyone has an opinion of what good marketing looks like.
And so I think it's important as a marketer to work
(04:33):
to really listen and understand first and foremost what people think
marketing is and how that they're that role
supports or contributes to what they do. And
then you have to utilize that to make sure that they understand,
how long it takes to do certain executions, how that's going to
impact their role, how they can help support marketing, because
(04:56):
it is a team game. It's it's a team effort, especially when you're working very
closely with sales and customer support. But you have to dive
into understanding the product. You know, you have to be able to tell
that that in a different way than maybe an engineer does,
or to talk about how a product or a solution,
(05:17):
why a CFO cares about it versus maybe a salesperson or
a marketer. So you just you have to be a communicator.
That's what marketing is first and foremost. And you have to not only think
about your audiences are not just external from your walls or
from your company, but you have internal
constituents too that you have to help all get on the same page
(05:39):
because it's going to reduce the cost to go out to market. It's going to
make it your job easier, and it's going to make them
understand, how you what you do day to day and how it helps the
company. Can we say that internal marketing does help employee morale and
productivity because of just how
just checking in with employees a lot of times and making sure that they
(06:01):
have what they're needed to be supported is just as important
as just making a
sale. Yeah. That's a that's a good maybe secondary
benefit to being a good storyteller. You know, you're
gonna hopefully you're gonna be involved with internal
communications alongside HR departments,
(06:23):
or operational departments because there is there's a lot of ways
that, marketing can help to,
extend the story. So, you know, when you launch a big campaign and
for us, you know, that's launching a campaign with a customer is doing a
big out of home, campaign. So they might be doing a big brand
launch. They might be doing a product announcement. It's a
(06:45):
very visual product. What we have, we've got billboards, we have bus wraps, we
have all these different executions that we build for someone. It's a fun
story. It's it's it's exciting to see that go live. It's exciting
to see that out in the world. We like to share that internally,
but we also have to help the other departments understand
how how their work contributed to us getting to the the the
(07:07):
angle. We have to we have to help maybe tell the story
of how do they find us? We have to ask those types of questions.
Where did they come from? Like, what was their main goal and how do we
contribute to that? Because that's going to help,
sales think about how they're messaging differently. That's going to
help, marketing where they spend their dollars or where,
(07:28):
like where they're advertising. So those types of stories are
important to think about the whole the whole story, not just what your
function does. But, yeah, when you talk about morale, I think that's one of those
areas where it's like, hey, let's look at this, execution we just
did. We just did a lot, a large, campaign for a conference.
Let's champion that and let's call out who contributed to that because I
(07:51):
may not know the day to day details of what someone on a planning team
does. But I can start to appreciate that more and start to
understand how long it takes to build an out of home plan. I can
understand how long it takes, to source with different
vendors. So that goes into my mind as I'm as I'm planning
maybe how we talk about a case study or use case. And
(08:12):
so I think it all comes back to just having an
appreciation for what other functions do and wanting to help
champion that because marketers, you know, their inherent
skill set should be able to be able to tell stories in a way
that can communicate to different learning styles.
And has it changed a little bit since we have more remote and hybrid workers?
(08:34):
Because I mean, past before, everybody had to come into
work. Now some companies are requiring you to come back to work five days a
week. Like Amazon just announced this past week, they're like, y'all have to come
back to work. But how has it changed with internal marketing if you don't have
everybody in the office five days a week now? And
then of remote and hybrid models, it's it's even
(08:56):
more paramount that internal marketing's and it's just
executed and there's a structure to it. I think, you know, everyone in
the company should be able to tell your elevator pitch. Everyone, there should
be consistency there, and it's just you may have to roll it out differently.
But you also have to keep in mind some employees may may have never
met each other. You're working in different time zones. There's different styles
(09:18):
and structures there. So being a part of helping understand what
the expectations are and contributing that in the
different learning styles that they have. You know, for someone in
remote, it may not be where you're just sending them a text
document. Maybe you're recording a Loom video and sending that because there's a little
bit more asynchronous ability there or it's just they're a visual
(09:40):
learner. So I think just like marketing
externally, you have to think about the executions you use and you have to think
about the different formats you use. So it's the same thing, I think, internally,
especially, but it's probably even more important as not everyone's in
the same office building or in the same location all the time. You have
to reinforce that you have to reiterate that message. And that's where I
(10:02):
think different learning styles comes into play with that.
And how can internal marketing help ensure consistent messaging across both
internal and external communications? I
think that's where a good example of that of that would be is,
not operating in a vacuum when you're launching a marketing campaign.
(10:22):
Launching that internally first because one, it's going to get everybody excited.
Like, here's what we're doing. Here's all the here's all the executions we built. Here's
what this is going to look like. But you get other people to buy
in, you get some, you get people's excitement there.
You're also not asking everybody to give their opinion because making a decision as
a group, a group thing can definitely
(10:44):
prevent some progress there. I mean, there's some feedback you might get,
but, you know, you take that in stride. It's like, Hey, thanks. We appreciate that.
Here's maybe the rationale of why we did it this way or why we're
messaging this way. It helps you to educate on the
theory and the the execution of of what a marketing campaign looks like.
But that's gonna help sales because they're gonna see the the use cases
(11:07):
that you're using. They're gonna to see the emails that are going out so they
know how to respond to that. So it's important to keep people
involved early on in the process. It gets them excited internally. And then
when it goes out in the market, you can then report on that. You can
give updates. But it's very important to keep everyone in the loop early
on, versus it being a surprise to, other departments
(11:27):
internally. You're trying to do all this
messaging to have, like, the different types of personality come in and help you
figure out if this is the right messaging, because you're gonna have different groups of
people with different diverse thoughts, and then they'll all disagree with each other, but
at least, you know, like where all these diverse thoughts are going with this
messaging, because I mean, as marketers, we can create this message. We
(11:49):
think it's awesome. And then all of a sudden we bring it out to the
wild and it's like, well, that didn't work so well. I
mean, as we know, marketers, you're not gonna bat a hundred
or, you know, a % every time, some
campaigns are just not going to hit. I think there is a trap
of asking for opinions from everybody.
(12:10):
If they're not the intended audience or they don't know enough about
the intended audience, there's going to be
a bias towards what they like. And, you
know, no offense, but somebody in accounting might not be your ICP. They
might not be the person you're trying to talk to. So while they they may
have an opinion about that, they're not the intended
(12:32):
audience. And so you have to take that into my into consideration.
You also have to take into consideration ideas are going to come from everybody.
You'd be silly not to take ideas from other places and other
individuals that may not sit in the marketing team. However, you have to
just there's a balance there of, you know, too many
cooks in the kitchen or just too many ideas versus
(12:54):
we're going to go with this. This is our hypothesis. We've made a decision on
this. Here's why we're going to learn from it. But but I've
had great ideas coming from someone that's, you know, no marketing degree
whatsoever, but they just they had a really good idea and you're like, Oh, I
could see that work. So that's important. And I think you want to champion that
as well to say, Hey, look, this idea came from someone in the product team.
(13:15):
We never thought of that. And look where this got us to. So I think
that's one of those things you can help champion for other people to contribute because
they they should feel like they should contribute. And nowadays
everyone has a voice. Everyone has social channels that they're active on.
There's not you shouldn't have the expectation of everybody wanting to share your
news. But you can champion those that do want to because
(13:37):
they're going to extend the voice of who you're talking to.
And it may start to reduce your your overall marketing costs. And what are
some of the common mistakes companies make when implementing internal communication
initiatives? And how should they avoid these?
Yeah, that's a good question. I think as long as it's not a one way
conversation, and as long as it's not well, we told
(14:01):
you that once. I think you have to continually communicate,
the same story over and over again. It's just it's just like external.
Nobody's going to make a buy unless you're selling T shirts or something
very transactional. Most people don't make a decision or a buy
or are in a buying position at that time when they hear
your message the first time, you have to continually communicate that over and over
(14:23):
again. And then when they're ready to execute on that or when they're
ready to understand that, they hopefully think of
you. So I think a couple areas that,
are not probably going to be effective when you're trying to build an
internal marketing communication program or plan is if you just say it
once and then think everyone retains it. If you do it in the format in
(14:46):
one format and you don't keep into consideration
how other people learn or absorb information, I think that's a
way that you can fail in that, and or just
not be open to feedback. I think it's a marketer's job to listen
and to digest and to
disseminate information in a way that,
(15:08):
in different ways that people can understand. So if you are just,
you know, closing that idea down, it's like, no, no, no, we're like, we come
up with the ideas here in the marketing world. You're going to fail and you're
going to turn people off, too. I mean, like everyone has good ideas. It doesn't
mean it's always going to be the best idea for their execution, but
you you should be open to those types of things within within reason.
(15:30):
So, I mean, what I'm hearing is even if you're the maybe the boss of
somebody, don't talk down to them, talk parallel to them or, like, equal to
them. So your messaging should be equal even if you're the boss,
but still have that separation. Or if you're the same point, just talk equal
to them. Because when you talk down to people, people are like, Well, I'm not
going to do anything about this. Yeah, I think that I mean, that's just human
(15:51):
nature in general. You don't don't be a jerk. You know,
like, I think keep in consideration that sales what
sales is doing. It's difficult and it's important, and it's equally
as important as what marketing is doing. We're here to help each other.
So sales team, here's why I think that our marketing
team should sit on your calls. Here's why we should talk to your customers because
(16:13):
we're going to pick things up that you may not. You're going to hear something
different than than we're hearing it and we're going to use it in a different
way. Not, you know, if I said that to a market, a sales
leader like, Hey, we're going to sit on your calls without
context, that seems like a forced entry there
that seems confrontational. Hey, I really want to understand
(16:34):
better how we can change up our landing page and we I want to use
the words that our customers are using. So would it be okay if we
sat if we listen to your Gong or call recordings or if we did,
or if we could go out on some sales calls like framing it in a
way where it's, Hey, I'm trying to help you out and it's going to make
all of our jobs easier. Yeah, you just, you know, I think it's as
(16:55):
simple as just try not to be a jerk, and which is, you know, how
we should all, live in life, I guess.
And and and in what ways can a company measure the
effectiveness of their internal marketing strategies?
I think when you when you can see cohesion between teams,
(17:17):
when you can do things like,
when you can think about, like, requests that come into
marketing and maybe, you know, depending on how you kind of keep track of that
or structure it, but, I think there's some efficiencies of scale
that could come with, maybe not having so many
rush requests and maybe the education around
(17:40):
a salesperson coming to a marketing team. I need a sell sheet,
which happens probably very often. You know,
the first thing I would do is ask, well, what do you what do you
actually try to accomplish? They do. Do they specifically ask for a sell sheet
or do you need a reason to follow-up and like they're just a tangible
type of of learner? Do we not have enough information on
(18:01):
our site? What's what? What are we trying to get across them?
Because we may have another execution for you that's already built, or we may have
a different way that you can deliver that. That's a track
that's easier to be tracked than just handing someone a PDF.
So there's a lot of ways to think about that. But I think if one
of the ways that I've found in the past that there's been some efficiencies there
(18:23):
is that the rush orders don't always come into marketing. It's
there's an appreciation for I understand how long things take or I'm
going to plan out ahead of time because I know how long things take versus
a mad scramble at the end. So those are some ways where I think, you
know, you're just going to see you're going to see a better relationship between sales
and marketing. You're going to see maybe some bottom of funnel or
(18:46):
middle middle of funnel closing better because we're just getting better
at executing on what the needs are versus working in silos. I
think those are a couple of ways that you can say, hey, this is working,
we're all we're all, you know, whatever the analogy you want to use, rowing our
orders on the same direction. Or I always butcher analogies like that.
But you know, you can pick whatever analogy you love the best,
(19:08):
but, that sort of teamwork model, you can just you
can see that working together. You can see proactive communication happening
like, Hey, we heard this from this prospect. They
referenced that, that one campaign you ran.
That's a good sign of that. People are working back and forth, and it's
not just a one way street. And how does technology
(19:30):
and digital communication play a role in facilitating internal marketing
strategies? Like, do you guys use email marketing, maybe
internal podcast, private podcast, videos? Like, what do you use
specifically? Yeah. I think it depends on the the size
and structure and and of each company. You know, I
think email marketing is one way that, you know, there was
(19:54):
a company I had worked for in the past. We actually
had a daily email that we put out, and it was it was called what
we know now. And the whole theory behind that was we had all these different
departments. This is when we went remote. So everyone this was sort of a
new structure for everyone. And we try to communicate
what we knew at that point about a lot of the changing landscape
(20:16):
of things, of just what each different department was working
on. And it was a great model because
everyone was used to email communication. It was simple to put
together. It took some time, but the the ROI on that was
was incredible because people felt more connected.
We also put some fun things into there too. So it wasn't just, you know,
(20:38):
being hit over the head with business information all the time. There were some
you got to learn about your employees more, your coworkers,
especially sitting in a work a remote environment. So, it
really depends. I mean, it's like don't try to boil the ocean, find
what works for your organization. If it's email, if it's Slack,
if it's, you know, like I said, Loom videos at the end of the
(21:01):
week. I've I've used those before just to kinda give people a heads up on
what's going on. Find what works for you. But, you know, you don't
have to I wouldn't focus on the technology or building out a
big structure. I'd focus on telling that story first. And if if it resonates
great and you can always expand upon it. Successful and
then experiment on other things, maybe to enhance it if need be.
(21:23):
But if not, don't try to, like, reinvent the wheel
again. Yeah. You don't need to buy a lot of technology. You
probably are using things in ways that people communicate. But just remember, everyone
has different learning styles like a long you know, some people might
want the too long didn't read bullet version and some people want the
documentation. So think about the different styles that you're using with with
(21:45):
people. And that goes for external marketing too. You know, everyone's gonna
have a different learning style outside your company.
The success of internal marketing programs.
A good internal marketing program without leadership buy
in. I think everyone has to be on the same
(22:05):
page that we're all working together. Sales and marketing are not
enemies. They're working cohesively. They're working with
customer support. You know, product
now is, you know, like a a newer term for product marketing,
but that function needs to be integrated with, the
different departments. They need to be able to understand what's coming down
(22:28):
the line and be able to tell that to prospects and the customers. So there's
retention there with current, excuse me, with current
customers and customer support, but then there's prospecting with sales. So
if that buy in isn't there and there's not appreciation of, like, why why
does this team need to be in this meeting and why what are we trying
to do? Then it's it's gonna fail.
(22:51):
How let's say some company you're trying to get the
leadership to Dubai and how do you convince them? Because sometimes it's like,
well, why do I need to do this type of a thing? Because everybody has
a long list of things to do or not do, or they think they're busy
or they actually are busy. But how do you get that buy in? Because sometimes
it is a little difficult to be like, hey. Look it. We need you guys
(23:11):
to do this because, I mean, you are the leadership and people look up to
you for this. I think you have you have to think
about what's important to them. So
a CFO or a finance person is going to care about,
they're going to care about budgets. They're going to care about ROI. They're going to
care about, probably more in an analytical way. And
(23:32):
so if you can help them understand,
listen, we're gonna spend a lot of money or time on these
marketing campaigns. If we operate in a silo, there's
a good chance that we may not be as effective because we are not
understanding the feedback from the customer feedback loop from
sales. So if we can do this, but if we don't hear
(23:54):
back from them, we're gonna maybe use the wrong words
and on our communications, and it's not gonna resonate
with our buyer and they're gonna go somewhere else. So that's like you have to
think about what's important to them. The sales team may
say, like, well, we need to book, you know, we want to book more meetings,
not just awareness. Well, okay. That's great. Like,
(24:16):
help us understand which, like, which
prospects are not converting and, like, give us enough of
a sample size so that we can maybe make some deductions around, hey. We
shouldn't maybe target this segment because we're learning that they're just not ready
to buy yet or this industry is at the wrong sales cycle.
So let's focus on other ones. If we can help them understand
(24:38):
what they're motivated about, and usually that's like selling more and
getting a more a higher paycheck. Well, how do I help them do that?
I'm going to help them find the right prospects, but I need I need some
feedback from them first. I care about what motivates
them. And so when they see that you're intrinsically
motivated to help them out, then I think that there's
(25:00):
a two way street there. So I think you just have to, you know, you
can't say, well, here's here's why, because I'm telling you so. I think you have
to put yourself in their shoes. And, again, this goes back
to like common sense marketing or just telling stories.
But think about what they care about and how do you tell the
story in a way that they they're like, Oh, yeah, Okay, then that makes sense.
(25:22):
And how can internal mark internal marketing help a company achieve
its business goals and objectives in the long term? I think we talked
about a number of those things there. I think you're just you're going to,
you're going to work faster. You're going to be on the same page with other
teams, especially when it comes to go to market. So when sales,
customer support and marketing are all rowing in the same direction,
(25:45):
you're going to execute faster. You're going to hopefully spend less, to
acquire new customers and you're going to keep them because you're finding the
right people. So I think, you know, I I it's not
easy and it doesn't happen overnight. But when everyone understands what we're trying to
accomplish, when everyone understands the buy in around what marketers are trying to
do, you can hopefully get sales quicker and you can keep
(26:07):
customers longer. And, I mean, for those companies that haven't really done
or done internal communication very well, what is kind of like
your rundown of, like or like your two bolt thing about, like, why why
is it so important for them to start now? I don't think you want any
department working in a silo. I think, you know, how often are they talking to
each other and how often are they sharing ideas? It's
(26:29):
important and it shouldn't be a blame game. It shouldn't be sales did this. Well,
no marketing did this. We're all in it to learn together. So I think
the the sooner that everyone can buy into that idea of we don't
need to spend every minute together. We don't need to have meetings every day,
but we should be sharing back and forth of how we get
better as a go to market, group or or or function,
(26:52):
it's gonna it's gonna it's gonna deliver dividends. Alright. People are
listening to this podcast and wondering where they can they find you online to learn
more about what you do and how internal communication is so great. Yeah.
I mean, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So, you know, if you if you search
for Charlie Riley on LinkedIn, happy to connect there or,
or check us out at 1screen.ai if you're, interested
(27:13):
in outdoor advertising. That's, you know, where I'm focusing my
time now. So, trying to help build some internal internal
marketing and external marketing for for our organization to do, measurable out
of home. But, yeah, you can find me there or or or like I said,
I'm active on LinkedIn. Alright. Any final thoughts for us for our
listeners? No. Thanks for having me. It's, yeah, I think
(27:35):
marketers marketers are asked to do a lot. So the more that you can help
get others on board internally, you're going to have more champions
that, you know, that get that moment of how you're helping them out.
You know, just be a good listener. It's kind of it's, you know, table stakes
for marketers. Alright. Thank you, Charlie, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew
and sharing your knowledge on why internal marketing is just as important as
(27:57):
external marketing. Thanks for having me. And thank you for listening. As
always, please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps. Leave
a five star review. It will always help with the rankings. Let me know how
I am doing. Join me next week as I talk to another great player
in the PR marketing industry. Alright, guys. Stay safe. Get to understanding
how you can make your internal marketing better, and see you next
(28:19):
week. Later.
Marketing is the one function that probably touches arguably
more areas of the business than others. Marketers are being asked to do more and
more. You have to be a financial expert. You have to be a product expert.
You have to convert sales. You have to tell stories. You have to
retain customers.
(00:29):
That's good. And welcome to a new
episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew, and I'm your
host, Brett Deister. Please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite
podcasting apps. The five star review really does help with the rankings. Let me know
how I am doing. But this week, we're
talking about internal marketing and how it's just as important,
(00:50):
and you should be probably be focusing on it as external marketing. I know this
is a big thing because most people kind of ignore it. It's on the back
burner because you always wanna make your sales. But, anyways, I have Charlie
with me, and he is the first head of marketing at on screen measurable
outdoor advertising advertising platform
has been the first marketing hire at six
(01:13):
organizations in marketing and sales at seed stage startups up
to 200,000,000.
Welcome to the show, Charlie. Thanks for having me. I appreciate
it. That's the first question to all my guests is, are you a coffee or
tea drinker? I'm an iced coffee drinker. I don't drink
hot drinks, but I do drink, iced tea
(01:34):
or I Iced tea occasionally, but, more of an iced coffee person.
So are you, like, like, iced coffee, cold brew,
or does it really not matter? Because they are actually brewed differently.
Yeah. I'm not a I I don't know that the the full nuance of all
of them, but, I I I like both. So,
usually an iced Americano is what I go with. Well, I mean, the difference
(01:58):
is that just cold brews just brewed in a room temperature or
cold. And so that's why it's called cold brews. There's no heat involved, and then
ice is usually traditional way, and then you just kinda ice it down.
Learn something new. Thanks. I appreciate it. You're welcome. And I gave a brief summary
of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you
do? So I'm the head of marketing at OneScreen dot
(02:20):
ai. We are a measurable out of home or
outdoor advertising platform. So we help, brands,
utilize brand marketing, in in their demand gen
execution. I've worked at a number of
different companies in different sizes in in a range of
industries. So, yeah, I've been first marketing
(02:42):
hire a couple times, and I've, you know, really tried to lean
into, I've worked on that. I've been very
fortunate to lead sales teams, even though my background is more in
marketing. I've led sales teams a couple of times now, so I have a deep
appreciation for understanding how hard that role is and how
much marketing works directly with sales
(03:04):
and customer support. It's not it's not just
siloed functions there. Everyone has to work together. And
so, yeah, I think that the topic of internal marketing, especially
with what I do now, where we're working with sales teams, we're working with support
teams, we may be helping with product launches. It's really
it's really important for marketers to understand
(03:25):
how our work supports and helps other functions. So I've I've been kind
of talking about that or or appreciating that for over twenty
years now. Why do you believe that internal
marketing is just as important with external marketing for a company
success? Marketing
is the one function that probably touches,
(03:49):
arguably more more areas of the business than others.
You know, marketers are being asked to do more and more. You have to be
a financial expert. You have to be a product expert. You have to
convert sales, you have to tell stories. You have
to retain customers. There's there's a piece to all of that.
And so you have to know a little bit about everything. You have to be
(04:10):
able to to snorkel in most functions and then deep dove
into other areas. And I think depending on the
function or the the maturity of organizations,
everyone has their interpretation or assumption of what marketing is, and
especially, you know, everyone has an opinion of what good marketing looks like.
And so I think it's important as a marketer to work
(04:33):
to really listen and understand first and foremost what people think
marketing is and how that they're that role
supports or contributes to what they do. And
then you have to utilize that to make sure that they understand,
how long it takes to do certain executions, how that's going to
impact their role, how they can help support marketing, because
(04:56):
it is a team game. It's it's a team effort, especially when you're working very
closely with sales and customer support. But you have to dive
into understanding the product. You know, you have to be able to tell
that that in a different way than maybe an engineer does,
or to talk about how a product or a solution,
(05:17):
why a CFO cares about it versus maybe a salesperson or
a marketer. So you just you have to be a communicator.
That's what marketing is first and foremost. And you have to not only think
about your audiences are not just external from your walls or
from your company, but you have internal
constituents too that you have to help all get on the same page
(05:39):
because it's going to reduce the cost to go out to market. It's going to
make it your job easier, and it's going to make them
understand, how you what you do day to day and how it helps the
company. Can we say that internal marketing does help employee morale and
productivity because of just how
just checking in with employees a lot of times and making sure that they
(06:01):
have what they're needed to be supported is just as important
as just making a
sale. Yeah. That's a that's a good maybe secondary
benefit to being a good storyteller. You know, you're
gonna hopefully you're gonna be involved with internal
communications alongside HR departments,
(06:23):
or operational departments because there is there's a lot of ways
that, marketing can help to,
extend the story. So, you know, when you launch a big campaign and
for us, you know, that's launching a campaign with a customer is doing a
big out of home, campaign. So they might be doing a big brand
launch. They might be doing a product announcement. It's a
(06:45):
very visual product. What we have, we've got billboards, we have bus wraps, we
have all these different executions that we build for someone. It's a fun
story. It's it's it's exciting to see that go live. It's exciting
to see that out in the world. We like to share that internally,
but we also have to help the other departments understand
how how their work contributed to us getting to the the the
(07:07):
angle. We have to we have to help maybe tell the story
of how do they find us? We have to ask those types of questions.
Where did they come from? Like, what was their main goal and how do we
contribute to that? Because that's going to help,
sales think about how they're messaging differently. That's going to
help, marketing where they spend their dollars or where,
(07:28):
like where they're advertising. So those types of stories are
important to think about the whole the whole story, not just what your
function does. But, yeah, when you talk about morale, I think that's one of those
areas where it's like, hey, let's look at this, execution we just
did. We just did a lot, a large, campaign for a conference.
Let's champion that and let's call out who contributed to that because I
(07:51):
may not know the day to day details of what someone on a planning team
does. But I can start to appreciate that more and start to
understand how long it takes to build an out of home plan. I can
understand how long it takes, to source with different
vendors. So that goes into my mind as I'm as I'm planning
maybe how we talk about a case study or use case. And
(08:12):
so I think it all comes back to just having an
appreciation for what other functions do and wanting to help
champion that because marketers, you know, their inherent
skill set should be able to be able to tell stories in a way
that can communicate to different learning styles.
And has it changed a little bit since we have more remote and hybrid workers?
(08:34):
Because I mean, past before, everybody had to come into
work. Now some companies are requiring you to come back to work five days a
week. Like Amazon just announced this past week, they're like, y'all have to come
back to work. But how has it changed with internal marketing if you don't have
everybody in the office five days a week now? And
then of remote and hybrid models, it's it's even
(08:56):
more paramount that internal marketing's and it's just
executed and there's a structure to it. I think, you know, everyone in
the company should be able to tell your elevator pitch. Everyone, there should
be consistency there, and it's just you may have to roll it out differently.
But you also have to keep in mind some employees may may have never
met each other. You're working in different time zones. There's different styles
(09:18):
and structures there. So being a part of helping understand what
the expectations are and contributing that in the
different learning styles that they have. You know, for someone in
remote, it may not be where you're just sending them a text
document. Maybe you're recording a Loom video and sending that because there's a little
bit more asynchronous ability there or it's just they're a visual
(09:40):
learner. So I think just like marketing
externally, you have to think about the executions you use and you have to think
about the different formats you use. So it's the same thing, I think, internally,
especially, but it's probably even more important as not everyone's in
the same office building or in the same location all the time. You have
to reinforce that you have to reiterate that message. And that's where I
(10:02):
think different learning styles comes into play with that.
And how can internal marketing help ensure consistent messaging across both
internal and external communications? I
think that's where a good example of that of that would be is,
not operating in a vacuum when you're launching a marketing campaign.
(10:22):
Launching that internally first because one, it's going to get everybody excited.
Like, here's what we're doing. Here's all the here's all the executions we built. Here's
what this is going to look like. But you get other people to buy
in, you get some, you get people's excitement there.
You're also not asking everybody to give their opinion because making a decision as
a group, a group thing can definitely
(10:44):
prevent some progress there. I mean, there's some feedback you might get,
but, you know, you take that in stride. It's like, Hey, thanks. We appreciate that.
Here's maybe the rationale of why we did it this way or why we're
messaging this way. It helps you to educate on the
theory and the the execution of of what a marketing campaign looks like.
But that's gonna help sales because they're gonna see the the use cases
(11:07):
that you're using. They're gonna to see the emails that are going out so they
know how to respond to that. So it's important to keep people
involved early on in the process. It gets them excited internally. And then
when it goes out in the market, you can then report on that. You can
give updates. But it's very important to keep everyone in the loop early
on, versus it being a surprise to, other departments
(11:27):
internally. You're trying to do all this
messaging to have, like, the different types of personality come in and help you
figure out if this is the right messaging, because you're gonna have different groups of
people with different diverse thoughts, and then they'll all disagree with each other, but
at least, you know, like where all these diverse thoughts are going with this
messaging, because I mean, as marketers, we can create this message. We
(11:49):
think it's awesome. And then all of a sudden we bring it out to the
wild and it's like, well, that didn't work so well. I
mean, as we know, marketers, you're not gonna bat a hundred
or, you know, a % every time, some
campaigns are just not going to hit. I think there is a trap
of asking for opinions from everybody.
(12:10):
If they're not the intended audience or they don't know enough about
the intended audience, there's going to be
a bias towards what they like. And, you
know, no offense, but somebody in accounting might not be your ICP. They
might not be the person you're trying to talk to. So while they they may
have an opinion about that, they're not the intended
(12:32):
audience. And so you have to take that into my into consideration.
You also have to take into consideration ideas are going to come from everybody.
You'd be silly not to take ideas from other places and other
individuals that may not sit in the marketing team. However, you have to
just there's a balance there of, you know, too many
cooks in the kitchen or just too many ideas versus
(12:54):
we're going to go with this. This is our hypothesis. We've made a decision on
this. Here's why we're going to learn from it. But but I've
had great ideas coming from someone that's, you know, no marketing degree
whatsoever, but they just they had a really good idea and you're like, Oh, I
could see that work. So that's important. And I think you want to champion that
as well to say, Hey, look, this idea came from someone in the product team.
(13:15):
We never thought of that. And look where this got us to. So I think
that's one of those things you can help champion for other people to contribute because
they they should feel like they should contribute. And nowadays
everyone has a voice. Everyone has social channels that they're active on.
There's not you shouldn't have the expectation of everybody wanting to share your
news. But you can champion those that do want to because
(13:37):
they're going to extend the voice of who you're talking to.
And it may start to reduce your your overall marketing costs. And what are
some of the common mistakes companies make when implementing internal communication
initiatives? And how should they avoid these?
Yeah, that's a good question. I think as long as it's not a one way
conversation, and as long as it's not well, we told
(14:01):
you that once. I think you have to continually communicate,
the same story over and over again. It's just it's just like external.
Nobody's going to make a buy unless you're selling T shirts or something
very transactional. Most people don't make a decision or a buy
or are in a buying position at that time when they hear
your message the first time, you have to continually communicate that over and over
(14:23):
again. And then when they're ready to execute on that or when they're
ready to understand that, they hopefully think of
you. So I think a couple areas that,
are not probably going to be effective when you're trying to build an
internal marketing communication program or plan is if you just say it
once and then think everyone retains it. If you do it in the format in
(14:46):
one format and you don't keep into consideration
how other people learn or absorb information, I think that's a
way that you can fail in that, and or just
not be open to feedback. I think it's a marketer's job to listen
and to digest and to
disseminate information in a way that,
(15:08):
in different ways that people can understand. So if you are just,
you know, closing that idea down, it's like, no, no, no, we're like, we come
up with the ideas here in the marketing world. You're going to fail and you're
going to turn people off, too. I mean, like everyone has good ideas. It doesn't
mean it's always going to be the best idea for their execution, but
you you should be open to those types of things within within reason.
(15:30):
So, I mean, what I'm hearing is even if you're the maybe the boss of
somebody, don't talk down to them, talk parallel to them or, like, equal to
them. So your messaging should be equal even if you're the boss,
but still have that separation. Or if you're the same point, just talk equal
to them. Because when you talk down to people, people are like, Well, I'm not
going to do anything about this. Yeah, I think that I mean, that's just human
(15:51):
nature in general. You don't don't be a jerk. You know,
like, I think keep in consideration that sales what
sales is doing. It's difficult and it's important, and it's equally
as important as what marketing is doing. We're here to help each other.
So sales team, here's why I think that our marketing
team should sit on your calls. Here's why we should talk to your customers because
(16:13):
we're going to pick things up that you may not. You're going to hear something
different than than we're hearing it and we're going to use it in a different
way. Not, you know, if I said that to a market, a sales
leader like, Hey, we're going to sit on your calls without
context, that seems like a forced entry there
that seems confrontational. Hey, I really want to understand
(16:34):
better how we can change up our landing page and we I want to use
the words that our customers are using. So would it be okay if we
sat if we listen to your Gong or call recordings or if we did,
or if we could go out on some sales calls like framing it in a
way where it's, Hey, I'm trying to help you out and it's going to make
all of our jobs easier. Yeah, you just, you know, I think it's as
(16:55):
simple as just try not to be a jerk, and which is, you know, how
we should all, live in life, I guess.
And and and in what ways can a company measure the
effectiveness of their internal marketing strategies?
I think when you when you can see cohesion between teams,
(17:17):
when you can do things like,
when you can think about, like, requests that come into
marketing and maybe, you know, depending on how you kind of keep track of that
or structure it, but, I think there's some efficiencies of scale
that could come with, maybe not having so many
rush requests and maybe the education around
(17:40):
a salesperson coming to a marketing team. I need a sell sheet,
which happens probably very often. You know,
the first thing I would do is ask, well, what do you what do you
actually try to accomplish? They do. Do they specifically ask for a sell sheet
or do you need a reason to follow-up and like they're just a tangible
type of of learner? Do we not have enough information on
(18:01):
our site? What's what? What are we trying to get across them?
Because we may have another execution for you that's already built, or we may have
a different way that you can deliver that. That's a track
that's easier to be tracked than just handing someone a PDF.
So there's a lot of ways to think about that. But I think if one
of the ways that I've found in the past that there's been some efficiencies there
(18:23):
is that the rush orders don't always come into marketing. It's
there's an appreciation for I understand how long things take or I'm
going to plan out ahead of time because I know how long things take versus
a mad scramble at the end. So those are some ways where I think, you
know, you're just going to see you're going to see a better relationship between sales
and marketing. You're going to see maybe some bottom of funnel or
(18:46):
middle middle of funnel closing better because we're just getting better
at executing on what the needs are versus working in silos. I
think those are a couple of ways that you can say, hey, this is working,
we're all we're all, you know, whatever the analogy you want to use, rowing our
orders on the same direction. Or I always butcher analogies like that.
But you know, you can pick whatever analogy you love the best,
(19:08):
but, that sort of teamwork model, you can just you
can see that working together. You can see proactive communication happening
like, Hey, we heard this from this prospect. They
referenced that, that one campaign you ran.
That's a good sign of that. People are working back and forth, and it's
not just a one way street. And how does technology
(19:30):
and digital communication play a role in facilitating internal marketing
strategies? Like, do you guys use email marketing, maybe
internal podcast, private podcast, videos? Like, what do you use
specifically? Yeah. I think it depends on the the size
and structure and and of each company. You know, I
think email marketing is one way that, you know, there was
(19:54):
a company I had worked for in the past. We actually
had a daily email that we put out, and it was it was called what
we know now. And the whole theory behind that was we had all these different
departments. This is when we went remote. So everyone this was sort of a
new structure for everyone. And we try to communicate
what we knew at that point about a lot of the changing landscape
(20:16):
of things, of just what each different department was working
on. And it was a great model because
everyone was used to email communication. It was simple to put
together. It took some time, but the the ROI on that was
was incredible because people felt more connected.
We also put some fun things into there too. So it wasn't just, you know,
(20:38):
being hit over the head with business information all the time. There were some
you got to learn about your employees more, your coworkers,
especially sitting in a work a remote environment. So, it
really depends. I mean, it's like don't try to boil the ocean, find
what works for your organization. If it's email, if it's Slack,
if it's, you know, like I said, Loom videos at the end of the
(21:01):
week. I've I've used those before just to kinda give people a heads up on
what's going on. Find what works for you. But, you know, you don't
have to I wouldn't focus on the technology or building out a
big structure. I'd focus on telling that story first. And if if it resonates
great and you can always expand upon it. Successful and
then experiment on other things, maybe to enhance it if need be.
(21:23):
But if not, don't try to, like, reinvent the wheel
again. Yeah. You don't need to buy a lot of technology. You
probably are using things in ways that people communicate. But just remember, everyone
has different learning styles like a long you know, some people might
want the too long didn't read bullet version and some people want the
documentation. So think about the different styles that you're using with with
(21:45):
people. And that goes for external marketing too. You know, everyone's gonna
have a different learning style outside your company.
The success of internal marketing programs.
A good internal marketing program without leadership buy
in. I think everyone has to be on the same
(22:05):
page that we're all working together. Sales and marketing are not
enemies. They're working cohesively. They're working with
customer support. You know, product
now is, you know, like a a newer term for product marketing,
but that function needs to be integrated with, the
different departments. They need to be able to understand what's coming down
(22:28):
the line and be able to tell that to prospects and the customers. So there's
retention there with current, excuse me, with current
customers and customer support, but then there's prospecting with sales. So
if that buy in isn't there and there's not appreciation of, like, why why
does this team need to be in this meeting and why what are we trying
to do? Then it's it's gonna fail.
(22:51):
How let's say some company you're trying to get the
leadership to Dubai and how do you convince them? Because sometimes it's like,
well, why do I need to do this type of a thing? Because everybody has
a long list of things to do or not do, or they think they're busy
or they actually are busy. But how do you get that buy in? Because sometimes
it is a little difficult to be like, hey. Look it. We need you guys
(23:11):
to do this because, I mean, you are the leadership and people look up to
you for this. I think you have you have to think
about what's important to them. So
a CFO or a finance person is going to care about,
they're going to care about budgets. They're going to care about ROI. They're going to
care about, probably more in an analytical way. And
(23:32):
so if you can help them understand,
listen, we're gonna spend a lot of money or time on these
marketing campaigns. If we operate in a silo, there's
a good chance that we may not be as effective because we are not
understanding the feedback from the customer feedback loop from
sales. So if we can do this, but if we don't hear
(23:54):
back from them, we're gonna maybe use the wrong words
and on our communications, and it's not gonna resonate
with our buyer and they're gonna go somewhere else. So that's like you have to
think about what's important to them. The sales team may
say, like, well, we need to book, you know, we want to book more meetings,
not just awareness. Well, okay. That's great. Like,
(24:16):
help us understand which, like, which
prospects are not converting and, like, give us enough of
a sample size so that we can maybe make some deductions around, hey. We
shouldn't maybe target this segment because we're learning that they're just not ready
to buy yet or this industry is at the wrong sales cycle.
So let's focus on other ones. If we can help them understand
(24:38):
what they're motivated about, and usually that's like selling more and
getting a more a higher paycheck. Well, how do I help them do that?
I'm going to help them find the right prospects, but I need I need some
feedback from them first. I care about what motivates
them. And so when they see that you're intrinsically
motivated to help them out, then I think that there's
(25:00):
a two way street there. So I think you just have to, you know, you
can't say, well, here's here's why, because I'm telling you so. I think you have
to put yourself in their shoes. And, again, this goes back
to like common sense marketing or just telling stories.
But think about what they care about and how do you tell the
story in a way that they they're like, Oh, yeah, Okay, then that makes sense.
(25:22):
And how can internal mark internal marketing help a company achieve
its business goals and objectives in the long term? I think we talked
about a number of those things there. I think you're just you're going to,
you're going to work faster. You're going to be on the same page with other
teams, especially when it comes to go to market. So when sales,
customer support and marketing are all rowing in the same direction,
(25:45):
you're going to execute faster. You're going to hopefully spend less, to
acquire new customers and you're going to keep them because you're finding the
right people. So I think, you know, I I it's not
easy and it doesn't happen overnight. But when everyone understands what we're trying to
accomplish, when everyone understands the buy in around what marketers are trying to
do, you can hopefully get sales quicker and you can keep
(26:07):
customers longer. And, I mean, for those companies that haven't really done
or done internal communication very well, what is kind of like
your rundown of, like or like your two bolt thing about, like, why why
is it so important for them to start now? I don't think you want any
department working in a silo. I think, you know, how often are they talking to
each other and how often are they sharing ideas? It's
(26:29):
important and it shouldn't be a blame game. It shouldn't be sales did this. Well,
no marketing did this. We're all in it to learn together. So I think
the the sooner that everyone can buy into that idea of we don't
need to spend every minute together. We don't need to have meetings every day,
but we should be sharing back and forth of how we get
better as a go to market, group or or or function,
(26:52):
it's gonna it's gonna it's gonna deliver dividends. Alright. People are
listening to this podcast and wondering where they can they find you online to learn
more about what you do and how internal communication is so great. Yeah.
I mean, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So, you know, if you if you search
for Charlie Riley on LinkedIn, happy to connect there or,
or check us out at 1screen.ai if you're, interested
(27:13):
in outdoor advertising. That's, you know, where I'm focusing my
time now. So, trying to help build some internal internal
marketing and external marketing for for our organization to do, measurable out
of home. But, yeah, you can find me there or or or like I said,
I'm active on LinkedIn. Alright. Any final thoughts for us for our
listeners? No. Thanks for having me. It's, yeah, I think
(27:35):
marketers marketers are asked to do a lot. So the more that you can help
get others on board internally, you're going to have more champions
that, you know, that get that moment of how you're helping them out.
You know, just be a good listener. It's kind of it's, you know, table stakes
for marketers. Alright. Thank you, Charlie, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew
and sharing your knowledge on why internal marketing is just as important as
(27:57):
external marketing. Thanks for having me. And thank you for listening. As
always, please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps. Leave
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