by: Dana Cass

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of internal alignment on content. I’m not just talking about making sure your execs, product stakeholders, etc. understand and support your content strategy—that’s still important (sorry, yes, you still have to have THOSE arguments), but I’m thinking more about aligning:

• How your company’s employees’ experience being part of your organization and building and implementing the products you market
• What you say about your company and its products and business externally 

This has been on my mind for a couple reasons:

1. More generally, we’re moving into an age of employees as influencers.
2. More personally, I was chatting with a former colleague who is now freelancing the other day, and she asked if I had any tips—based on my experience developing the content strategy for the organization where we both worked—as she embarked on a project building out a marcomms function for a startup, inclusive of both internal and external comms. 

I have done time in the internal comms trenches, and I’m grateful for it because it showed me how vital it is—for both the effectiveness of your marketing and the health of your organization—that what you say externally reflects what people experience internally.

(Also because let me tell you, that’s where the good tea is.) 

1. Brand advocacy: If you want people to be advocates for your brand, then you need to give them material that feels authentic to and not dissonant with their experience. 
2. Effective marketing: It’s crucial for your company’s long-term reputational health that your marketing aligns with the truth of your product. You don’t want to be the company whose product launch videos and posts garner a zillion comments about how you overpromise and underdeliver. 
3. Employee retention: When what you say outside and what people experience inside doesn’t connect, the fundamental promise you make to your employees breaks down. If you say internally that you have certain values, but do and publicize work that doesn’t align with those values, people feel betrayed. If you promise the moon to your audience but don’t give your teams the resources to execute, people burn out. 

So what do you do when there’s a disconnect? When leadership is telling you “promise xyz features” and the product rank-and-file are saying “there is literally no universe in which we deliver xyz features anytime soon”? Or where you’re pushing case studies and press coverage about work that your company said it wouldn’t do, and people are yelling at marketing because they don’t have leadership’s ear? 

This is where a couple unique aspects of the marketing function (and content in particular IMO) come into play: our cross-functional position and our communication skills.

Marketing is in a position to surface disconnects—between eng/product and the business, between leadership and the rest of the org, between different arms of the marcomms org.

And sometimes we’re the only people in the company who both understand each group’s concerns and can articulate them in a way that resonates to other groups. (Content people! We’re good at words!) 

This work—stuff like telling leadership that engineering is pushing back on the new product campaign because they feel insufficiently resourced, or helping leadership convey its rationale behind a certain campaign or angle to the rest of the company—definitely falls into the category of “stuff marketers don’t get paid enough to do.”

But investing in it makes your content more authentic. It strengthens your ability to amplify content through employee networks. And ultimately, it makes your company and its business healthier in the long term—and isn’t that the real goal of content? ■

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Dana is a freelance content writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Previously, she served as global head of content for an S&P500 software company and head of marketing for a seed-stage startup.