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What is internal marketing?
If your company still thinks internal marketing is sending a nice email on Mother’s Day, this guide is for you.
Internal marketing is the application of marketing techniques to a company’s internal audience. It’s not internal communications — although it uses the same channels. Internal communications is the medium (intranet, email, bulletin board). Internal marketing is the strategy that gives purpose to those media: campaigns with clear objectives, segmented audiences, tangible deliverables, and measurable results.
In practice, internal marketing includes everything that creates a connection between the brand and the people who work for it: welcome kits at onboarding, seasonal campaigns with physical products, recognition programs with items employees take home, commemorative date activations. It’s the difference between “informing” and “engaging.”
The problem is that most companies treat internal marketing as internal communications with a better layout. And that explains why most campaigns don’t work.
The right question isn’t “how do we do internal marketing?” It’s “how do we turn internal marketing into an operation, not a one-off project?”
Why internal marketing fails at most companies
The failure starts with the model. Most companies run internal marketing like this:
- HR or Marketing has a campaign idea. Usually tied to a commemorative date.
- Someone opens a spreadsheet, gets quotes from suppliers, and requests pricing for generic gifts.
- The supplier delivers late, with inconsistent quality. Half the employees don’t even receive anything.
- Nobody measures anything. The campaign becomes a photo on the bulletin board and that’s it.
This cycle repeats 4 to 8 times a year. Each cycle consumes weeks of the team’s time, generates frustration, and produces zero engagement data. It’s what we call “PowerPoint internal marketing”: it exists in the presentation, but not in the experience.
The symptoms are well known: campaign emails with 15% open rates, expensive events with 30% attendance, gifts that go straight to the drawer, zero correlation between campaigns and climate or turnover metrics. And the worst part: the People & Culture team spends hundreds of hours per month running logistics — getting supplier quotes, checking inventory, packing boxes, calling couriers — instead of thinking about people strategy.
The root of the problem is clear: internal marketing operates as a one-off project, not a program. Each campaign starts from scratch. There’s no permanent catalog, no automated workflow, no accumulated data. When the campaign ends, the learning is lost and the cycle starts over.
What’s missing isn’t creativity. It’s infrastructure. What’s missing is a model that turns ideas into recurring operations — with a catalog, customization, tracked shipping, and a results dashboard.
And there’s an aggravating factor that few people mention: tax complexity. Every gift purchased externally generates an invoice, tax classification, and regulatory considerations. In companies with strict compliance, the quoting and purchasing process can take longer than the campaign itself. When all of this falls on HR or Marketing, the result is predictable: the campaign gets delayed, simplified, or simply doesn’t happen.
How the best companies do internal marketing
Companies that run internal marketing campaigns with physical products at scale follow a different operational model. It’s not about “having better ideas.” It’s about having infrastructure that turns any idea into an executable campaign.
The model works like this:
Centralized, on-demand catalog. Instead of getting supplier quotes for every campaign, the company accesses a catalog with thousands of items ready for automatic customization. Upload the logo once; the system applies it across all products. No minimum inventory, no advance purchasing.
Campaign as a product. Each internal marketing campaign becomes a “product” in the internal catalog: rules for who receives it, when, how much, and with what budget. The manager doesn’t need to open a spreadsheet; they activate the campaign and the workflow kicks in — production, customization, individually tracked shipping.
Physical products that go beyond digital. Companies serving 40,000+ employees with this model consistently observe that campaigns with physical products generate 3 to 5 times higher participation than purely digital campaigns. The reason is simple: the employee takes the item home, posts it on LinkedIn, shows it to family. Digital disappears in the inbox; physical stays on the desk.
Real measurement. A consolidated dashboard shows participation rate by campaign, cost per employee, delivery time, and post-campaign engagement. For the first time, you can correlate internal marketing with internal NPS and turnover.
Flexible activation models. Campaigns can work in different ways: the company ships directly to the employee, the employee chooses from a catalog with rules, or the manager selects the item and the recipient fills in the address. Multiple giftmailing models coexist on the same platform, adapting each campaign to its context.
Integrated governance. Configurable approval (automatic for recurring campaigns, manual for special items), cost center by department, budget per campaign, consumption reports. Procurement and HR see everything in one place — no shared spreadsheets required.
This model solves the two biggest problems: it takes operations off HR’s plate and makes internal marketing measurable.
The moments that matter most
In practice, the campaigns that generate the best results follow a predictable calendar. Companies that run internal marketing with physical products well focus on key moments:
- Onboarding: personalized welcome kit on Day 1. It’s the moment of greatest emotional impact and the easiest to standardize.
- Commemorative dates: Mother’s Day, Christmas, company anniversary. Seasonal campaigns with items employees take home.
- Recognition: promotions, tenure milestones, goals achieved. A tangible item turns recognition into memory.
- Engagement campaigns: climate surveys, safety programs, referral programs. Physical products serve as concrete incentives.
You don’t need to cover all these moments at once. Mature companies start with two or three and scale as they measure results.
The numbers that prove it
The data from companies that adopted this operational model is consistent:
- 40,000+ employees served in recurring internal marketing programs with physical products.
- 300+ onboardings per month operated with personalized kits, tracked delivery, and first-day SLA.
- ~200 hours/month saved per large company — freeing up 2 people previously dedicated to quoting, purchasing, and manual shipping to move into strategic roles.
- 3-5x higher participation in campaigns with physical touchpoints versus digital-only campaigns.
- Organic sharing on LinkedIn and social media consistently higher when items have perceived quality and real customization.
These numbers don’t come from market research. They come from real operations at companies with 8,000+ employees across more than 800 cities, and networks with 700+ franchises across every state in Brazil. The on-demand production model also eliminates waste: no sitting inventory, no campaign leftovers, no materials going to waste — an operational and ESG gain that companies with sustainability targets increasingly value.
What to look for in an internal marketing solution
If you want to move beyond the “spreadsheet + generic supplier” model, these are the criteria that separate a real platform from a middleman with a nice website:
On-demand catalog with no minimum inventory. If the solution requires minimum orders or advance purchasing, you’ll end up with inventory sitting in a closet. Look for an on-demand production model with a broad catalog (10,000+ items is a good benchmark).
Automatic customization per campaign. Upload the logo once, automatic application across all items. Customization not only of the product, but of the packaging, card, message, and employee communication.
Individually tracked shipping. Each employee receives individual tracking. The company sees a consolidated dashboard of all shipments. Nationwide coverage with e-commerce-style shipping options.
Participation dashboard and governance. Configurable approval (automatic + manual), cost center by department, budget per campaign, custom reports. Without this, you’re just trading one spreadsheet for another.
Guaranteed invoicing and zero tax complexity. The platform issues all invoices. No headaches with tax classification, tributaries, or compliance.
Integration with existing systems. Functional SSO and SCIM for authentication. Webhooks available at any point in the workflow — from user creation to delivery confirmation. Integration with HR and ERP systems developed on demand, without months of implementation.
Complete white-label. The employee experience needs to be 100% your brand. The platform, the communication, the packaging — everything with the company’s identity. If the employee realizes it’s “a third-party supplier,” the internal marketing effect is diluted.
If the solution you’re evaluating meets these criteria, it will likely solve the problem. If it doesn’t meet some, ask why. See how People & Culture solution teams apply these criteria in practice.
Internal marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it directly feeds your employer branding strategy. And when you need to turn engagement into a recurring program, see our guide on how to build an employee recognition program from scratch.