Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Are Your Marketing Team Comms Broken? About this episode Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at Staffbase, David Burnand, delves into the realm of employee communications and how it transforms internal company interactions. By utilizing an employee communications cloud platform like Staffbase, companies can revolutionize their communication strategies with their workforce. Join David as he explores the topic of fixing broken marketing team communications in this insightful episode. Show Notes Connect With: David Burnand: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 Marketing is like a team sport, but sometimes we're playing in different fields. For most companies, the lion's share of their budgets are spent on external communication with their internal marketing comms being totally broken. Without internal team alignment, you run the risk of having fragmented messaging, which leaves your customers confused. According to Microsoft's Work Trend Index, 60% of teams report feeling disconnected from their leadership and company decision-making since moving to hybrid work. And the symptoms of the comms problems are everywhere. Your product team launches features without your marketing team's involvement. The content team creates assets that the sales team never uses.
1:58 Speaker 04 Your CMO presents a strategy that never quite translates into tactical execution. It happens all of the time. When your marketing team isn't on the same page, your market position Suffered. I'm Benjamin Shapiro and today I'm talking with David Bernard, the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Staffbase. David has helped companies like Adidas, Sephora, and Rite Aid transforms how their teams communicate internally to make sure what they're doing externally makes sense. And he's going to share the playbook for how to align your marketing team around what actually matters. All right, let's jump in. David, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
2:38 Speaker 05 Thanks, Ben. I'm so happy to be here with you.
2:40 Speaker 04 Excited to have you. Thank you for staying up late. You're calling from overseas. Where in the world are you?
2:45 Speaker 05 I'm in the UK.
2:47 Speaker 04 Well, communications is your specialty and I appreciate you staying up late to do a little bit with us. And let's dive in and talk a little bit about this. There is this notion of our external versus our internal marketing communications. Let's start at the top. What do internal marketing communications look like when they're actually successful?
3:05 Speaker 05 If you think about what really matters here, it's around two things. So one thing is internally, within your team, marketing, as you said, it is a team sport. And the specialities of the roles within successful marketing teams now mean that the collaboration piece is more important than ever. But actually for marketing teams to actually really understand at an individual level, what am I doing? What part do I play in the overall strategy that we're trying to deliver? So I think that's a big part of it. I think it's about ensuring within big companies as well that organizations are actually able to make best use of the output of marketing, that they have a good flow and accessibility of information.
3:46 Speaker 05 But I think the bigger piece for me is how we communicate the role of marketing within the organization and how we help the organization also to understand the role that they play in bringing the brand to life. Because the marketing team is a part of it, right? But actually, a brand doesn't just exist from what a marketing team does. It's the sum part of all of the experiences that any organization delivers, not just the advertising and the campaigns and all the stuff we do on socials.
4:14 Speaker 04 I feel like there is a big sort of dynamic shift depending on how big your company is. If you're working at a startup, if you're a solopreneur, understanding the alignment between your goals and your marketing is just making sure you're sober when you start writing your marketing campaign copy. It's all in your head when it's a party of one. As your team expands, you need to start to define your goals and communicate that and make sure that there's some connection between a direction and your execution. But when you get into mid-market and enterprise, that connection between what the CEO is saying we should do and the direction we're going, and then his direct reports, direct reports, direct reports, direct report, writing the actual execution copy.
4:58 Speaker 04 So how do you align that sort of communication flow to keep your team on the same page when it comes to four, five, six levels of depth within your organization?
5:11 Speaker 05 I think for me, it starts with really thinking about what's the organization's narrative, because ultimately, if we haven't got a clear narrative at the top, then there is absolutely no chance that by the time, as you say, it gets like four, five levels down, that people are going to understand their individual roles. So part of it starts with the narrative, but then the other major aspect of it, and that narrative has to be centered around the why, like why are we doing or everything that we're doing at that top strategic level, but then how does it break its way down into the marketing team and then the individual marketing functions? But I think the other aspect here is we oftentimes forget as marketers that actually we have
5:50 Speaker 05 a responsibility to market ourselves and to communicate well internally within our organizations. And sometimes that gets lost. Sometimes we forget that. And if you think about how a marketing team works, a huge chunk of this, if I think about the work that I do within Staffbase with my team, I have a team of around, I think we're around 80 people now, so big-ish marketing and comms team. A big part of what I do with my team is that repetition, almost running it as a mini campaign within the organization to think about why are we doing the things we're doing? What are we trying to do? And what does that mean for you as individuals and as individual teams within the overall function?
6:31 Speaker 04 You said one of the critical points was understanding the role of the marketing team. Give me some examples of different roles and structures marketing might play and how that affects their marketing comms strategy.
6:45 Speaker 05 I think it really depends how broadly you're set up. And as you said, if you're a startup, your role is very, very different, right? You're trying to get to an MVP or maybe trying to get you to your first customer. It's, there's a very different situation to if you're in a broad-based enterprise in software or maybe you're a retailer where your structure could be much broader and the deliverables that you're expected to provide as a marketing team are very different. So for me, the structures would vary depending on what the business strategy was, the maturity of the organization. So within our marketing team at Staffbase, we take care of everything from comms and brand right through to digital customer success.
7:26 Speaker 05 That forms a part of our deliverables and we have a central structure and then we have a regional structure. Not everybody's like that. If you're within an organization, for example, if you're in a big industrial conglomerate like GE or Siemens, then maybe you'd have a structure much more based around the individual business units because what you're selling within those individual units is so very specific. And then there are brands that are in between, right? So then there are retailers that have international presence, so they'll have that local flavor. They'll always want that local flavor, but fundamentally that brand experience, they want to be the same. Now, whether you're at H and M in New York or in Munich, it shouldn't matter.
8:11 Speaker 04 We've all worked for companies of differentiating sizes, or at least most people have worked for some sort of a big company, hopefully some sort of a startup. And everybody at some point in their career should get that broad experience. I know it was eye-opening for me early in my career. I worked at eBay and I think it was like 13,000 people at the time. And it's funny, we had Raski, the decision-making mongoose, which is like the nomenclature we used about how to set up who was responsible for any given meeting. I'll never forget that. I was like, okay. This is the most corporate internal comms, excuse my language, bullshit I've ever heard. And now that I look back, I'm like, no, understanding who was responsible, who was an advisor, who like whatever the other acronyms were, actually was really valuable.
8:55 Speaker 04 Just the way that it was communicated internally was pretty cheesy.
8:57 Speaker 05 Yeah.
8:58 Speaker 04 But it served a purpose. And one of the things that I think is really hard to understand when you're running a larger marketing team or a larger organization, whether you're running it or whether you're just an operator, is understanding whether the internal comms are working, figuring out if you are actually aligned with the marketing team's goals and are the marketing team's goals aligned with the executive team goals. So help me think about how you diagnose whether your internal comms are effective or not.
9:27 Speaker 05 I would consider maybe four different things. I would start with understanding the why. If I was to ask anybody in the marketing team, why are you doing what you're doing? They should be able to ladder up and explain what their role is within the overall strategy that we're trying to deliver. I would say that if the flow of information is good, so I was at an organization, Viva Systems, and they had a principle called an operating principle that they called who needs to know. So your information flow is just really good and you're not hung up on thinking, oh, I'm always a step behind. So is my information flow good? And if you do manage to do those two things, then I think two things happen.
10:08 Speaker 05 The first thing is that people are less hung up on who's doing what because they just sort of know. And as a result of that, they also make better decisions without managers having to always ask and to intervene.
10:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, but how do you evaluate that? Is there a metric you can use to quantify, hey, information is flowing effectively? Or my team understands the ethos of the company and why we're doing the strategic decisions? How do you measure?
10:37 Speaker 05 So it's something that I think internal communicators have been actually quite poor at. I think it's the biggest elephant in the room for employee communications. If you think about marketing like 10, 15 years ago, when I was first getting seriously into marketing, we would run campaigns back then, but it was like, well, we do cool stuff and everybody loves it and it's artistic and creative and so on and so forth. But it was like, please, please, please don't ask me for the results of these campaigns. And then over time, technology enabled us. And these days for us as a marketing team, I can tell you down to the dollar, I can trace revenue back to individual programs and the overall impact, the sum total of everything marketing delivers. Because we've been enabled by
11:22 Speaker 05 technology, communicators haven't had that. But I think the opportunity now as communications technology really improves, you can actually set up campaigns, you can set up micro polling, you can ask people all the time, if you have the right tools, how bought in they are into a certain program. And you can use that to understand, is this working? And also to show business leadership, this is why we do these things in the same way that we do with marketing.
11:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, I feel like if you're at a large enough company, you have an external comms team and a marketing team that's always communicating with the customers, hopefully. And maybe you have an internal comms team. But for most of us, it's on the executive leadership and maybe the marketing leadership as well, to make sure you're communicating internally. So talk to me about some of the tactics that marketing leaders specifically can use to implement ways to make sure that the internal communications are flowing effectively.
12:21 Speaker 05 Some things that I would consider would be firstly, treat your communications with teams like you would with customers. You wouldn't just run an ad campaign once. Think about all the ads that we're bombarded with on social every day. We're so well targeted.
12:36 Speaker 04 You mean, everybody in the organization doesn't read every email and digest it? No way.
12:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think there's a risk that they may miss one or two.
12:44 Speaker 04 I've got a team of four and I don't read. Half the emails. Sorry, guys, if you're.
12:49 Speaker 05 I was gonna say, how many unread emails do you currently have? I'm guessing a few.
12:53 Speaker 04 I'm a zero inboxer, so unread, technically very few, but digested, eh, different story.
13:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's maybe a different thing, right?
13:02 Speaker 04 Got the message multiple times. I get you.
13:04 Speaker 05 Correct. And then the other thing I would say is we need to avoid info bloat. So we're all so bombarded with things these days. So really thinking about how do we streamline communications and make it easy? Going back to your point about the things like, do I digest things or not? Avoid information bloat. So really think about what are the things that my team really needs to know? And let's focus on those things and not send them other things, unnecessary distractions.
13:32 Speaker 04 There's a balancing act there, right? Where it's, I want everybody to be on the same page and understand what the rest of the organization is doing and how we're all functioning together, but I don't want to give too much information so people could actually digest what I'm saying and understanding the activity of the marketing campaigns and team. How do you find the balance between keeping everybody on the same page and aware with actually giving them a chance to digest what's going on?
14:00 Speaker 05 It's really hard. There's no one way to do it, but what I would say is if you think about a couple of things. One thing is leverage your managers. So depending on how complex your organization is, the ADELMON Trust Barometer, which is kind of a study that's run for many years on the trust that people have in different things, not just companies, but also society, government, people they buy from, supermarkets, all kinds of things. What they found a couple of years ago was that actually people have more trust in their companies than they actually had in the Wall Street Journal, in terms of mainstream news. That's actually changed over the past two years. And because of all the things that have happened within companies, like trust between companies and their employees has actually declined quite significantly.
14:45 Speaker 05 However, there's an exception to this, and the one exception is managers. People tend to trust the managers that they are close to. That number has remained very high. So the more you can use your manager. To act as transponders for all of the key things that you need to communicate and allow them to filter out the things their teams don't need. And equally let through the things that they do. That has twofold effect. One is it clears away some of that information blow. But the second thing is if it comes from the manager, the individuals in the teams are more likely to read it because they trust the manager. The higher up it comes from, the tougher it gets.
15:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think understanding and isolating the points of communication and making sure that the information is trickling to essentially the loudspeaker. The loudest voice in the room tends to be the one that gets listened to. And for most people, that's their manager. The last question I want to ask you is about the technology and a little bit more about the implementation. How can technology enhance your internal communications? And really, what's the tech stack that we should be using to make sure that we're effectively communicating mission, goals and strategy within our marketing team?
15:54 Speaker 05 So I think going back to where we started, some of these things depend on the size of your organization. But assuming you're a reasonably big organization, I would say the first thing is decide on the types of technology that you need. So I would differentiate between what I would class as micro communication and collaboration. And for that, you might use Slack, you might use Teams, you might use Google Meet, G chats, you know, for those micro interactions of which we might have thousands every day. So that would be the first thing. So how do we use for that ongoing communication and collaboration that you have all day? But then the other thing is most organizations of a decent size also need a kind of a macro communications platform. We are one of them. So staff base is one of them.
16:37 Speaker 05 So we do a platform that spans across what we class as a modern internet employee app. Because most people these days access information on their phones rather than their laptops, especially frontline workers who often get forgotten in all of the communications that companies do. And then other things like SMS, email, digital signage, and so on and so forth. Now, I think having a macro communications platform is important for two reasons. The first reason is that it's multi-channel. So going back to that idea of treating communications, internal communications with your team, like you would treat your external customers, repetition, targeting, all of those things you can do with a multi-channel platform.
17:20 Speaker 05 And the second thing is it's separate. So you need some separation between those micro communications platforms and the thousands of messages people get every day. And then the big messages that you need larger teams to receive.
17:34 Speaker 04 So help me understand why it's a separate platform. Cause to me, if I'm consuming information, you know, my inbox is the central hub, right? I get all my newsletters. I don't get all of my communications. I have Slack for sort of the ongoing thing. And so there's that dance between what you called the micro of like my inbox, my Slack, maybe there's some sort of another admin portal. Why wouldn't you push information into those channels where people are living? Why do you create a separate environment?
18:02 Speaker 05 So you would use those channels. For example, Staffbase does push directly into Teams and it does push into email inboxes in order to ensure that people are aware that there are important messages there. However, going back to the idea of noise, collaboration platforms where people do work like Slack or Teams, they're noisy platforms. So within Staffbase, we have both Slack and Teams. If I had corporate news or big departmental news, it would easily get lost amongst the thousands of other messages I get every day. So I can use it as a reinforcement, i.e. there's something here for you, you need to read. So I might use it as a trigger, but actually much more effective to put it in people's pockets
18:45 Speaker 05 and send them a notification that is away from all of that other digital noise. That's why we think it's important.
18:51 Speaker 04 Help me boil this down. What are some of the easy to implement tactics that marketing leaders can start to think about when they want to improve their internal marketing communications?
19:03 Speaker 05 I think there's four things I would look at. Number one, review your business goals. So really ensure that there is a clear line of sight between your business goals and your programs. It sounds obvious, but it isn't always obvious to your team. If you can't explain it, they'll never know. Second thing is build a narrative around the why. So going back to those business goals, be able to articulate, okay, not just this is what we're trying to do as a company, but then this is why we're doing these things with the marketing. The third thing is think about the appropriate delivery mechanism. So really consider actually for this particular piece of information, what's the right thing? You have to be careful. Those macro platforms we talked about could also become bloated quite easily. Right? There's a balance to be struck in how you communicate.
19:48 Speaker 05 And then I would say the final thing is be authentic. Try not to be super corporate in your delivery. Try and get that connection because the more you can connect with people, the more likely they are to buy into what you're trying to do. And the more likely they are to ultimately deliver for your business, which is ultimately what you're trying to do.
20:07 Speaker 04 We're all thinking about consistency in our marketing efforts. We want our social campaigns to reiterate and reflect on what our email marketing says, on what our website says, to make this cohesive, great hug with our marketing campaigns around our customers. And it's not just a copywriting exercise, right? It's not a channel selection exercise. There is something about the internal reflection of your team that helps you get all of those touchpoints to sound and feel consistent. It's not just a tone and a style guide. It's teamwork. It's camaraderie. It's communication. It's the left hand understanding what the right hand is doing that helps make your marketing better.
20:53 Speaker 04 All right, David, I want to move on to what we call our lightning round, where we're going to ask you a couple of quick questions related to marketing team communications. Are you ready?
21:03 Speaker 05 I'm ready.
21:04 Speaker 04 All right, here, let's do it. Question number one, what's the word? Give me one word that describes the current state of team dynamics in marketing today.
21:13 Speaker 05 Fractured, definitely.
21:15 Speaker 04 Fractured, so we're broken.
21:17 Speaker 05 Too much tech, too much noise, so people don't know what they're supposed to do.
21:21 Speaker 04 All right, so let's dig into that a little bit. Too much tech, too much noise, to me, which seems to mean that people are trying to send their internal comms through multiple different channels and it's getting lost. Is it a team structure problem? Is it a communication channel problem? Why are we so fractured?
21:41 Speaker 05 I think it's probably a little bit of both, if we're being honest. So I don't think a comms platform is also the silver bullet that fixes this. If your structure is wrong, if you have a lack of clarity in terms of the roles within teams as well, then I think the best comms in the world don't help you. But if you've worked really hard to have that clarity and crispness in terms of roles and responsibilities, then comms plays a really vital role and clarity of communication is super important.
22:06 Speaker 04 Fractured, that's so sad.
22:09 Speaker 05 It is, isn't it?
22:10 Speaker 04 All right, let's move on to question number two. Buy or sell? Are you buying or selling that remote work has negatively impacted team communications in marketing?
22:20 Speaker 05 I would buy.
22:22 Speaker 04 All right, tell me why you're buying that remote work is making it harder for us to communicate.
22:28 Speaker 05 Because I would say it's been great in terms of access to a larger talent base. But having said that, the downside of it is that communication and collaboration takes more effort than it previously did.
22:40 Speaker 04 I had this conversation with my wife yesterday and her company is going towards a return to office, five days a week model. In other words, get your ass back here. And not everybody in the organization knows it, don't tell them, please. But she's like, yeah, I gotta go into the office. It's gonna be like 30 to 45 minutes each way. Now all of a sudden I have less operating time. I can't get home for dinner. Oh my God, the world is falling. And I was like, hang on, when you signed up for this job, this is what you signed up for. There's gotta be some good things about it. It's a beautiful office. You're gonna be in downtown San Francisco. It's a lovely place despite what all of the internet says. And she's like, you know, it turns out there's something to this where I was.
23:23 Speaker 04 In the office and then after the meeting, everybody leaves the room and then they talk about the things that they need to go do because of the meeting and there's the post-meeting meeting, which turns out to be great for collaboration. It seems like, A, we're fractured because we're remote and then we're distant. So everything has to happen within a very concrete time box where we're in front of our screen. Do you think people moving back to the office solves the first problem of marketing being fractured?
23:50 Speaker 05 I don't think so. I think that it can help and certainly we have a lot of office collaboration time these days, but we tend to make it very focused around specific things. The problem that most teams now have is the genie is kind of out of the bottle. So when COVID happened and we all moved to remote work, people were hiring everywhere. But it's going to take a long time before you can get everybody unless you really force it. And some companies are, but unless you really force it, for a lot of organizations, it's going to take quite some time until they are able to get a whole team co-located, which has had pluses and minuses to it as well.
24:28 Speaker 04 The ironic thing to me is everybody's coming back to the offices, but the offices are set up to be co-working spaces. So this notion of having your own desk and having a place where you can go and do the work and do novel things like leave your laptop and your keyboard in one place, that doesn't exist anymore, but we're all supposed to go back to the office. And in the meantime, communicate and collaborate where we're trying to find a place to sit. It seems like there is going to be a big transition as the world decides to go back to work. Let's move on to our next question. Double down or diversify? Are you doubling down on existing communication tools or diversifying into new platforms to enhance your team's collaboration?
25:09 Speaker 05 Double down on this. I think there's too much blow in terms of the number of tools, but actually a lot of the platforms that we have currently are absolutely adequate. You've just got to choose the right platforms.
25:20 Speaker 04 It seems like in terms of team communication, there's the big one, right? Your inbox, there's your either Teams or Slack, your messaging platform, some sort of collaborative document creation, your Google Docs or Excel, what is it? Microsoft Word? I don't even remember what it was. I'm so far removed from using Microsoft tools.
25:38 Speaker 05 Yeah.
25:39 Speaker 04 What are the other tools that are making it so cumbersome for internal communications?
25:45 Speaker 05 I know a lot of organizations, I've seen this myself, where actually it's not even just the corporate tools, right? You know, I've seen organizations where they were doing a lot of communication on things like WhatsApp or SMS or Messenger or messages. So they're using a lot of external tools bypassing all of the security that the IT teams would love to enforce on them because they just found those platforms easier. But over time, of course, these things spiral and then we just end up with too many channels. And especially, I think it's especially true around messaging and it makes it especially difficult for organizations then to communicate the most important things that they want to communicate to their broader employee base.
26:28 Speaker 04 I'm going to throw a curve ball at you.
26:30 Speaker 05 Okay.
26:31 Speaker 04 Marketing Mythbusters. I was going to ask you a question about the role of marketing and what we should be doing, but you're a communications expert. So tell me, Marketing Mythbusters, bust this myth for me. Your external communications are twice as important as your internal communications and marketing.
26:48 Speaker 05 I'm going to bust the myth. And the reason I'm going to bust the myth is because I would say that actually truly effective marketing for the majority of teams. So I will draw a line. There are some teams that can be wasteful, right? Because they have so much budget, they don't have to really worry. But for the vast majority of teams, especially in this climate, they have to work really efficiently. And so the internal communications between the individual parts of a marketing function are really important because we have to make the sum of our parts be more effective than those individual elements. So internal comms is actually, I would say, for the majority of teams for marketing effectiveness, probably more important right now.
27:29 Speaker 04 It's one of those things, I feel like as marketers, we don't necessarily think about it being our responsibility to manage the connection between the teams and the organizations. But inherently, as marketers, our job is to understand our consumers, to be able to understand the message they need and to try to drive them towards an action. But without that alignment between teams, it's really hard to execute externally. You need to understand the vision and the goal of the company to be able to effectively communicate that, no matter what channel you're reaching. David, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and telling us a little bit how to master our internal communications to make sure that our external communications are actually effective.
28:11 Speaker 05 It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
28:13 Speaker 04 All right. That wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to David Bernand, the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at StaffBase. If you'd like to get in touch with David, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can find his company's podcast, which is called Aspire to Inspire, or you can visit his company's website, which is staffbase.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit that subscribe button in your podcast app or in YouTube and we'll be back in your feed sometime soon. All right. That's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
29:16 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand, then visit iheareverything.com.
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