Customer outreach and brand campaigns are likely the first things that come to mind when you think of marketing. But there’s untapped potential within your marketing team that reaches beyond external audiences.
Marketers’ knack for storytelling, design, and engagement strategies holds priceless potential for internal training initiatives. In conjunction with HR and other employee training or onboarding staff, your marketers can help employees absorb information more effectively, with training materials that feel as polished and purposeful as your best client-facing content.
Here are four tips on how.
Reason 1: Marketers are Adept at Resource Creation — and Have a Library of Existing Assets
No one conveys brand messaging better than a marketing team, whether it’s company values or product information. Marketers have a hand in creating internal-facing assets that arm sales teams and other stakeholders with company-critical information to close deals; oftentimes, those assets can also help get new hires up to speed on products or processes quickly.
Even if HR prefers to create and organize their own onboarding material, marketers likely have myriad resources that mentors can plug into training decks. Product one-pagers, FAQ sheets, internal newsletters, even brand guides — these are all high-quality, ready-to-go assets that can reduce redundant content creation and accelerate training timelines. Better yet, marketing teams are already in the habit of refining this content regularly to ensure accuracy, branding consistency and audience relevance, making it an even easier lift.
Reason 2: Marketers Are Content Repurposing Masters
Turning blogs into infographics, meeting notes into social media posts and sales collateral into slide decks — marketers are no strangers to repurposing content in new and engaging ways to keep the content train chugging. But have you considered redirecting those powers internally for your benefit?
Pages-long process documents and blasé training material are just one repurposing away from becoming engaging, easily digestible onboarding assets that are as pleasing to read through as they are to look at. Marketers can help reframe training material into formats that align with how employees actually learn, whether that’s a quick-reference cheat sheet or an animated explainer video.
To take it a step further, marketers can help tailor training materials to different employee personas, whether by department, role or location — similar to how they segment external audiences. Personalized onboarding feels more relevant and respectful of each employee’s needs, and is a key ingredient for onboarding success.
Reason 3: Marketers’ Social Media Skills Translate to Internal Communication
Marketing teams live and breathe engagement. It’s their job to know what captures attention and how to communicate key messages clearly and creatively. These skills are invaluable when applied to internal training efforts, particularly when introducing new tools, policies or even culture initiatives that need company-wide buy-in.
Marketers can help shape internal comms strategies using the same tactics they’d use for social media: eye-catching visuals and snappy, engaging messaging. Whether it’s creating an internal Slack campaign or crafting a series of “Did You Know?” posts on your company intranet, their social savvy can boost awareness and retention in ways that traditional memos struggle to.
Reason 4: Company Culture Is a Shared Responsibility
Marketers are keepers of brand voice, and that voice should resonate just as strongly inside the company as it does out in the market. When your marketers work hand-in-hand with HR, they can help shape a consistent cultural narrative that threads through onboarding, training, and employee development initiatives.
From reinforcing core values in learning modules to designing culture decks that feel inspiring, marketers can infuse employee touchpoints with meaning and purpose. This alignment ensures that employees don’t just understand the brand — they feel connected to it.
It’s All in the Family
Involving your marketing team in internal training initiatives brings practical benefits. Marketers are skilled in content creation, messaging, and engagement — qualities that can improve the value and appeal of training materials in numerous ways.
Plain documents and long meetings have their place, but by working alongside HR and other training teams, marketers can deliver accurate, well-designed information that’s expertly aligned with company values. That’s training done right!
