Internal and External Communication:
What Synergy for Your Company?

Internal communication and external communication differ in their target audience and objectives:

The first aims to circulate information within the company, between employees, managers, and executives. It facilitates teamwork, fosters employee engagement, boosts productivity, strengthens cohesion, enhances the employee experience, and improves employee retention.
The second targets an external audience made up of clients, candidates, partners, investors, or institutions. Generally, its goal is to build the organization's reputation to attract top talent, secure partnerships, stand out from the competition, and generate more leads.

Despite these differences, internal and external communication are complementary. To be credible, an organization’s overall communication must maintain a certain coherence. Furthermore, internal and external communication can support each other to achieve their respective objectives more effectively.

Are you looking to implement an effective communication policy? In this article, Mozzaik provides you with good reasons to take action and explains how to create true synergy between your internal and external communication strategies. Enjoy the read!‍

Synergies between Internal and External Communication

There are numerous points of convergence between internal and external communication, which generate multiple benefits for the company.

Employee Advocacy and Employee Engagement

Employee Advocacy, which involves making company employees ambassadors to the external public on social media, lies at the intersection of internal and external communication. To relay their employer's messages on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or X (formerly Twitter), employee ambassadors need to receive the right information internally and have simple means to share it.

For the company, the effort is worthwhile, as social media content has 561% greater reach when shared by employees rather than by their employer. Additionally, involving employees in the organization's communication actions helps strengthen their sense of belonging and engagement at work.

Brand Image and Corporate Culture

Branding and employer brand are also at the intersection of internal and external communication. To convey a credible and reliable brand image, a company must build a brand identity aligned with its corporate culture. In other words, communication elements intended for the external audience must be consistent with the vision, mission, values, and history actually promoted internally.

This alignment between internal and external communication allows communication teams to convey a clear message. But that’s not all. It also strengthens employees’ sense of belonging, as they feel in sync with their employer's brand image; smoothens customer relations, as employees and customers share a common vision of the company and its services; and improves talent retention, as new hires join an organization that matches the image they had of it.

Internal and External Crisis Communication

Synergy between internal and external communication is also essential in crisis situations. To regain the trust of its customers, partners, and financiers, the company must deliver a coherent and credible message. To this end, it is important to properly inform employees in advance so they can present a united front. This internal communication effort, necessary for the effectiveness of external communication actions, also helps employees better understand, manage, and cope with the crisis situation.

Content Creation for Internal and External Communication Channels

Finally, having internal and external communication teams work together enables the creation of impactful content that can be used by both sides. External stakeholder communication campaigns can indeed promote internal successes. The objective: to highlight corporate culture and showcase employees and their expertise while playing on transparency and authenticity. Conversely, internal communication can, for example, relay satisfied customer messages internally to boost employee motivation.

To top it all off, the teams responsible for internal and external communication can share their content creation techniques, communication tools, or even certain communication supports, fostering collective intelligence and innovation, as well as achieving economies of scale.

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How to Align Internal and External Communication?

To create synergy between internal and external communication within your company, you need to implement a dedicated communication strategy, have the right tools in place, and avoid certain mistakes.

Strategy to Coordinate Internal and External Communication

Harmonizing an organization's internal and external communication is not always straightforward. For your internal and external communication teams to work together, deliver consistent messages, and achieve their respective goals more effectively, you should:

Define common goals for both internal and external communication. For example, these could include improving the employer brand, increasing employee engagement, or managing crises more effectively. Whatever the goals, they must be measurable. To assess your progress, establish performance indicators (KPIs) for each, such as the eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) to measure changes in employee engagement
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Identify and segment the target audiences for internal and external communication, along with their specific characteristics and needs. To help with this, consider using the "persona" technique. This involves creating a "profile" of the person you are addressing (age, position, expectations, barriers, content consumption habits, etc.). Once your target audience is defined, determine the key messages and communication channels suitable for each group while ensuring overall coherence.
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Create a unified communication plan that integrates and coordinates objectives, key messages, communication channels, editorial calendar, and the roles of those responsible for the internal and external communication strategies.
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Establish a collaborative process for the internal and external communication teams. Encourage information sharing through regular rituals and suitable solutions (e.g., Teams groups, SharePoint team sites, or a brand platform).
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Align communication channels for both internal and external communication. Adopt a common visual identity and editorial guidelines to unify your various communication materials (presentations, newsletters, social media posts, etc.) and create a cohesive overall communication.
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Develop an Employee Advocacy program. Train your employees on the key messages you want to share, the stakes of external communication, best practices for sharing company messages on their social networks, and the communication tools available to assist them.
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Measure and adjust your global communication strategy. Track your KPIs and analyze audience feedback to gauge the effectiveness of your communication actions and overall strategy. Based on the results and feedback received, adapt and improve your communication plan.

Tools to Harmonize Internal and External Communication

Digital tools can help you create collaborative processes and, thus, synergies between internal and external communication. Among the numerous solutions available, we suggest equipping yourself with:

A Brand Platform, which is a document or interface centralizing all the components of your brand identity (mission, vision, values, promise, positioning, key messages, editorial guidelines, visual identity, etc.). This tool provides both internal and external communication teams with a shared reference and toolbox to conduct consistent communication actions and create synergies.
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An intranet or Digital Workplace, a digital workspace that brings together collaborative tools, communication tools, and information that communication teams and employee ambassadors need to communicate effectively both internally and externally. For example, your Mozzaik365 Digital Workplace integrates a “Social Media Wall” that centralizes your company's LinkedIn posts, allowing your employees to engage and repost them effortlessly, directly from SharePoint.
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Common communication channels for both internal and external communication, such as LinkedIn, YouTube, or Podcast. These channels allow you to highlight internal projects to an external audience, thus promoting transparency and authenticity. Don’t hesitate to adopt a multichannel communication approach to tailor your actions to your various target audiences.

Mistakes to Avoid When Unifying Internal and External Communication

You now know how to create a harmonious and effective overall communication strategy. However, to create synergy between your internal and external communication, you must avoid making certain mistakes:

Communicating externally before communicating internally. To create a positive synergy between internal and external communication, always ensure that you communicate internally before addressing external audiences. This way, your communication teams and employee ambassadors can convey a consistent, credible, and reliable message.
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Promoting different visions internally and externally. To achieve your communication goals more effectively and with fewer resources, the values and messages conveyed by both your internal and external communication must be consistent. Otherwise, you risk losing the trust of your internal audiences, as well as your external audiences if the “truth” is revealed.
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Doubling the workload. Aligning internal and external communication does not mean doubling the work but rather optimizing each team’s efforts by sharing resources, ideas, and tools. By enabling different departments to share collaborative workspaces, business tools, and information, the Digital Workplace is the ideal solution to break down silos, help employees work more efficiently, and facilitate internal and external communication.

Internal and External Communication: Final Thoughts

Internal and external communications address different target audiences and pursue distinct objectives. Nevertheless, aligning these two approaches is essential to ensure effective and consistent overall communication.

To create synergy between your internal and external communication, implement a unified communication strategy and adopt tools that facilitate information sharing and collaborative work.

The Digital Workplace is the ideal solution to synchronize your internal and external communication teams and to transform your employees into true brand ambassadors on social networks. To learn more, click here.