Content Marketing Today

Why Content Marketing is Vital Inside Your Business

Conditioned Air shows how internal content marketing enables internal communications that bind, motivate, and strengthen its team.

You can learn an awful lot about a company during your first few minutes inside their office. Is everything spic and span? Do you get a warm welcome? Do you see energized, friendly staffers. Do you get offers of help?

If the answer to these kinds of questions is an unequivocal Yes, you have just met a company that understands the vital role of internal communications. In fact, it’s probably a company that believes at the gut level that the company is a team with every member playing a vital role in its success.

I think Naples-based Conditioned Air is one such company. It also turns out that they understand the importance of content marketing inside the business.

On a recent visit, company CEO, Theo Etzel, and I were discussing content marketing when the subject of internal communications arose. He showed me the most recent edition of their company newsletter. After reading it, I can say that this company walks the walk on internal communications.

The company puts a top priority on communicating effectively, consistently, and pervasively inside the company. Although Conditioned Air is relatively small with 120 employees, they manage to publish a professional quarterly company newsletter that reinforces their deeply felt mission:

The mission of Conditioned Air is to provide products and services, in an honorable way, that exceed the expectations of each and every one of our clients within an industry whose reputation is tarnished with mistrust and deceit.

The 8 page newsletter is in full color on glossy stock. Theo and his team write candidly about the company’s triumphs and challenges. They celebrate success, encourage ongoing training, profile employees, speak to safety, elaborate on the vital importance of living up to the mission–and also have a little fun.

Clearly, this newsletter takes a fair amount of time to produce. This is especially noteworthy in a company where nobody sits around with nothing better to do than write an internal newsletter.  It seems a genuine labor of love.

Theo opens the Q1 2009 edition with this quote, “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.”  He then goes on to talk about the successes of 2008 and the good news in early 2009, without minimizing potential challenges. He offers sincere compliments to the happy, positive team-driven atmosphere that pervades the company and extends to customer interactions.

He also writes a weekly one page missive called “On a Positive Note.”

Once again, the tone is both positive and sincere without being over the top Pollyanna-ish. His most recent note stressed the importance of staying true to core company standards and his confidence that all the hard work by team members would ensure a successful future.

Communicate Well Internally and You Win. Fail to Do So and You Lose.

I’m sure many companies of similar size in the same industry are cursed by a failure to communicate with their people and suffer from a high level of staff cynicism and disinterest.

That might be OK for a short while in boom times when customers will tolerate less than the best. But, it sure won’t work in our current recession.  I’m guessing that companies like Conditioned Air will blow right by them, emerging stronger than ever when we recover.

Theo and his team share a bond made stronger by consistent internal content marketing in which the truth is told, team members are saluted, and positive thoughts shared.

Conditioned Air has been doing effective internal content marketing since way before any one had heard of the term. 

It works well for them. It will work for your company, too.