338. Roadshow++ ⛺️
5 unique ideas on how to communicate marketing strategy inside your company
Hi there 👋
Something on my mind this week is how marketing leadership can look very different from company to company, stage to stage, and season to season. For instance, a large portion of my time lately has been about interpersonal relationships with fellow executives. 😅 It’s a far cry from my being a player-coach on a scrappy five-person team a few years ago. What is life like for you these days? I’d love to hear from you.
This week’s newsletter content — really the past few weeks of content — is inspired by the theme of how to drive alignment and influence throughout the org. I hope you find it helpful.
Wishing you a great week,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
5 unique ways to get your company aligned with your marketing
When I presented at my first company all-hands at Oyster, I took a big risk.
I opened my talk with seven stanzas of custom poetry chock full of wordplay, bad jokes, and near rhymes.
What was I thinking?! Fortunately, Oyster is a group of very generous and patient people, and my presentation was well-received and, if nothing else, memorable. I took the risk so that I could make an impression for my marketing team about what we were capable of, and I chose an original medium so that the ideas I presented might have a better chance of sticking. I also kind of opened the floodgates for future weird things I would do at company presentations since. Case in point:
I photoshopped the CEO and SVP Sales into Top Gun: Maverick slides, complete with fake mustaches
I did a live fashion show with Zoom video filters like the pizza hat and the Deal With It sunglasses
I’ve quoted Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys in consecutive presentations
I convinced some teammates to join me for a dramatic table read of a scene from Mean Girls
All that to say, you might want to take the following ideas with a grain of salt. :)
There are a lot of different ways to win favor within the company and to advocate for your marketing strategies. The more time I spend in leadership, the more I realize that a significant portion of my time should be communication, advocacy, and relationship-building.
So here are a few of the unique ideas I use when it comes to building rapport and spreading a marketing strategy throughout the org.
1. Roadshows
When I have a new and noteworthy item from my marketing team — let’s say it’s a new brand strategy or a GTM evolution — I like to do a roadshow throughout the company so that I can share it directly with each team.
A roadshow, according to my definition, involves setting up time with individual teams like product, customer support, sales, finance, etc. to present your plans and open the floor for questions.
Typically this might mean grabbing 15 minutes during their weekly standups, but it can also be an one-off meeting just for your topic.
We do this practice quite often at Oyster on a macro and a micro scale. On the micro scale, individuals within the company will go on roadshows or “listening tours” where they meet 1:1 with people from different teams in order to build relationships or spread ideas. On the macro side, we hold roadshows and kickoffs whenever big new changes take place for our team.
2. Custom graphics, wallpapers, and social assets
You’ve heard of one-pagers?
How about one-sliders. :)
The ability to condense a big idea or strategy into a one-page Google Doc is a great exercise, and it’s even that much more clear and catchy to do so into a single Google Slide. It’s very much worth it. Not only is a single slide concise, it’s visual and memorable.
If you make it look good enough, you could pitch it as a new desktop background for people to use as wallpaper or a graphic to bookmark in Slack so they can easily find it and reference it.
We’ve done this in some small ways with the social media assets we create at Oyster for our internal team to use on their social profiles. When we rolled out our revised mission statement last year, we used the wording from that statement in the LinkedIn banners and Twitter cover photos that we created for the team.
3. A Substack
In addition to the substack you’re reading right now, I run another substack for the team at Oyster. It’s a fully private, fully internal-facing newsletter where I can communicate the latest and greatest from our marketing team.
What’s great about a a newsletter for internal comms is that it’s a familiar medium but an unfamiliar use case. We’re all used to receiving newsletters in our inbox, but rarely are they highly personal ones from our teammates.
My internal newsletters have covered everything from brand strategy and marketing goals to link roundups and personal stories.
4. Looms
We are big Loom fans at Oyster because so much of the work we do is asynchronous. With Looms, you can record yourself or your screen in an easy-to-share video that makes it easy to spread ideas throughout the organization.
I do a weekly Loom to tell my fellow executives about the progress we’re making on the marketing team.
Other teammates have done Looms to kick off new projects or recap a quarterly OKR strategy.
There’s really nothing a Loom can’t do!
What’s particularly great about Looms is that the viewers can leave emoji reactions and comments at specific timestamps of the video so that you know exactly what people are reacting to and how to help clarify.
5. Guest AMAs
To reinforce particular ideas, I will often turn to an outside expert for help. Bringing in guests to do AMAs with your team can be a surefire way to add credibility and fresh perspectives to initiatives that you’re working on with your marketing team.
For instance, PLG is important to us (it’s important to everyone, right?). So I’ve brought in a PLG expert to share their experience with creating a PLG motion and to answer any questions my team has.
I’ll even open up these AMAs to the whole company to attend if they’d like.
Over to you
What tactics have you found useful when you’re communicating ideas within your company? Do you have any go-to moves for getting your strategy to stick with your peers? I’d love to hear from you.
Misc.
Very cool framework for unlocking more produtivity
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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