Internal marketing is HR's most underrated skill

Somewhere right now, an HR team is celebrating a benefits rollout that nobody will remember in three weeks.

I've spent years building platforms focused on employee experience. And the pattern I keep running into is maddeningly consistent: companies design genuinely good benefits packages, then essentially whisper them into the void and wonder why nobody shows up. 

I'm talking about our clients — companies ranging from fast-growing scaleups to established enterprises, across industries, across geographies. Not outliers. The pattern is that consistent.

A company invests serious budget into mental health support, flexible spending accounts, learning stipends or fertility benefits. They roll it out. They send one email. And then… silence. Utilization sits at 12%. Leadership wonders if employees "even care." The program gets quietly defunded next budget cycle.

The benefits didn't fail. The marketing did. HR teams are not trained to think like marketers, but they need to.

Here's what a marketer would do that HR almost never does: segment the audience. Not all employees are the same. A 24-year-old engineer in Peoria has different benefit priorities than a 42-year-old parent in a remote office. A marketer would build personas. They would ask: who needs to hear about the childcare benefit most urgently, and what message will land for them? HR sends a company-wide blast and calls it communication.

Timing matters just as much. A financial wellness benefit announced in November, buried between holiday party logistics and year-end reviews, will be ignored. A mental health resource pushed out on a random Tuesday with no context will be skimmed. Marketers know that message recall is tied to context and relevance. HR knows how to use a company intranet.

And then there's the message itself. Benefits communication is written in benefits language – dense, compliance-flavored, defensive. "Employees are eligible for up to X amount per calendar year subject to the following conditions." Nobody reads that. Nobody acts on it. Marketers write for human beings in actual pain: "Feeling overwhelmed? Here's how to talk to someone today — it's free, it's confidential and it takes three minutes to set up."

This is not a small problem.

The numbers tell you everything you need to know. A Jellyvision study found that 80% of employees don't fully understand their benefits – not partially, not vaguely — don't understand them. And SHRM research shows that organizations with highly effective benefits of communication are nearly three times more likely to report high employee satisfaction than those with poor communication. Three times. For the same benefits budget. That's not a marginal gain being left on the table — that's the entire game.

This publication has reported consistently on the gap between what employers offer and employees actually understand or use. The research is unambiguous: communication gaps are one of the primary drivers of low benefits engagement. Employees don't feel valued not because the benefits aren't there, but because no one ever made them feel like the benefits were for them.

That's a marketing failure. And it falls squarely in HR's lap.

This is precisely the gap our clients come to us trying to close — often starting with our pulse surveys just to diagnose whether employees even knew a benefit existed, then using our feed to actually reach them: targeted, timed, relevant. Technology isn't the hard part. Accepting that communication is a discipline, not an afterthought, is.

The irony is painful. Companies spend enormous resources on employer branding to attract talent from outside the organization, then do almost nothing to market their culture and benefits to the people already inside it. The employees they most want to retain are the ones most likely to be recruited away — and they're also the ones most likely to notice when their employer doesn't seem to know how to talk to them.

Benefits are a promise. Communication is how your clients keep it.

If their utilization numbers are low before you help them redesign the program, then look at how people were told about it. The answer is usually not a better benefit. It's a better message sent to the right person at the right moment.

That's not an HR problem. It's a marketing problem. And it's time HR owned it with your assistance.