Internal comms is marketing you haven’t measured yet — every leadership memo, all-hands deck, and Slack announcement is a first draft of the story that eventually reaches customers, investors, and candidates.
Every company I audit has a marketing budget, a content calendar, and at least one person whose job is to get the external story right. Almost none of them have anyone doing that same job for the internal one. That asymmetry is the actual gap — not a missing campaign, a missing measurement.
The leadership memo that goes out at 4pm on a Friday. The all-hands deck nobody rehearsed. The Slack announcement written in eleven minutes between two other meetings. None of it gets the scrutiny a landing page gets before it ships. And all of it is doing the same job a landing page does — setting the story that eventually walks out the door in an exit interview, a Glassdoor review, or a candidate’s answer to “why did you leave your last company.”
Why does internal communication affect external brand perception?
Every employee is a broadcaster, whether a company measures it or not. They repeat what leadership actually said — not what the deck was supposed to convey — to their partner over dinner, to a candidate they’re referring, to a recruiter who calls out of the blue, to an investor at a portfolio dinner. A confusing layoff announcement doesn’t stay inside the building. It becomes the Glassdoor review. A leadership memo that reads as evasive doesn’t stay in the inbox. It becomes the reason a top performer takes the recruiter’s call.
Meanwhile, the external brand a company spends real budget building is being quietly rewritten in real time by whatever the internal story actually is. You can run the sharpest external campaign in the category and still lose the narrative war inside your own building — and once that happens, the leak reaches the market faster than the campaign does.
I saw this play out with a client who spent a full quarter and a real budget on an employer-brand campaign — polished careers page, a founder video, testimonials from happy hires. Applications actually dropped. The reason had nothing to do with the campaign: an internal restructuring memo had gone out three weeks earlier, written in HR-legal hedge language that read as evasive, and the team’s own group chats filled in what leadership hadn’t said. Candidates doing back-channel reference checks — which almost all serious candidates now do — heard the group-chat version, not the careers-page version. The external campaign never had a chance against an internal story it wasn’t aware it was competing with.
The story a company is telling the market and the story it’s telling its own people are the same story. One of them just has a bigger budget.
How do you measure internal comms the way you measure marketing?
Once you accept that internal comms is a channel, the metrics translate almost one-to-one from the ones already sitting in a marketing dashboard:
| External marketing metric | Internal comms equivalent |
|---|---|
| Open rate | All-hands attendance and re-watch rate |
| Click-through rate | Manager cascade rate — how much of the message actually gets relayed to their team |
| Brand sentiment / NPS | Pulse survey sentiment taken immediately after a major announcement |
| Content calendar | A documented comms cadence — not everything landing reactively, the week something breaks |
| A/B testing on messaging | Comparing recall when the same announcement is delivered by two different managers |
None of this requires new software. It requires deciding that a memo deserves the same post-mortem a campaign gets — did it land, who actually absorbed it, and what got lost between the deck and the desk.
Where should a company start measuring internal comms?
Start with an audit, not a new policy. Pull the last 90 days of internal communications — memos, all-hands decks, Slack announcements — and map them against three things: cadence, channel, and cascade. Is there an actual rhythm, or does everything happen reactively the week something breaks? Does the format match the message, or is a sensitive announcement getting the same treatment as a scheduling reminder? And how much of what leadership actually says survives the trip from leadership to manager to individual contributor?
That third one is almost always where the real leak is. This is the exact terrain the Internal Comms Redesign engagement works in — meeting rhythms, memo structure, announcement cadence, manager-to-IC translation. The behavioral layer nobody is measuring, fixed before it becomes next quarter’s Glassdoor problem.
Lia Sarduy is the founder of The PR Plug, a Miami-based AI-native communications consultancy where the same behavioral-science lens applied to external brand gets pointed inward first — because the story employees are already telling is the story about to go public. Get the next essay by joining the list, or book a call if your last all-hands got a lower turnout than your last webinar.
Frequently asked questions
Why does internal communication affect external brand perception?
Every employee is a broadcaster whether a company measures it or not. What leadership says in a memo, how a layoff gets announced, or how confusing an all-hands is becomes the material employees repeat in exit interviews, Glassdoor reviews, investor updates, and casual conversations with candidates and clients. The external brand a company spends a marketing budget building is being quietly rewritten, in real time, by whatever the internal story actually is.
How do you measure internal comms the way you measure marketing?
Apply the same rigor used on external campaigns to internal ones: track all-hands attendance and re-watch rate the way you’d track open rate, measure how much of a leadership message survives being relayed by a manager to their team the way you’d measure click-through, and run a pulse survey after major announcements the way you’d check brand sentiment after a campaign. The metrics translate almost one-to-one once internal comms is treated like a channel instead of an afterthought.
Where should a company start measuring internal comms?
Start with an audit of the last 90 days of internal communications — memos, all-hands decks, Slack announcements — and map them against three things: cadence (is there an actual rhythm, or does everything happen reactively), channel (does the format match the message), and cascade (how much of it survives translation from leadership to manager to individual contributor). That audit alone usually surfaces the one leak losing the most trust.