You hit the send button on the big internal announcement. After weeks of work, iteration and polish, it’s finally live. But too often, once it’s in your audience’s hands, nothing happens. That’s because communicators need to look at internal announcements as the beginning of comms campaigns rather than the end.
Meghann Klein, senior director of internal communications for the revenue and technology group at Marriott International, told Ragan that by mapping out the story of the announcement and breaking it into parts, communicators can create campaigns that drive the message home for employees over time.
“Once you have that macro ‘hero’ story and you make your big announcement, the magic is in the reinforcement,” Klein said. “That happens when you break the story into its chapters and explain those pieces to the people who need them.”
Here’s how you can turn your single internal announcement into a series of interconnected stories. For more insights, join
1. Determine the relevance before the channels
One of Klein’s ongoing comms pursuits at Marriott is spinning a leadership comms campaign out of a single kickoff video.
“The biggest building block for any major announcement is how you segment your audiences,” Klein said, “And that’s not about channels yet. It’s about understanding how the message is going to resonate with different groups, even if the ‘customers’ are your own employees.”
At Marriott, that segmentation breaks down into three core groups:
- Associates working on Marriott properties
- Franchise owners and operators
- Corporate employees
“You can think through your message and break it down into its value proposition components,” she said. “So if I’m a marketing employee in Europe who works in a regional office, why would I need to know this message? Why would it resonate for me? That’s the level you have to get to.”
2. Create the “what this means for me” moments for your distinct audiences
Klein builds follow-ups around how employees actually work and not how communicators may want to deliver the message.
“You’re really working backwards from not just who they are, but what their employee experience is every day,” Klein said. “If you can’t explain to them why they should pay attention to this big headline or macro announcement, then of course they’re not going to stop what they’re doing to engage with it.”
With thousands of frontline workers across its properties, Klein emphasized the importance of creating messaging that lines up with each employee’s lived reality. If a Marriott employee is serving guests on a property, they’re probably not going to sit down to read a follow-up message from a leadership announcement. That’s why packaging matters so much.
Klein outlined three general tactics for message framing off of an initial announcement based on Marriott’s audience groups:
- Frontline employees: Quick-hitting messages with takeaways tied to their work
- Franchisees: Guidance on how to reinforce themes with their teams
- Corporate employees and franchisees: Context and strategy behind the announcement and follow-ups
“You’re either simplifying the message or pulling on the threads of what this means for someone based on their function and what their day looks like,” she said.
3. Build out the branches of your campaign
Once the message is defined, Klein’s team expands it into multiple versions that can be deployed over time. What starts as a single leadership video becomes a set of audience-specific follow-ups, with each tied to a different value proposition and use case. She said that following the initial video announcement, there will then be three follow-up videos for Marriott’s audiences and customized follow-ups that can branch down even farther.
“It’s being told almost like a Rubik’s Cube,” she said. “Depending on how you pick it up or which version you see, you get a slightly different story every time, but it’s all coming from the same place. That gives us a lot more flexibility in how we pull it through and use it at different moments.”
Rather than a one-time rollout, the campaign evolves.
“That approach lets you extend the life of the story,” she said. “You’re not just launching something. You’re creating multiple ways for people to experience it over time.”
Turning one announcement into a campaign only works if every branch still connects to the same core message. Otherwise, you’re adding content that risks becoming noise for your audiences.
“Knowing where those boundaries are really helps your flow, your focus and how you segment the campaign,” Klein said. “Otherwise, you end up with a lot of content, but not something that actually connects back to a larger story.”
Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.
