Internal Comms Isn’t Just the Inside Version of Marketing

Most teams know how to craft external messages but struggle when communicating with their own people. This article explores the fundamental difference between internal and external communication, where teams go wrong and why structure matters more than polish especially in remote and hybrid environments.

At first glance, communication is communication. A message is crafted, sent, received but if you work inside a growing team, you already know it's not that simple.

Most companies spend far more time perfecting how they sound to the outside world than thinking about how they speak to each other. That imbalance shows up in quiet, damaging ways: onboarding that feels awkward, updates that land flat, newsletters no one reads and information that slips through the cracks.

The truth is, internal and external communication serve different goals, feel different to write and land very differently with their audiences. Recognising that gap is the first step to making internal communication feel intentional and useful, not just reactive.

External Comms: Persuasion, Perception, Performance

External communication is designed to impress. It speaks to customers, investors, partners and the media. Its role is to attract attention, shape perception and project confidence. There's often a layer of performance built into every sentence. Style, voice, timing — they all matter. Messages go through rounds of review, stakeholder feedback and brand alignment.

This is where you find your polished product launches, slick investor updates, LinkedIn campaigns and crisply worded social media posts. Done well, these comms do their job beautifully but the mindset behind them doesn’t always translate well when the audience is your team.

Internal Comms: Clarity, Trust and Everyday Function

Internal communication plays a different role entirely. It’s how a team stays aligned, how culture is reinforced and how decisions make their way from leadership to the rest of the company. It has to work in real time for people who are juggling meetings, projects and notifications.

That means clarity matters more than cleverness. Consistency builds trust and structure not style is what helps messages land.

The best internal comms don’t shout or sparkle. They feel calm, create rhythm and help people know what to expect and where to look. It might be a Slack message that sets the tone on a Monday morning, or an onboarding flow that makes a new hire feel welcomed rather than overwhelmed.

Where Things Go Wrong

A common mistake is to treat internal communication as either an afterthought or a mini marketing project. On one end, you get messages sent in a rush with no formatting or context. On the other hand, you get overly polished copy that feels out of place, like someone ran the update through a PR filter.

Neither approach works for long. If a message is too casual, people miss the point. If it's too polished, it risks sounding inauthentic. When every team or manager communicates in a different style, things become fragmented fast, important updates live in too many places and the tone shifts from channel to channel. People start to tune out.

That inconsistency doesn’t just affect clarity. It affects trust.

What Good Internal Comms Actually Look Like

When internal communication is working well, it feels almost invisible. People know where to find what they need. They trust what’s being shared. Messages are easy to skim and even easier to follow.

This doesn’t mean stripping away personality or turning every update into a bullet-point memo. It means building reusable formats for the things that happen often: onboarding, updates, recognitions, announcements. It means deciding how your team sounds and sticking to it across tools and teams. And it means being thoughtful about how communication flows not just what it says.

Why This Matters So Much in Remote and Hybrid Teams

When teams are spread across time zones or rarely in the same room, communication is everything. There’s no casual coffee catch-up to clear up confusion. No hallway alignment before a change rolls out. Every message becomes a stand-in for leadership, culture and decision-making.

In that context, vague or inconsistent communication isn’t just annoying — it’s exhausting. It drains trust, adds to the cognitive load and it slows teams down.

That’s why structure matters. Not to overengineer communication but to reduce unnecessary friction.

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How We Approach This at Studio Comms

We don’t polish slogans or sell brand stories. What we do is build clarity: through onboarding flows, tone and message guides, internal comms calendars, structured SharePoint layouts and well-designed message formats.

The goal isn’t to impress. It’s to land. To help teams feel aligned, supported and confident in how they share information.

So if your internal comms feel scattered, unclear or just plain hard to keep up with — it might not be a tone problem. It might be a structure problem and that’s something we can fix.