By Michael Foster

It may sound like a wild idea, but marketing to your own employees can be a win-win for everyone.

For large companies with thousands of employees, it’s easy to overlook the reality that there is a solid potential customer base literally under your nose. If your firm provides a much-needed or high-quality product or service, wouldn’t you want your employees to enjoy it?

Yet it’s amazing how many companies don’t make an effort to bring their products to their own employees and make their lives better. I’m speaking from experience on this. Once, I worked for a financial services company that offered retirement benefits from another company. Why this firm didn’t provide its own financial products to its own employees was a mystery that I’m still unpacking to this day.

And this is the reality that First Data Corp. has seen firsthand all too often. First Data has learned the power of bringing marketing in-house—really in-house, by promoting products to a firm’s own employees.

That’s exactly what First Data did with a large U.S. retailer, which had a debit card and mobile payroll product that employees could take advantage of, if they only knew of the advantages of that product. First Data developed a multichannel content marketing campaign to target its client’s employees, boosting buy-in and producing a happier retail experience for the company’s workers.

But the benefits to this marketing approach don’t just end at customer acquisition. Unlike traditional marketing, marketing to your employees has an added benefit of educating employees on the company’s products so employees can themselves become better evangelists to anyone else in the market for those same products.

In other words, there’s a multiplying effect to marketing to your employees. Think of it as word-of-mouth marketing on steroids.

Welcome to the world of B2B2E: business to business to employee marketing. It’s a revolutionary approach to marketing that can be used to improve employee morale, make employees more engaged in the company, and drive employee engagement and retention.

Learn how marketing and employee training are converging, and how you can make employees happier by harnessing the power of multichannel marketing and targeted advertising—to your own employees. That’s the topic that Euphemia Erikson, vice president and head of product marketing at First Data, and Mike Neumeier, principal at Arketi Group, will discuss at this year’s LeadsCon Connect to Convert in Boston. On Friday, Oct. 5, they will lead the discussion in a session titled “B2B2E in Action: One Marketing Team’s Journey to Engage, Educate & Enrich Employees,” going in depth on how B2E marketing made a tremendous impact for First Data’s client.

To learn more on what’s driving today’s customer acquisition, performance marketing, and sales, join us at LeadsCon’s Connect to Convert this October in Boston. Register today.