Episode Summary
When people think of brand advocates, they often think of external people, like social media influencers. And years ago, in large companies, there were people whose primary role was to build awareness for the company.
But some of your best brand advocates today can be your employees. They know your company inside out and can provide a unique voice to your brand.
According to Michael Roberts, Head of Demand Generation at CloudApp, employee advocacy has many benefits for the company as well as for the employees themselves.
In this episode of Rep Your Brand, Michael gets into the benefits of employee advocacy and how to get people involved in this program. Michael and our host Nick Bennett discuss the employee advocacy program at CloudApp, its results, and how companies could turbocharge their program.
Guest Profile
- Name: Michael Roberts
- What he does: Michael is the head of demand generation at CloudApp.
- Company: CloudApp
- Noteworthy: Michael shares marketing principles that will bring common sense into your email marketing, so you don't have to rely on hacks; simplify your marketing funnel and hence, cut out the ambiguity; let the market drive your marketing strategy and not the tech stack; get the most out of the tech stack that you have; operationalize content distribution; and build better relationships with your ICP.
Key Insights
- What is employee advocacy? Employee advocacy is the promotion of an organization by its staff members, and businesses may ask employees to promote the organization actively, often through social media, as an element of their job. Michael notes that this brings many benefits to companies, and the benefit they primarily hope for is revenue. "Employee advocacy starts with enabling your people to talk about the things that they want to talk about, and it all comes down to the motivation of who they are as people. And I think understanding where they're at in their work and career is fundamental. That's the base you have to figure out before you start going into tactics and plans and measurement and all that other stuff."
- How can you involve people in the employee advocacy program? Some companies may have started an employee advocacy program but they can strengthen it by, for example, getting more employees to use LinkedIn. But, as Michael says, if you want to get people involved in this, you have to understand what they want. "If I can figure out what people want, that helps on the motivation front. On the other side, there are the barriers, and what I found by talking with a lot of the employees was that there was a large number that didn't care about being active on LinkedIn, but there was about 30% of the company, here at CloudApp, that was interested in it. And as we had initial conversations on what it meant to get involved, their biggest barrier was that they just needed some sort of pressure or push to get started. They just didn't know how, and the lack of experience just kept them from acting. And so, we became an enabling agent to remove those barriers as much as we could to help them succeed."
- How to successfully create content? You can create different types of content — blog posts, emails, social media content, e-books, video content, etc. And many marketers want to start creating content but don't know where to start. Michael advises that you just start posting, no matter what. "If this is something you wanna tackle, the first thing you have to set up is the habit — just like a basic system of being committed to it. That's what I would've said four months ago. If you don't know what to write, I would say, 'Rather than posting, just comment.' If you are to start today, start by engaging with other people's content; I think that builds the muscle. And so a simple framework would be like, 'Okay, 10 minutes before I start my workday, I'll get on LinkedIn. I'll just go through the first five posts on my feed; I'm gonna leave a thoughtful comment of some kind — just to start flexing that writing muscle.' And then, odds are that, within a week or two, you'll actually get to a point where you'll be like, 'Hey, that comment actually gave me an idea for something I could post.'"
Episode Highlights
The Employee Advocacy Program at CloudApp
“My first measure of success was to get them active, which we defined as three posts per week for a month. And I felt like if we could get them to do that for a month, then the likelihood that they would stay active after that, at some level, would be a lot higher. So I maintained the long-term incentive as something that I talked about all the time, but there was also a short-term monetary incentive. It was very easy, and I wanted it to be eye-catching. So we offered people $200, and it was tiered. So the base, the mid-expectation tier of what we wanted to do, was, ‘If you did this for a month, three posts a week’ — and we weren’t guardians of the content either; we just said, ‘All you have to do is post three times a week; you’ll get $150 from us. If you do it five times a week, you’ll get $200.’
I worked on the positioning of the program too. And I actually didn’t get pushback from leadership on this, but the core value prop of this program that I put at the top was, ‘Never apply for another job,’ and I think there was something about that messaging that was like, ‘Holy crap! They’re actually doing this for me and not just the company.'”
The Success of Monetary Incentives
“We had our 30-day window where we were tracking directly to that monetary incentive on whether people were lining up to hit that $200. So within the 30 days, it was pretty obvious that people had to hit a post count. And that was it. It was a very clear measure. And then after 30 days, our measurement was like, ‘How well do people stay involved?’ So if you were to look at LinkedIn (and we just focused on LinkedIn; we didn’t include any other platforms; we didn’t try and pressure beyond that, it was just that single one) of the group that was involved, post average across the group, and content view average, we were averaging between one and three posts a day. I was essentially the most active person on LinkedIn. Everybody else was very sparse. So one to three a day over the course of a week. And as we got the program rolling, we got 12 opt-ins from employees, and so our average posts went from one to three a day to eight to 10. And towards the end of the program, when everybody was in, we were in that 10 to 15 range. Now, post impressions — you’re looking at from a post perspective, that’s like a 500% increase. But from the views, since people were just starting out, it wasn’t like a 500% view increase. It was probably something like 200% to 250%. But what I found really interesting was after that 30-day period.”
The Future of the Employee Advocacy Program
“There’s a maintenance aspect in the sense of an unknown for us that we’re trying to figure out — how much effort for the impact that we’re driving. I think the initial effort of how much we had to put in for the impact we pulled out was actually phenomenal.
Because even though it was like this formalized program, it was pretty intuitive. It didn’t take too much to put together. As folks drop off, and we’re trying to keep them motivated to stay, we’re trying to figure out how to manage that efficiently. And then I think the other thing that we are still figuring out is that now that we’ve got a couple of folks — probably like three — that are extremely active, what does it look like to help them create content that will stick to what they want to talk about? Because I never wanna take that away because as soon as I become a guardian of it, I think that’ll pull the joy out of it. [I would rather they] create in ways that will lead to conversations that help the company.”
