You can also listen this blog post as a podcast episode.
The increasing demand for content that engages with your customers can give a headache to many marketers. Even successful marketers say they’d still publish more content if they could.
Of course, they do: they have the data to show that content marketing works.
However, there is limited time in a day, limited budgets, and a limited number of members in your marketing team.
Or how limited is your team…?
Perhaps it’s time to include more people from your organization in content production, and increase your content marketing efforts by even hundreds of new pieces of content every week.
Success: Everyone Creates Content
Our client, the largest realtor company in Finland, Kiinteistömaailma, equipped all of their real estate agents with Tumplate’s editing tool, and now they produce hundreds of pieces of content every week.
Before starting to use Tumplate, Kiinteistömaailma found it challenging to keep their brand intact between multiple digital marketing channels and hundreds of independent realtors. Producing enough marketing materials for all channels also took too much time and resources from sales.
Kiinteistömaailma wanted to make it easy for all agents to create content, allowing them to focus on their core business - selling real estate. Now, each posted video and photo has the distinctive Kiinteistömaailma branding, and it’s easy to spot who is selling the property.
If your company consists of tens of experts, an army of salespeople, or a group of very dedicated and vocal insurance agents, giving them the means to produce high-quality content could take a lot of content production pressure off your marketing team.
More importantly, your customers will thank you, when they feel each agent, salesperson or IT expert personally cares about them, and you will see this human-centric marketing approach as increasing revenue.
Benefits of Employee-Generated Content
People want authenticity, and to feel that they can trust the companies they are buying from, and individuals are more likely to trust a message from a person, than from a company.
Statistics show some of the benefits of employee-generated content:
- 76% of people surveyed by AdWeek say that they’re more likely to trust content shared by employees than content shared by companies.
- Organic posts published by employees are reshared up to 24 times more than posts done by brands.
- LinkedIn says that employee-shared content gets a 200% higher click-through rate than content posted on company LinkedIn pages.
- Employees get 8 times more engagement than content shared through branded channels.
These are just some of the benefits for the company from the marketing perspective.
In addition, there are plenty of other benefits, especially for human resources. The hiring process speeds up, hiring costs go down, people stay for longer, and much more.
Keeping your own team happy, healthy, and motivated is more crucial than ever, but so is attracting new talent. Employer branding and employer advocacy are essential trends in the post-pandemic world.
Gartner predicts that by 2023, 90% of B2B companies will include employee branding and employee advocacy as part of their social media marketing strategy.
And yet, some employees are against employer branding and they are not advocating for employer-generated content at first, because it can be seen as asking employees to utilize their personal social media accounts for the company's good.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the resistance is that many have done it wrong in the past, only asking to share marketing and communications team-approved company news on social media, or even worse, the communications team creating copy-paste messages that the entire company publishes on personal accounts, sometimes all even at the same time.
In contrast, organic employee-generated content benefits the employees too. Their personal brands grow, and they gain social media followers for their professional accounts. Being active on social media helps employees to stay in the know of the latest industry trends and peers, and it can help them to accelerate their careers.
How to Get Started
Employee branding is much more than trying to get your employees to share the corporate communications messages from your company's LinkedIn page.
It requires much more on the employer’s part to create the type of culture where employees want to create authentic original content.
Here are some of the first steps to take:
- You will need a social media strategy for your team.
- Your sales, marketing, and HR people should be included in creating the employee advocacy plan.
- Employee content should feel organic, not forced. It’s about connecting with people – not (just) about the sales pitch or perfect marketing text. Some social media training might be needed.
- Have your brand guidelines well documented, including tone of voice.
- Have your brand assets easily accessible, and educate how they can be used.
- Make creating and sharing content easy and fun.
Employee-Generated Branded Visual Content, Even Videos
Tumplate makes it easy for anyone in your organization to create original branded content in less than a minute - even videos - and then post them on their own social media channels.
We know the challenges you might have: if you are running marketing for a large chain, or with multiple independent dealers or locations, it can be a hassle trying to keep the branding consistent. You want to encourage creativity, but not at the expense of losing your consistent branding.
And if your brand assets are scattered and difficult to share with a large team, it can be risky to even think about advocating for employee-generated content.
At the same time, most likely you already have excited employees who would like to share content about their job or the company they work for, but they don’t know what they are allowed to say, or how to create content that follows the brand guidelines.
You do the planning and decide how you would like to approach the employee-generated content and leave the rest of it for us.
Tumplate lets you control the brand consistency even when you unleash an entire team of real estate agents, independent sales reps, or IT professionals to create high-quality on-brand content.
Your team members can create branded content on a custom editor platform, where all brand assets are already loaded in - logos in the right places, and correct fonts perfectly aligning each time. Or, we even have a simple way to create animated video content by entering a few variables into an easy form, without ever seeing an editing tool. Talk about empowerment!
When you are ready to harness the power of your entire team to create brand-specific, flexible, and dynamic marketing content across all channels, let’s talk, maybe Tumplate can help.
Resources: 38 Eye-Popping Employee Advocacy Statistics That Matter the Most
