In this webcast, you’ll learn:
- How employee sharing can enhance your marketing goals
- How to launch your own employee advocacy program
- Real life best practices and success stories from DLA Piper and LinkedIn
Live Webinar: How to Increase Your Content Reach and Engagement Through Employee Advocacy
1. How to Increase Your Content
Reach and Engagement
Through
Employee Advocacy
Maximize Your Content Marketing Impact
by Empowering Employees to Share
Tuesday, September 13, 2016
11:00am PT | 2:00pm ET
LinkedIn
Elevate
2. 2
Today's speakers
Katie Levinson
Product Marketing Manager,
LinkedIn
Daryl Drabinsky
Senior Digital Communications
Manager, DLA Piper
Alex Rynne
Associate Content Marketing
Manager, LinkedIn
3. 3
How employee advocacy maximizes your marketing goals
How to launch your own program
Best practices from DLA Piper and LinkedIn
How LinkedIn Elevate can help you succeed
Q&A
Agenda
4. 4
We’ve been seeing more and more
companies and brands becoming
interested in having authentic
conversations. But the biggest change
we’ve seen is the thirst for the how.
“
Mark Burgess
President and Founder, Blue Focus Marketing
and author of The Social Employee
5. 5
What’s employee advocacy?
Empowering your employees to share content
with their own social networks
Employees build thought leadership and their
professional reputations
Companies extend their reach and engagement, and
connect more authentically with their audiences
6. 6
90% of brands are already pursuing or have
plans to pursue employee advocacy
Early pilots, testing 38
%
Leadership support for broad-based employee advocacy 26
%
Employee advocacy is strategic, with strategic impact 16
%
Trained employees in just a few departments 11
%
No plans 7%
Employees not allowed to advocate 3%
“What best represents the state of employee advocacy at your company?”
7. 7
Companies with a formal program grow
faster
than those without one
Firms with formal
employee advocacy
programs grow faster
Other firms
> 20% revenue growth
8. 8
Employee advocacy extends your reach
Your employees have
10x more connections
than your company
has followers
9. 9
Employee advocacy drives higher CTR
Employees drive 2x higher
click-through rates compared
to company shares of
the same content
10. 10
Employee advocacy increases engagement
While on average only 3% of employees share
company-related content, they drive a 30%
increase in the engagement with that company
content
Employee
engagement
Total engagement
Like, click, comment, re-share
12. 12
Set your program goals and content strategy
STEP 1
PROGRAM GOALS
Reach and engage
more of your target
audience
Increase brand
awareness and
followers
Drive leads
for sales
CONTENT STRATEGY
company-related
25%75%
non-company related
13. Select employees to participate
13
Look at current
content to
understand which
audiences it will
resonate with
Find your
current social
champions
STEP 2
14. 14
Educate
employees: What’s
in it for them
Employees can build their
professional reputations and
visibility by sharing smart content
How to get them involved
Share key stats: Employees
who share regularly grow their
networks 4x faster and get 6x
more profile views
Hold “Social Media 101”
sessions
Help them build a strong
LinkedIn profile
STEP 3
15. 15
Tips to rock your
LinkedIn profile
Upload a professional photo.
Profiles with photos receive a 40% higher InMail
response rate.
Write a descriptive headline.
After the photo, the headline is the first thing
people look at in a profile.
Include a summary and experience.
Employees should tell their story from the
perspective of someone trying to determine
whether or not they want to do business with the
company or respond to an InMail.
Personalize the LinkedIn web address.
By creating a URL that closely matches their
name, employees will be more easily found in
search
engine results.
Share updates prospects or customers
will find insightful, useful, or
provocative.
In addition to providing links to the articles,
employees should comment on what they share
without being too self-promotional.
1
2
3
4
5
17. 17
Keep employees engaged
Regularly suggest content
Recognize top sharers
Refine content strategy
Enable employees to share on the go
STEP 5
18. 18
Measure your results
What you should be measuring:
Traffic to your website, blog and other owned channels
Traffic sources through UTM codes
With the right tool, you can also measure:
Increase in company followers
Number of impressions
Engagement rate with your content
STEP 6
21. 21
Get employees on board with a structured
and strategic rollout plan
Select employees/departments
to roll out to in pilot program
Formal onboarding process
explaining how product works
Continual education as to
why sharing matters
Continual reinforcement in
internal communications
22. 22
Be collaborative with other departments
While the program may start with marketing, other functions will
become interested and can help you get more people on board.
23. 23
Create a cultural shift
Get employees comfortable with social media by:
Helping them understand what employee
advocacy is and how sharing content
represents them as professionals
Getting people to participate and share,
at their own baseline level
Showing them the impact on their
professional reputations such as profile
views
Highlighting the impact on their company
25. Measure your results
Employees are
sharing 6x more
frequently
Employees are
growing their networks
8x faster than before
more Company
Page views
than before
more Company
Page followers
than before
27
27. Certain types of content perform
better than others
Credible 3rd party
content on current trends
Links directly to landing
pages with form fills
Blog posts
28. 28
Don’t make it all about you: The 4-1-1 rule
3rd party/curated
Owned/company-related
Promotional (i.e., lead gen)
For every 6 pieces of content you share with employees:
30. 30
t tt
Why Breaking the Rules
is Good for Business
The George Costanza
Approach to Content
Marketing
240,555
Reach
2,145
Total engagements
653,302
Reach
1,672
Total engagements
230,226
Reach
1,665
Total engagements
The Sophisticated
Marketer's Podcast: B2B
Marketing and Sales
Trends with Justin Gray
and Craig Rosenberg
32. 32
LinkedIn Elevate makes it easy for you to
distribute content to employees and to measure
your results
How Elevate works
Curate
Share
Measure
33. 33
Customers using Elevate are seeing great
results
Employees share 5x more than
before, resulting in:
more Company Page views
more Company Page followers
average engagement rate
34. 34
How to get started with employee advocacy
1 Start with the basics
2 Emphasize the value to employees
3 Make it easy by regularly suggesting content
4 Recognize and reward participation
Hi everyone, thank you all for joining our employee advocacy webinar. My name is Katie Levinson, and I’m a product marketing manager on LinkedIn’s employee advocacy platform, Elevate.
I’m excited to be here today to talk you about how empowering your employees to share content can meaningfully increase the reach and engagement you see with your content.
With me today I also have Daryl Drabinsky, Sr Digital Comms manager at DLA Piper, who has been running her own employee advocacy program for the company for the past year. She’ll be walking you through some of her personal best practices of what it takes to have a successful EA program.
We also have Alex Rynne, Assoc Content Marketing Manager here at LinkedIn. As part of her role, she manages the development and distribution of content, and she’ll be giving you her tips on how to engage employees with your content.
We’ve got about an hour and a lot of great material to cover
First, we’ll take a look at what employee advocacy is and some key trends
Then we’ll talk about how employee advocacy maximizes your marketing goals
Next, we’ll go through 6 simple steps to launching your own program
Then as I mentioned we have Daryl and Alex here today to share best practices
And finally we’ll give you a glimpse of a new product, Elevate, that helps companies do this successfully. We’ll leave about 10 minutes or so at the end to answer any questions
Wanted to start off with a quote from Mark Burgess, who is a leading expert on social employees. Having authentic conversations with customers and prospects is nothing new - but HOW companies are going about doing so is what’s new. And that how is employee advocacy.
Employee advocacy is quite simple: it’s all about tapping into the vast and highly relevant networks of your employees by making it easy for employees to share content with their social networks
Your employees’ networks are huge -- and full of the prospects and customers you are trying to influence
Even in today’s social media saavy society, not everyone is comfortable sharing
What an employee advocacy program does it make it super easy/turnkey
Employee advocacy has dual benefits
For employees, it positions them as thought leaders and builds their professional reputations
Companies are able to expand the reach and engagement with their content by tapping into their employees’ networks
And not only that, the content lands in a more authentic way, since it’s coming from a trusted source in an audience’s network - someone they are personally connected to
The secret of empowering employees to share content is out - an Altimeter survey from the first quarter of 2016 found that about 90% of brands are already pursuing or are have plans to pursue a formal employee advocacy program
And there are many reasons why that’s so
1st, companies with formal programs are twice as likely to be high growth firms - meaning greater than 20% revenue growth year over year - than those who don’t have a formal program in place
Part of that 20% revenue growth stems from the fact that employee advocacy naturally extends the reach of your content - and thus awareness for your company, brand and products
On average, employees have about 10x the connections than a company has followers
And these connections have personal, trusted relationships with your employees who are sharing content
Which brings us to engagement - your audience is generally more interested in reading what their friends and colleagues have to say more than they’re interested in what your brand has to say
Our LinkedIn data has found that employees drive double the click-through-rate with content they share versus that exact same content when it’s shared by a company
This makes intuitive sense -- you're much more likely to click on something your friend or colleague posts than something a company posts
We know from our analysis of the LI network that only about 3% of employees share company-related content today
That can be because it’s difficult for them to find relevant company content to share, or because they just don’t know what is and isn’t okay to post to their networks
Whatever the reasons, there are huge benefits to activating more employees on social media
Those 3% of employees drive a 30% increase in engagement with that company content
Just imagine the impact of getting 6% or 9% of employees sharing - you could see a 90% lift in engagement!
So, now that we’ve covered off on the main benefits of employee advocacy, let’s switch gears and talk about how you can start a program of your own
As with any program, the first thing you’ll want to do is set your goals and strategy
As marketers, there are many different things we want to achieve with our content. And there’s no wrong goal to set
You may want to simply just reach more people at a higher engagement rate than you have before
Or you may want to put a specific number behind acquiring followers
And for the B2B marketers, your primary goal could be to drive more leads for sales
Whatever your goals might be, set them at the outset so you can track the success of your program
Once your goals are set, it’s time to think about your content strategy
Content is probably the most important aspect of employee advocacy to get right
Without interesting content, your employees are not going to engage - and thus you miss opportunities to then engage with their networks
So, while it may be tempting to put in all company-related content, it’s important to have a healthy mix of industry and thought leadership content to keep employees engaged
We recommend no more than 25% of content that you share with employees be company-related
You can source non-company related content through 3rd party publishers. We’ve found that sites like HBR.org, Forbes and LinkedIn perform well just as a few examples
Next, you’ll need to decide who to invite to your program
While it would be great to start with everyone, sometimes it’s best to start with a subset of employees
A selection criteria that we have seen work well with our customers are to find employees who are already fairly active on social
These social employees can then become ambassadors for your program
Another way to select employees is to have a look at your current content mix and think about which of your employees it will resonate with most
Is it mostly engineering related? Sales related? About diversity?
Understanding how your content may resonate with different groups of people will help set you up for success
One final dimension to consider is your ultimate target audience, and think through which employees look most like them. Are you trying to reach IT professionals with your message? Well it’s likely that the IT professionals at your company are connected with a lot of other IT professionals (from school and past roles) so consider starting with them.
Like I mentioned in the beginning, only 3% of employees currently share company-related content -- although many employees are generally active on social media
If you’re looking to change employee behavior and convince them to share company-relevant content, it’s important to start with what it means for them
We recommend having a formal education program in place designed to show employees how they can build their professional reputation by sharing smart content
Step one is building a strong LinkedIn profile. Many employees may not even have this basic step, so it’s important to start here and emphasise the importance of having a strong digital presence.
Step two is helping employees understand that they can be known as a thought leader and build their professional reputation and visibility by sharing smart content.
Not surprisingly, employees who do this will see more engagement from their networks.
We’ve found that employees who share regularly grow their networks 4x faster and get 6x more profile views than those who don’t
For salespeople specifically, sharing quality content translates to success. Salespeople who share content regularly are 45% more likely to crush their quota
There are many reasons why sharing content can benefit employees -- both long term and in their current day to day careers -- so make sure you let them know why sharing matters for them
We’ve distilled the top 5 most important aspects of having a strong LinkedIn profile. When your employees have strong profiles, you help set them up for success in building their professional reputations.
Run through the 5 tips
So, you’ve set your goals and content strategy, and selected and education employees. It’s time to launch your program!
During launch, make sure your senior leadership is involved and invested in the program
This lends credibility in the eyes of employees, and makes them more likely to be active participants if a senior leader wants them involved, and is setting a good example by sharing him/herself
Beyond exec support, it’s important to have a robust communications plan, with reminders, to maximize your impact
Use whatever existing communication channels you have - email, intranet, internal collaboration tools, and even flyers around the building
If you can only do a couple of these, We’ve found that regular emails and a large presence on intranet homepages tend to get good results
Employee advocacy is not a set it and forget it type of program
You have to continually be engaging employees to get the most out of it
Here are some ways to ensure that your employees keep sharing regularly:
1st - make sure they have something to share! You need to be giving them fresh new content at least weekly so they stay engaged
Recognition goes a long way. See who your most active sharers are, and highlight them in an email or newsletter
Content is king - without the right content, your employees won’t share. So, regularly look at what is, and isn’t, resonating with your employees. Provide more articles that are similar to what they’re already sharing
Today’s employees are pretty mobile, and not always working at their desks. Make it easy to share on the go by providing a way for employees to share via their phones
And last but certainly not least, you’ll want to measure your results.
Using UTM codes, you can track things like traffic to your website, blog and other owned channels, and get a sense for which specific content is driving what traffic
If you’re interested in going even deeper with your measurement to see how your employee sharing is impacting business-level metrics, there are solutions like LinkedIn Elevate that can help you do this.
And now I’d like to hand it over to Daryl, who will take you through some of her learnings on employee advocacy at DLA Piper
Intro: Name, Role, little background on DLA Piper
Motivations to get started with employee advocacy initially
Had had success at previous company and knew the results it could drive
Content-driven culture at DLA.
Know that content shared by individuals is more trusted and engaging than content shared by a company
sales -- lawyers -- how traditional marketing doesn't work and that it's a very relationship driven sale, the network matters, etc
Also wanted way to track metrics, so looked for a formal solution that would allow us to do so
Employee advocacy/Elevate would allow us to track usage/share rates of employees, engagements, and the impact on our brand through increased followers
Lastly, always looking for creative new ways to communicate and stay cutting edge
Knew this would make us stand out in the legal world
Put in place a comprehensive rollout plan
Education was the most important component
Every time a new employee comes on board we take them through an education program
Daryl - are you comfortable giving some detail around this?
We started out with a smaller pilot program
Had fantastic results and made it easy to make the case to expand more broadly within the organization
VO:
Saw a lot of success with Elevate, so other departments wanted to get involved
Other departments such as those focused on diversity, HR, BD teams have a pulse on what’s going on within the organization in other ways than marketing does
Helps with content creation and curation, and gives us more variety to share with employees.
We also train those other departments so they get the most out of the platform
As part of our education plan, we focused on getting employees comfortable with social media
Understand what employee advocacy is and why building their reputations is important
Actually showing them the impact of their sharing
Through Elevate - increased profile views and connection growth
Had employees who never shared before, but because it was so easy to do and then they saw their results they loved it and continued to share
Also shared how this was impacting DLA
One of the biggest success stories was LMA Award we received for our employee advocacy program - and couldn’t have done it without our engaged employees
One reason we chose LinkedIn Elevate because it allows you to see demographic data.
Let’s us know which industries/audiences are engaging most with our content
Allows us to refine what we share to try to hit more of our target audience
Have seen a lot of success with employee advocacy
Employees sharing 6x more
Easy to use
Reputation metrics make it addictive
Daryl - any anecdotes/quotes from employees?
Daryl - any anecdotal data on new business this has helped to attract? Other successes you want to highlight?
Katie VO: Thanks Daryl, for sharing your experience with us. That was very insightful. Now I’ll hand it over to Alex for content tips and tricks
Introduction, role at LinkedIn, how long have been involved with EA/Elevate (i..e what makes you an expert on content)
Content we’ve seen perform well at LinkedIn are blog posts, 3rd party content on current trends
Lead gen content has also performed well
Alex - can you provide some color as to what you do to make this engaging?
As mentioned before, don’t want all your content to be about your company
We follow the 4-1-1 rule
For every 6 pieces of content, 4 should be 3rd party/curated, 1 should be owned/company content, and 1 should be promotional (lead gen)
As a content marketing engine, we have best practices for catching the attention of employees and motivating them to share.
Rules for a high-quality broadcast image:
• Look for crisp, clear imagery with brighter colors and unexpected visuals.
• Avoid using stock images or too many headshots.
Rules for a compelling headline:
• Keep the headline short - under 60 characters. Start with a question or quote to hook the reader and use"You" to speak to your audience
• Successful posts provide clear value and are oriented towards helping professionals be more productive and successful through:
• Advice• Education• Interesting Facts• Make it attention-grabbing.
Use tracking codes to understand traffic and understand content performance
Alex: some insights around these posts and why they performed so well
Now turn it back over to Katie for some information on LinkedIn’s employee advocacy solution
Does alex have any anecdotes on how Elevate has increased traffic to blog, webinars, leads etc? That would be amazing
Thanks, Alex. We’ve touched on LinkedIn Elevate throughout the presentation. I want to provide just a little color to what it does to simplify advocacy and drive results for organizations.
What Elevate does is allow you to easily curate content that you then broadcast to your employees through the platform
Employees can then share to LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook
Then, both you as a company and your employees can see the impact of the shares
Such as engagements, reach, profile views
On average, we find that employees who have Elevate share 5x more than they did before. And in many cases, we’re teaching people to share regularly who didn’t know how to before. In fact, 50% of our users shared nothing in the 90 days prior to using Elevate.
Our customers are seeing great results because Elevate is designed to do a few things very well:
Drive employee activation and engagement -- we help companies start with the right employees and make this something employees want to do regularly
Maximize content engagement with data-driven recommendations -- Elevate uses the power and data of the LinkedIn network to help make companies more successful
Deliver full funnel business impact and audience performance -- Again our access to the LinkedIn network allows us to help companies see very granular data around their performance and impact
Before we open it up for questions want to leave you with a few pieces of advice for getting started successfully:
Start with the basics. Most employees are not social professionals. It’s important to start with why social matters and the value of having a professional brand.
Critically important to emphasize why sharing content benefits an employee. IF you want to expand beyond your passionate advocates it’s important to explain how this helps them build their reputation and grow their network
Third is to make it easy. Most employees aren’t social media professionals and thus don’t have the time to find quality content on a regular basis. To the extent that you can make this turnkey for them, do
Finally — recognize and reward participation. Highlighting stories of employees who are doing this well and seeing benefits as well as getting executives to recognize and celebrate this type of behavior is key. Employees have a lot competition for their attention so making sure to reinforce the benefits to them and to their organization is important.