ACI Worldwide Boosts Brand Awareness with Employee Advocacy

Founded in 1975, ACI Worldwide powers electronic payments for more than 5,100 organizations around the world. More than 1,000 of the largest financial institutions and intermediaries as well as thousands of leading merchants globally rely on ACI to execute $14 trillion each day in payments and securities.

Challenges

Over recent years, ACI Worldwide has grown through both organic growth and acquisition of new solution capabilities. The increasingly globalized nature of the business and diverse offerings called for extensive marketing efforts, focused on educating existing clients and potential buyers.

As ACI embarked on this initiative, it encountered the first challenge: how to drive brand awareness and establish industry leadership with limited marketing and PR resources in certain regions. For ACI, it was also important to grow brand awareness globally in a way that connected to the heart of ACI's mission, value, and culture.

Like many financial service companies, the second challenge for ACI was ensuring social media compliance. Coming from a highly regulated industry, ACI has very clear dos and don'ts around the content it shares across all social channels.

Solutions

For ACI to truly reach its audience and connect with them on a personal level, it needed to adopt a new internal voice.

Our employees were a perfect choice for communicating our brand's story. Not only do they live and breathe our brand, they also carry the credibility and expertise that resonates with our target audience.

As the first step in positioning employees as brand ambassadors, Christopher conducted extensive training, covering everything from social selling techniques to building a top-notch social profile.

Next, ACI turned to Oktopost for its simple, scalable, and unified employee advocacy platform. To hit the ground running, Christopher initially focused on onboarding customer-facing employees and key members of the senior leadership team who were well-connected on social media and could demonstrate positive ROI from the get-go.

Ensuring Social Compliance

With Oktopost, ACI could implement a fully-compliant employee advocacy program. Every single piece of content is carefully created, curated, and vetted by the program administrator before it gets pushed out to employees, ensuring that advocates amplify the company's reach without concerns about potential regulatory pitfalls.

Thanks to Oktopost, employee advocates can also embrace a more relaxed attitude towards social engagement, knowing that every post, image, and hashtag shared with their ecosystem has been thoughtfully curated and pre-approved.

Showcasing Company-wide Expertise

Despite ACI's growth across multiple industry segments and global markets, Oktopost's employee advocacy platform offers a way for employees to deliver authentic, seamless, and consistent messaging to drive greater brand recognition.

Using Oktopost's Advocacy Board, ACI can establish a clear content strategy by categorizing its social posts with 'topic tags'. This prompts effortless content discovery by employees, who can simply filter, discover, and share the most relevant content with their audiences in a matter of seconds.

Content Relevancy = Employee Engagement

For ACI, content relevancy and employee engagement go hand-in-hand. When employees are equipped with information that they care about, they're not only more eager to share it, they also become a force multiplier for driving brand awareness.

Chris' approach to enhancing content relevancy is twofold: collecting employee feedback through roundtables, and using Oktopost's analytics to optimize the content strategy.

Our roundtables offer an open forum for employees to suggest new content ideas, while the analytics give us a deeper insight into the content performance itself - i.e. which messaging drive the most engagement and which networks work best for employees.

Results

Following its continued expansion across different regions, new segments and verticals, ACI Worldwide wanted to drive brand awareness through employee advocacy. With Oktopost, employees have become an extension of ACI's marketing team, helping to bring its solutions and capabilities to hundreds of new faces around the world, as well as positioning themselves as subject matter experts.

Employees' accumulative effort generated impressive results across the funnel, including a 35% increase in audience reach, 130% increase in website traffic from social media, and 40% more leads who converted directly from employee-shared content.