0:02
Nina Zoukelman
Hi everyone and thank you for joining our webinar, Employee Advocacy for Financial Services. What are you missing out on? I'm Nina, the Content Marketing Manager here at Oktopost. And in case this is your first time joining us, Oktopost is a social media management and employee advocacy platform for B2B companies. Our platform enables marketers to manage and schedule social content, engage with audiences at scale and and measure the true ROI of social media. Now allow me to introduce my guest, finance marketing expert, Andrew Davis, Director of Digital Marketing and Creative Services at capco. It's a pleasure to have you with us, Andrew. Cool.
0:43
Andrew Davies
Thank you very much. First of all, obviously a big thank you to Oktopost for inviting me to take part in the webinar and also everyone who's joined us today. As Nina said, I actually head up capco's digital marketing creative services team and I've worked in some form of digital marketing and social media for around 10 years. I've got experience across both the public and private sector when I moved into financial services around five years ago. Just so you're all aware, just a super quick intro into capco. We are a global management consultancy dedicated to financial services, operating from 27 offices across the globe with 90 plus global clients. And this year we celebrated our 20th anniversary and our 5,000th employee.
1:22
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks Andrew, and congrats on Capco's 20th anniversary.
1:26
Andrew Davies
Thank you very much.
1:28
Nina Zoukelman
So before we get started, please note that this webinar is being recorded and will be sent to you within the next few days. If you have any questions, feel free to use the chat box on your right and we'll answer them during our final Q and A. So more and more financial services are looking to embrace employee advocacy, to humanize their corporate voice and amplify social reach. So how can they get started with advocacy despite the compliance hurdles along the way and maximize its potential? In today's webinar, we will why financial services should invest in employee Advocacy, how to overcome industry related barriers, and finally, six steps to jumpstart your employee advocacy program. So we all know that the 2008 crisis has led to a decline in audience trust in financial services. To counter this effect, many companies are turning to employee advocacy. But that's not the only reason why advocacy is a perfect fit for financial services. So let's start with our first, why invest in employee advocacy? So Andrew, what are the top reasons you decided to launch an advocacy program at capco?
2:46
Andrew Davies
You touched upon one of the key points straight away here, which is the financial crisis in 2008, which quite frankly really damaged the sort of reputation of FS organisations. In fact, many sort of faceless corporates. I think since 2008 there's been sort of further dips in negative press, which has only deepened the lack of trust. Now over sort of my years of working within various digital marketing roles, I really start to notice a decrease in the performance of brand accounts through social media. Engagement rates, which I imagine some of you will use as your sort of common metric for channel health, was certainly on the decline and so were link clicks into people's websites. Now, organisations from all sectors, as they sort of become more familiar with social media, there seems to have been a bit of a crossover between what people consider to be their personal and professional social media accounts. That's become a lot more blurred. I sort of noticed personally, especially during my time at kpmg, that when staff were sharing content through social media, it was actually resonating much, much further and generating many more engagements than what we were actually generating through corporate feed. So I think in terms of personalising the company image, that's definitely what's happened with sort of move into personal and professional social media accounts and employee advocacy programs. The second point on here, just around loyalty and rapport, is something that we kind of preach to employees at capco. For me, before the birth of social individuals and businesses, they only had a certain few touch points with clients or prospects. Social media has allowed us to move and engage and interact with audiences at any point at all. Given that social is quite a personal space as well, allows us to engage on a much more personal basis, so we don't always have to be engaging with people through social media and always going in for the hard sell. They might be posting things on Twitter, on LinkedIn, that are actually quite personal, so they might have been on skiing trips. I think that kind of information is business intelligence and really allows us to build a proper relationship with with our clients and also prospects. Now, talking about reaching new audiences, I think we sort of have to accept these days that people are just far more likely to engage with content when it's being shared by someone they know. In the very nature of social media, if you're engaging with that content, you are in effect sharing it with the audience. And as a brand, as someone who is sharing content and allowing our employees to share it through their own feeds, we're always going to be reaching new audiences through that way. Reinforcing brand and domain expertise is really key here. Now, I'm sure many FS organizations will have content strategies. And while these are very, very good at keeping your own corporate feeds fresh, I think the real value comes from the employee advocates sharing that content. So using tools such as Oktopost, which allows the advocates to edit the content before it's shared, really allows them to add their own context. This is where they can start making it relevant for their own audience. Now, in turn that is building both the brand and that individual's domain expertise, especially nfs. The final point on here, just around utilizing advocacy internal comms is something that just I've noticed over the last four years, especially in huge, huge organisations, organisations like kpmg, where they operate across so many different industries and sectors, quite easy for those teams to become siloed. Now if you can start getting people onto the advocacy programs and they're looking on, on the boards which have in Oktopost the contents that's being shared, they actually start getting educated fairly quickly around things that are happening in the business. So I think there's a double benefit here for external reach and also educating the internal audience.
6:14
Nina Zoukelman
Great insights. Thanks Andrew. Sorry. It's a known fact that social ad spending has been on the rise for B2B companies. But how ROI positive is it? Let's have a look at capco's case study which compared the ROI of social ads to that of advocacy. So Andrew, I'm going to let you take the wheel on this one.
6:37
Andrew Davies
Cool. For me, this is probably the real, real key selling point. Now a lot of people are talking about social media becoming a pay to play landscape. It's something which I strongly disagree with and I think this example speaks to that. So in 2017 we ran our first ever global recruitment campaign. As with the simple goal of just acquiring new talent into the business, when we looked at our KPI and the metrics, it was all around driving people from paid adverts, getting them through to the career section on the website and actually performing a career search. That's really key. Now to sort of test whether it was a pay to play landscape, we were sharing the exact same content that we were putting out through our paid ads. We actually put that into our employee advocacy program which allowed our individuals in the business to share that content. So as you can see on the left hand side, content and paid content went through LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. But it's actually the results which speak loudest. Now through our paid advertisements, we were converting clicks through to the website and then performing a career search at 3.93% which I always say is actually pretty high. If you were converting above 1 or 2% with Normie, so that's a good result. But the actual organic content that was going out through our advocacy programs was converting at 51.7%. The 50% of people who click the link from an advocate post were then performing a career search on the website. It's actually a 12.5 higher. Sorry, 12.5% higher engagement or conversion rate from organic to paid, which is absolutely incredible.
8:09
Nina Zoukelman
Wow, incredible results. Thanks, Andrew. So we're moving on to the next section of our webinar, how to overcome industry related barriers. Did you know that 64% of financial advisors avoid social media due to compliance concerns? That's a pretty high percentage. However, regulation shouldn't stop you from adopting social advocacy. Andrew, from your experience, what would you advise to marketers trying to tackle the compliance challenge?
8:41
Andrew Davies
Broken this section down into seven steps in total, but for me it's incredibly important to understand that first of all, social media is not an instant win. It's definitely a marathon over a sprint and good social media strategies actually take a lot of time to embed into your organisation. I think the other really important thing to mention just around compliance, is that there's kind of no silver bullet or rapid solution for this. It's all about building relationships. Now the first step may seem very obvious, but it's just establishing a dedicated social media team, ensuring that you have the resource so you've always got the always on approach. There's always someone who's able to respond, having a team that understands the language of the business but also understand what resonates out once the content's been published, and a team that really have the ear to the ground and an excellent sort of knowledge of the latest trends. We then start looking at sort of work processes. So for me it's sort of. It seems kind of unfair that you would expect a community manager or social media team to really understand all of the latest regulations compliance that comes out. So therefore you should really look to build deep relationships, brand risk compliance teams who can be really quick to sense check any potential or sort of brand damaging controversial content before it goes out. Nina and I have spoken about this on many occasions, but it's all about just making sure these teams are embedded in the process, speaking to them early and showing them the content calendars. The sooner you start to do that, the stronger this relationship will become, the more your social media can be educated and the more safe the business will feel about the content. Going out through social, conducting compliance training, also sort of leaving an open channel for questions is a key element. Vital to have a team that are highly visible, vital to have a team that are very approachable. Many people in FS organisations and this used to be a question I had all the time, is people just terrified. They always ask me what should I post to social media. So having that open channel of communication, a friendly forward facing team who will take questions at any time is key. We've all got Skype and WhatsApp and all these different various comms channels, so make sure you're always able to take the questions and answer them. We talk about preparing libraries of pre approved content. It's something that Oktopost is brilliant for. So developing that content calendar very early, putting it into the board with imagery. So the content that's going out, the recommended content is there, we know it's safe, we know it's approved, certainly makes people across the business feel a lot safer before they sort of enter into the social media world. Adopting technology supports that just things like Oktopost, you can build in workflows, you can build in approval workflows. If legal, brand risk or compliance needs to be part of that workflow, build them in early, get them involved from day one. So you're uploading content into the system as a social media team, really quick workplace so people can access, comment on it and send it back if needs be. The final step is just around defining an actual crisis management protocol. So really understanding what's going to happen if you start seeing negative comments, if you start getting negative attention. For years now, I've always followed what I call just a five step process which is looking at monitoring. So using social media listening tools or just having an ear to the ground and making sure you're taking note of the comments that are coming in. The review stage is all about those relationships that you've built with compliance risk teams. So when the negative comments there, take it to them, don't be afraid of it, take it to them, have the discussion with them as to whether you need to respond. By the time you come to a responding phase, you are working with your PR teams, your corporate affairs teams, making sure that you know exactly that it's safe to go out. Resume monitoring is all about waiting for that comment to come back. Often thought you can, you see a negative comment, you can respond. As an organization, sometimes it can add fuel to the fire. So it's always good to constantly resume monitoring, have heightened alert. Another recommendation around this would be if you've got content calendars that may be two, three, four, maybe even six months in advance, go back and review those content calendars. You don't want to be publishing something immediately after a bit of a crisis that may spark the negative conversation again before you finally just go into restoring normal activities with a bit of heightened awareness.
12:53
Nina Zoukelman
Great. Thanks Andrew. That's a really actionable guide. So let's move on to our final section Kickstarting your employee advocacy program how do I get started with advocacy? Is one of the most frequent questions we get from marketers. So in this section we'll share with you a six step guide to jump starting your employee advocacy program as well as best practices for managing it. So the first step would be establishing your goals. Defining what you want to achieve will allow you to identify your tactics and measure your success. Once your objectives are clear to you, you will need to align them with the right measurement metrics. Here are a few if growing brand awareness and engagement on social media is your goal, then social reach, impressions and clicks are the factors you need to be measuring. If it's more qualified leads you're after, then conversions and MQLs are your go to metrics. With sales increase as your goal, you need to be looking at SQLs and new business. Another common goal for marketers is recruitment. As Andrew mentioned previously, in this case a career search rate and applications are your measurement metrics. The second step is defining a content strategy. So Andrew, what's the most important tip you can offer marketers looking to do that?
14:15
Andrew Davies
This is probably going to sound quite blunt, but sort of conversation or a question that I always ask back to marketers and in fact anyone across the businesses, would you engage with this content if you saw it on your own social media feeds? And it's amazing how many people actually come back and admit they wouldn't engage. So we're very lucky at capco to have to have people and people looking after our content strategy when it comes to actually sharing that content. We take an approach called the three E's which is all around educate, enlighten and entertain. So you can see from the diagram in the middle there. We always start off with an objective and know how to measure it. And even if the case is just to get eyeballs on content and people want shares and retweets, at least understand the objective and then know how to measure. Now next, when we talk about the three E's, you don't have to do all three. We just want people to actually understand that the post should either educate, enlighten and entertain. I think the first two obviously working within fs, they're much easier to do entertain is obviously quite hard through fs quite a serious topic, but it's definitely good to try and tick off one of those three boxes. I think the second part when we talk around aligning employee preferences. As I mentioned earlier on, you are able to edit the content or the context of the post when it's shared through Oktopost. So it's always good just to make sure your employees know that should be making it relevant for their own audiences. Great.
15:30
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks Andrew. And I would Also add the 411 rule for every product related article you share, share a curated 1 and 4 thought leadership pieces. Make sure you're not only tooting your own horn on social media, you're talking about your company and your products. Another tip would be to segment content by topics and that's going back to your previous point on aligning with employee preferences. An HR manager and a web developer will have different social followings and might want to share content on different topics. By segmenting your content by topics, you will make it easier for them to discover the content that's most compelling for them and their networks. So the third step is choosing initial advocates. Start with the social enthusiasts, those who already have an active presence in social media. Most chances are these employees are already sharing your content and the advocacy program will give them a boost and make it easier for them to share. Usually social enthusiasts would be employees in customer facing roles, marketing, sales, customer success support. They probably have a well developed social network and feel comfortable delivering the company message. So Andrew, who else would you onboard when starting an advocacy program?
16:52
Andrew Davies
I think the really key ones C suite execs. So the senior leadership within organisations doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that the new joiners and everyone across the firm is always really keen to impress the leadership. So to have the leadership engaged in this advocacy program and sharing content and appearing active on social media is a really key part of getting buy in.
17:13
Nina Zoukelman
Great. Thanks Andrew. I think really when it comes to advocacy for following by example is key. So let's see the next three steps of our plan. Step number four is demonstrating the value of advocacy to employees. Let's put it on the table. Employees are your most valuable partner when it comes to advocacy, not to C levels. Without their buy in your advocacy program will simply fail to ensure their support and participation. Emphasize the benefits of advocacy for them. Firstly, advocacy has the potential to turn employees into thought leaders, expanding their professional networks. Eventually, the accumulative effect of advocacy means significant career growth for employees. In fact, almost 86% of employee advocates cite the increased social presence as having a positive impact on their career. The next step is launching a pilot program. First off, provide employees with social media training and advocacy best practices. We all know that the unknown can be daunting. If you don't take the time to explain to employees how social media and advocacy worked, they might not want to take part in the program. Secondly, establish compliance policies. Some social media management platforms such as Oktopost, include ban word features using which you can ensure that employees stay away from unwanted messages. In addition, you can use the training sessions to educate employees on several compliance rules such as safeguarding the password to their profiles or no sharing of confidential information, etc. Encourage employees to give feedback on their experience with the program. You can also conduct knowledge sharing sessions where different advocates will reveal which content and posting practices work best for them. And finally, track the performance of your pilot program. This will allow you to gauge the participation rate as well as engagement with your content on social media. Leveraging those insights, you will be able to optimize your program and tweak it to your company's needs. We all know how hard it can be to get the management to sign off on a new initiative, especially when it's a marketing initiative. So once you've measured the results of Advocacy improved its roi, use this data to gain the executive's buy in. You can generate reports that track back to the goals you set when you launched the pilot program and show the management how those goals were reached. Advocacy is not a one off exercise. Once you've launched your program, it will require careful management and tweaking. So Andrew, in your experience, what are some of the principles that have guided you throughout your advocacy program?
20:02
Andrew Davies
You touched upon a few of these points really nicely just then actually. So I think it's really important. You've got to incentivise and encourage employee engagement. There's obviously many, many ways to do this. You have some organisations which are probably handing out iPads as soon as they get people sharing content, but I think one of the best ways to do it is just through gamification. There are many leaderboards, there's so many analytics that we can look at, especially with an Oktopost. So start sharing some of those leaderboards around your organization. Let people know when they've been performing highly and also challenge the ones who may not be fully embracing the tools. Holding social media training, as you say, isn't one time this stuff needs to be done over and over again. I used to run training sessions and I've noticed the same three or four people attending numerous times before they start to feel comfortable. So always offer the training, do it on a regular basis and also just make sure that the open channel of communication is really clear. Offer that reassurance to them at all times. The employee feedback is just a key element. There may be insights that they can share with you around what they believe is valuable to the programme, what they think is missing. So seek that employee feedback and certainly optimise your programme around it. The final one, and you touched on this as well, is probably the most vital step is measuring and optimise. Create the feedback loop to the business, as we discussed above, especially with your advocate, so you can actually see their return. Also, don't hide away from the mistakes. Sometimes I think it's actually fairly good to discuss the mistakes openly. Obviously you would not repeat them, but you should always be looking at mistakes, look at your achievements and optimize from there.
21:36
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Andrew. I think that don't hide from your mistakes is really key here. So now to our listeners, we'd like to hear about your challenges. We've been getting a lot of great questions, so we're going to try and address some of them them. So our first question is how do you optimize an advocacy program? Andrew, would you like to take this one?
22:02
Andrew Davies
Sure, yeah. I think optimization is probably the last point I touched on is all around looking at the data, really breaking that data down. Look at every single post that's gone out and put them into segments and look at what performs well and what doesn't perform well. Look at what imagery's been news, look at the format of the imagery. Is it just the title of an article? Is it the title of an event? Is there something more that you can put in there? Really get that data and go through it in an incredible amount of detail and just feed that back into the business. It's not until you sort of do these exports, all these big sort of Excel exports of all the posts that you've shared over the year, that you can actually do that breakdown and start understanding what works and what doesn't. And some of the results are actually quite surprising when you think there's a post that you think will absolutely kill it on social media and generate all the clicks. It might not do so. It might actually just generate a few likes or comments. So it's really interesting. Just do that and do a proper breakdown and dedicate time to it. Don't just have a look at the front face of data, really go into it. Great.
23:03
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Andrew. So Another question we got was what Is exactly the 411 rule? So the 411 rule is all about not tooting your own horn on social media. It's the easiest thing to only share content about your products, your employees, your company, your brand. But the thing is, your followers would get bored with it very quickly. They're looking for value. What they're looking for in social media and when they're going on your brand's profiles, is value. So first of all, put an emphasis on thought leadership pieces. Talk about the industry, talk about its trends, developments, news, product launches, talk about the latest news in your industry, in your sector. The 411 rule means that for every product related article which, which is about you, your company, you need to share four thought leadership pieces that aren't about you. If you have an editorial calendar, you can really plan it out that way so that the ratio between product related articles and thought leadership, industry related articles, is a 411 and the other article you can share is curated content. It can be news, it can be an article from the BBC or Wired, whichever your industry is, just have this balance on social media. So another question is, could you give an example of work processes you advise marketers to develop with the legal team? Should they expect to approve every single post I share? So Andrew, what's your take on this?
24:55
Andrew Davies
For me, this is all around just establishing the relationships and doing that early. I think the second you walk in the door, you should be speaking to these teams, letting them know who you are and letting them know where to go should they have any questions in terms of the processes or tools. If you will, just have the regular meetings, look at the workflows within the platforms that you may be using. If there's a workflow there where legal can be involved and not just legal, it might be risk, it might be brand. Build them into that workflow, give them the reassurance early on that they can see this content. Believe me, they're probably busy enough anyway. They don't want to be digging into the social media world all the time. So build them into the workflows early, build them into an approval process, hold regular meetings with them, have open communications, and just reduce that risk factor for them. And doing that early will make a huge impact in the success of the program. Great.
25:44
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Andrew. So another question is, is there a difference between the content the C level should be sharing and content other employees should be sharing? So I would say that the short answer is no, there isn't. Employees can share content about strategic acquisitions quarterly Earnings just as much as executives can. The only difference can be in the message they share with these articles. Executives might decide to add a more high level strategic angle to certain articles, while employees might share a more generic message in the same way if it's an article about a new hire for the HR department, so the HR managers would get more personal about it, while executives will share a general message welcoming this new head of HR to the company. Generally speaking, encourage employees to personalize their messages and adapt them to the content they're sharing and this will create a diversity of voices. The same article can have a different take from different employees and this will create the engagement you're looking for on social media. So another question is can advocacy assist social selling and if so, how? Andrew, would you like to take this one?
27:04
Andrew Davies
Yeah, sure. It definitely, definitely assists with social selling. I think social media totally changed the landscape now around selling. As I say, it's around not going in with the hard sale every single time. And people still do to me on LinkedIn all the time. They'll just send me a message out of absolutely nowhere trying to sell me a product or trying to arrange a meeting. I just don't think it's the way the game's played anymore. Encourage your employees to be online. Encourage them to get involved in conversation. Let them know that this era of social media stalking, especially from a business point of view, is over. If you're looking at someone's profile that actually shows interest and then start sharing thought leadership content, start getting in the minds of these people early on. Don't approach them with hard sell. Have normal conversations, have personal conversations and build a relationship. And for me that's what social selling is all about now, just having these genuine relationships.
28:00
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks Andrew. I really agree with what you're saying about having genuine relationships and advocacy facilitating that. So our last question is would you advise employee advocacy for small businesses with less than 150 employees? So I would say definitely. Advocacy is as much of a fit to a small company as it is to a larger company. You just need to. It's mostly trial and error. Basically you need to do your pilot program. You need to pick your employees, you need to see how is their engagement with the program. You need to understand the engagement rate of their audiences which with their content on social media and see how you move forward. You can start with a group of 10 employees, then expand it to a group of 50 employees. There is no reason why all 150 employees shouldn't be engaged with the program. I think that one of the best things about advocacy is it's not a one size fits all. It's really adjustable. You can just make it work for you if you just tweak some of its attributes. So that's all the time we have for questions, unfortunately. And thank you to all the marketers who tuned in, and we hope you enjoyed our webinar. A big thank you to Andrew from CAPCO for co hosting this webinar with me. If you have any questions, or if you'd like to hear more about Oktopost or capco, if you didn't have the time to ask the questions you wanted to ask us, please feel free to contact us. We hope to see you next time.
