0:00
Sapir Segal
Okay. Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for the webinar Unlock the Power of employee advocacy. Two secret ingredients that will increase your reach by 800%. Co hosted by Oktopost and Sixter. My name is Sapiyeh Siegel. I am the Content Marketing Manager at Oktopost, which is the only B2B social media management platform. And I will now introduce Colby Coy. Hi, Colby.
0:29
Kolby Coy
Hi, everyone. As Speer mentioned, my name is Colby and I'm a customer success manager at Sigster. If you haven't heard of us, Sigster actually unlocks employee email as an owned marketing channel by providing simple centralized control over employee email signatures.
0:46
Sapir Segal
So just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions throughout the webinar, feel free to submit them via the questions panel on the right hand side of your screen. You can also use the Twitter hashtag EmployeeeadVocacyWalk 101 to share any of your thoughts and questions, and we will be sure to take the time and answer them during the final Q and A session. I'd also like to take this opportunity to just quickly run through today's agenda. Colby and I will be discussing the ins and outs of employee advocacy, including what exactly is employee advocacy, how to leverage employee advocacy through two very powerful channels, and of course, how to track and measure employee contribution and results. And just a reminder, we are recording this webinar, so we'll send you the link afterwards that you can keep to watch later or share with your colleagues. But I hope that you guys enjoy what we have to say. And now let's turn over to Colby to start us off.
1:44
Kolby Coy
Yeah, thanks for the introduction, Sapir. It's great to be joining you all today. Employee advocacy is a huge focus at Sigster and Oktopost, so I'm really excited to be contributing to the conversation. Before we jump into the actual application of employee advocacy, I think it's important to understand the terms meeting. So, to put it simply, employee advocacy focuses on empowering your employees to share company content through their own personal channels. When you think about it, in this day and age, customers and prospects experience information overload. They are bombarded by hundreds of marketing messages almost everywhere they turn. And as B2B marketers, this reality makes it incredibly challenging for us to capture our readers attention, let alone get them to listen to our message and act upon it. So to ensure our messages get heard, we turn to our employees. What many companies don't realize is that employees are a very influential marketing asset. Imagine for a moment the Same piece of content being shared by a company like IBM versus an IBM employee who just happens to be a friend or a contact of yours. Undoubtedly you'll trust your friend more than the company as a whole. That's because people tend to trust recommendations from people they know. Not to mention, employees are typically more connected than your company. And each one of those connections serves as a potential lead for your marketing team. Besides being trustworthy and highly connected, your employees voice is perceived to be more authentic. Therefore it's heard much louder than a message shared by your company. The bottom line is that employees have the power to engage with thousands of connections that your marketing team alone couldn't reach. You may be thinking though, why in the world would employees want to participate in yet another program? How could I actually encourage them to share all of this company content? Well, Sapira and I are going to discuss two really effective ways to easily get your team on board with content sharing.
3:44
Sapir Segal
Thank you for that great introduction, Colby. So the first ingredient to create a very successful employee advocacy program is of course social media. And if you think about it, employees who already enjoy their role, who feel good about where their company is heading, will voluntarily talk about it across their social networks. And you have probably done so yourself. A study by Weber and Shenrich shows that that 50% of your workforce is already actively posting, tweeting and commenting something positive about your company. So all you need to do as a marketer is leverage this percentage and double it. And to do so, your social advocacy program must include content that employees will want to share. For example, eBooks, customer case studies, blog posts, videos and webinars just like this one are all types of B2B content the marketers create and advocates can share. But it's also important that this content is up to date. It's engaging that it's also relevant and that to employees role in the company and their type of audience. And of course it should be valuable, meaning that it offers incredibly useful or important information about your company or product. Now if your content ticks these four boxes, then it's very likely that not only will employees want to share it, but also their audience will engage and find it interesting. So that's just kind of like touching upon the type of content to provide your employees. What about the sharing process itself? So to motivate employees and empower them to share your content, it's incredibly important that you make it extremely easy and fast for them. And with the Oktopost social advocacy app, advocates are able to share content on the go with minimal effort. So Literally wherever they go, they just open the app, they see fresh content and hit share. Now this combination of amazing content and a simplified sharing process leads to message amplification and increased engagement. And these are actually the two main benefits that your company can gain from implementing social advocacy. So your content could reach 5,561% further and drive eight times more engagement when shared by employees versus your corporate social profiles. But besides how your company could benefit, a lot of people usually wonder what's in it for their employees. So at Oktopost, we usually acknowledge that social advocacy is a two way street, that sharing quality content turns employees into thought leaders. And what that means essentially is that over time, as they share lots of great content, they progressively develop a trustworthy reputation and are looked up to as an influencer in the industry. And perhaps it is because of thought leadership why 86% of employees believe that social media had a positive impact on their career. And I can say from personal experience of being an advocate for Oktopost has really shaped my personal brand and also expanded my professional network. And interestingly, millennials like myself are more likely to view social advocacy as an opportunity to enhance their careers. But to help you envision what a program could potentially look like at your company, we're just going to take a look at a real life use case. And Fujitsu is a great example. They're a global enterprise that currently has hundreds of active advocates using the Oktopost tool. And in the image, you can see two very similar messages promoting the same piece of content. The only difference here is that one is posted by the company's official Twitter and the other one is posted by a Fujitsu employee. And as Colby mentioned earlier, a recommendation coming from an employee on social media speaks much louder and is a lot more trusted than a company's message. It is also perceived to be more authentic, it's a lot more credible, it's a lot. And it amplifies and reaches a much wider audience. So that's kind of why social media is such a powerful channel for employee advocacy. However, it is not the only way to go about it. And Colby will now discuss another simple yet powerful channel. So, over to you.
8:03
Kolby Coy
Yeah, thanks, Napir. I did notice that a few people have just joined us. So to get you up to speed, we're now diving into kind of the second ingredient when we think of employee advocacy. So when referencing employee advocacy, I'm sure the first thing that comes to mind is probably social sharing. That's kind of what you think of what you might not have considered As a device for employee advocacy is employee email signatures. Employee email is the number one touch point your company has with key customers, prospects, partners. In fact, the average employee sends around 10,000 emails annually. So if you're a company with 100 employees, that means you're sending around 1 million emails every year. And roughly 28% of your employees work week is spent on work related emails. I mean those numbers are huge. So Sixer can unlock this own channel for employee advocacy by providing simple centralized control over your company's email signatures. So how does it all work? Email signature marketing gives marketers the ability to append a clickable call to action banner to every email sent. So if you look closely at the image in front of you, you can actually see an example of my personal Sigster signature and campaign. Ironically, we use Sigster campaigns to promote the very webinar you guys are listening to right now. So Sigster is really unique in the fact that it's an own channel that's utilized by individual employees during one to one interactions. Most company controlled content is promoted from a single source and then the audience consumes that content at a single location. Sigster, on the other hand, provides the opportunity to promote content during thousands of those individual email interactions. Therefore, every single employee is a brand advocate and promoter of the company's most important marketing initiatives. As Sapir mentioned earlier, you have to make sure that whatever you're trying to get your employees to do is simple and effortless. Otherwise, you know, they might not act upon it. So unfortunately, asking employees to update their email signatures manually is really time consuming and unpredictable. With Sigster, however, all signature content is controlled by the marketing team. So that means that with zero input, your employees promote your company's latest and greatest marketing content in every outbound email. Just to put some numbers out there. On average, signature promoted content gets viewed 2.5 times more, meaning its reach expands by 250% with the help of employee advocates. So to drive this point home, let's just check out an example from Customer Canvas. Canvas used a campaign to promote an upcoming feature and functionality webinar. The campaign resulted in a 43% increase in registrations which converted to 8 upsell opportunities. So bottom line, the email signature is a really great way to communicate with and engage with your target audience. And speaking of target audience, if you're going to ask employees to share marketing content via their email signature, shouldn't that content be relevant to their email recipients? I mean, it just makes sense. So in our opinion, content shared Via Employee Advocates should be just as personalized as any other marketing communication. That's why Sigster gives you the ability to create and leverage employee groups. So employee groups actually allow you to utilize different signature campaigns within your various subsets of employees. Through the application, you can dictate the specific content to be served by your marketing team, your sales team, hr, and so on. So that means that whatever six year campaign a group promotes is really relevant to their audience of email recipients. On the other side of the equation, what's in it for the employees? I'm going to piggyback off of what Sapir said earlier, and note that email signature marketing works in the same way as social media marketing. By sharing that quality content through their email signatures, employees become thought leaders. They're seen as knowledgeable, helpful, and that kind of makes the email signature truly beneficial for both sides of the party. All right, so say you've implemented a couple of employee advocacy initiatives. Maybe Oxbows and Sigster. What's next? As you all probably know, testing is the secret sauce for any marketing program. And employee advocacy is really no different. It's important to track views, clicks, click through rates, and conversion in relation to your employee shared content.
12:38
Sapir Segal
Great. So with all of these metrics in hand, including clicks, engagement and conversions, you can understand the true value of employee advocacy as part of your entire marketing ecosystem. And what that gives you is the ability to compare employee advocacy as a marketing channel to the rest of your marketing initiatives. So let's take a look at this example. You can compare the number of conversions generated from posts that advocates shared to the number of conversions generated from your company's social posts.
13:11
Kolby Coy
Yeah, that's right. And honestly, the same thing can be done with email signature marketing. You can compare the performance of Sigster to other marketing channels like your website, social channels, display ads, and even pay per click. And if you take that approach, you really start to allow marketing data to shape your overall strategy, which includes where to invest those marketing dollars. All right, so that's just a taste of what employee advocacy is all about. I think Sapira and I could talk about the topic all day, but unfortunately we're running out of time here. Just a quick run through of everything we've discussed today. We went over what employee advocacy is all about, how to leverage two powerful employee advocacy channels, social media and employee email, and then how to track and measure that employee contribution and results.
14:02
Sapir Segal
Great. And so we have been receiving quite a few questions throughout the presentation, so I will start answering them now, but feel free to keep sending us questions. And our first question is from Dylan. Hi, Dylan. And he asks, how do you onboard employees to an advocacy program? So. So to answer your question, Dylan, generally speaking, the best way to do that is that at Octoposter especially, we have our customer success that works together with marketing to build a kind of customized plan that suits your specific needs. And what we usually see is customers kind of starting off with a pilot program with a small group of employees, and once they get this up and running and it's easy, they can see that it's successful, they will extend it to the rest of the organization and see how it works. So that's just to answer your question. Wait, there's another. Okay, so another question. This one is from Todd, and he wants to know how many advocates would you need to have in a program? So. Well, there's not really a specific number. There's no maximum or minimum number. I guess the more the merrier. And it really varies according to the company. But essentially, the more employees that you have sharing all of your company content, the more audience that you can reach. And, yeah, it's better for the company. So, Colby, we have another one here. Maybe Kobi, you can answer this one. So what sort of rewards or incentive programs are there? Or would you suggest
15:50
Kolby Coy
reward and incentive programs? Yeah, so we think it's important to recognize people that are employee advocates in the organization. So we actually have done that. Sigster has the ability to promote internal campaigns. So we've actually recognized people that have shared content via an internal campaign, just giving them a pat on the back. I know that. I think Oktopost does something as well that you can recognize top users, but there's a lot of options there. It's really what your employees care about, and then just making sure that you recognize them in that way.
16:26
Sapir Segal
Yeah. And also just to add on to what Colby said, for example, with social advocacy, at Oktopost, we have the app, like, as we mentioned in the webinar, and this app also has a leaderboard which allows you actually to see the number of shares and clicks generated by each employee. So it creates this very transparent program, and that essentially incentivizes employees to keep going, to keep sharing content, and generate as much engagement and conversions for the company. I think we have another question, this one for Colby. Someone asks, what type of content should companies promote through the email signature?
17:14
Kolby Coy
Yeah, that's a great question that honestly doesn't have just one answer. I would say the best way to decide what to promote is to start Looking for ways to complement existing programs. So we really think that the email signature doesn't have to be an isolated investment. It's. It's meant to work with all of your programs. So we've seen great engagement with campaigns that promote upcoming events or even educational ebooks, white papers, case studies, anything like that. So the sky's really the limit.
17:47
Sapir Segal
Yeah. So thank you for that. And we have another question. It's are the signatures and social media, Are there two different programs? So, yeah, they are. Also Oktopost, we specialize in social advocacy. So social media advocacy. And620 specializes in email signatures. But yes, there would be two different programs. I guess it's better to have both of them. But, Colby, do you want to add anything to that?
18:20
Kolby Coy
Yeah, no. I mean, it's really just trying to figure out the best ways to leverage your employees. So, obviously, we think that doing it through social as well as email signatures is the best approach, but it's kind of just tailoring it to what you're looking to achieve from a marketing perspective.
18:39
Sapir Segal
Sorry, what do we have another. Okay, so one more question. This one's from Stacy. So she asks which social networks can employees connect to? So to answer your question, Stacy, I think at Oktopost, we usually focus on the B2B oriented networks, which are LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. So employees can easily connect all of these three channels and just share their content to those profiles. But they can decide if maybe Facebook, for example, is more of like, that's where their friends are. They can choose where to share their content out of those three. So I guess that's the time that we have today for the questions. But if we weren't able to cover them in today's session, then you are welcome to get in touch with us. Here is the slide with our contact information. So I'll leave it up so that you guys can get in touch with us. Write down any questions that you have. But I want to thank you for joining me. Also to you, Colby, for working on this with me, and thank you guys for attending the webinar. And I really hope that you found it valuable and that I hope, you know, I hope you guys have a very, like, a great day.
19:59
Kolby Coy
So, yeah, thanks, everybody.
