Employee-Generated Content- A Buzz Or An Impactful Marketing Strategy?
Did you know your employees have 10 times more followers on social media than you?
Supposing that this fact rang a bell in your ears, it is now time to leverage and optimize the potential that your employees’ social media presence hold in generating greater business for you by targeting exponential reach.
Integrating Employee-generated Content(EGC) in your marketing strategy can help you maximize the insights that your employees have of the company. As it utilizes the content they share on social media channels being your brand’s advocates.
To know more about how you can create, promote, and benefit from EGC, make your way to the end of this blog.
Employee Generated Content: An Overview
Dynamism is the choice of most users. They are evolving continuously and are actively looking to engage with people over brands.
Smart marketers are decoding their expectations by leveraging User-Generated Content (UGC) as an essential element in their marketing strategy.
But of late, recognition around ‘users’ being the only influential content creators is getting questioned. As the workforce of an organization also has the potential to act as its advocates. An offshoot of this is Employee-Generated Content.
Taggbox defines EGC as content created and posted across social media platforms in any form, be it visuals, testimonials, blogs, etc., by the team members of an organization.
It acts as an authentic form of influencer marketing, which speaks for the brand, creates awareness, exposure, and builds trust in potential users of the brand.
More and more brands are opening up to utilizing the credibility that their employees can generate for them and are driving results effortlessly.
How Can You Generate Employee-Generated Content?
Each employee in your workforce has a different perspective on things. Be it a take on your industry, product, operations, or customers; they have resourceful insights to share.
Leveraging this information can enhance your brand’s performance and is also better perceived by the audiences.
People trust faces more than a faceless brand. Employee-generated content other than UGC gives a face to the brand that the audiences can rely on.
But before you jump start with the creation of EGC, take note of these four tips.
1. Strategize & Train Aligning Your Brand’s Objectives
Prior to inspiring your employees for generating EGC or letting them run wild, formulate how your social media marketing strategy is going to look like.
Take your goals, targets, consumer behavior, policies, etc., into consideration before finally drafting your employee generated content marketing plan.
Your employees must be guided through creating EGC. Letting them have a sound knowledge of the procedures the company follows will let go of any ambiguity if they have in their minds.
Then they can create content as it may fit fine to their niche, intent, and audience.
2. Choose The Right Employees
Once your strategy and training are in place, the next important thing is choosing the right employees to successfully launch your campaign.
Find the ones that are competitive, open to learning, brand advocates, motivated, well aware of the social media trends, and curiously consume content created online.
When these talents create content, it will be informative, engaging, and benefit the company in terms of reach and brand authenticity. To retain perfect employees, consider calculating the employee Net Promoter Score to improve employee engagement and satisfaction.
3. Don’t Push Employee Participation
As much as you seek active employee participation, it is important not to force them in content creation. Not all of your employees will be interested in posting content on social media that speaks for the company.
It is important to understand that content that ignites curiosity and user engagement should not feel like a chore; rather, it should be free-flowing, thought-provoking, unique, and creative.
So, give your employees the liberty to create EGC as per their suitability and interest. Additionally, to encourage employee participation, consider implementing recognition programs on a budget. This could include shoutouts in company meetings or newsletters, small rewards for top contributors, recognition gifts, or even a simple thank you note. These gestures can go a long way in showing employees that their efforts are valued and appreciated.
4. Keep Your Employees Updated
For EGC to be successful, having perpetual dialogues with your employees is important. They must be kept updated with the happenings in the organization, the targets, and the fundamentals.
It is only when they are kept well-informed that the content created will add value to the audience.
Technology here plays an important role. Leverage employee advocacy software and mobile apps that contain a directory of communication between departments, leaderboards, etc. This helps in bridging the gap for social selling, EGC, external and internal communication, etc.
Case Study: QPS Employment Uses Taggbox: Goes Big On Event Engagement At Annual Event
How Can You Efficiently Promote Employee-Generated Content?
1. Showcase It On Digital Signage Screens
Leveraging digital signage displays can turn employee communication into an energetic and dynamic conversation. By showcasing content that is relevant and inspiring, businesses can convincingly boost employee and user engagement.
In this time when there is a superfluity of information, filtering out appropriate and attractive content while displaying it through a promising channel is imperative. Here, creating a social wall and putting it up on digital signage displays comes into play an interesting role.
Through social walls, you can display unique and moving posts generated by your employees via the business’s exclusive hashtags, mentions, tags, etc.
Taggbox Display allows you to aggregate this content effortlessly, moderate it to maximize its relevance, and turn it into a unified feed after providing for customizations that enable you to make the social wall look as per your requirement and in line with the company’s aesthetics.
After you have successfully created your social wall, the next step is to display it on digital signage installed within or outside of your organization to be able to effectively promote EGC and gather employee attention, engagement, and interaction.
2. Repost EGC On The Brand’s Social Media Pages
Reposting is a robust way to make your employees’ brand advocates in the eye of the users. It also makes them feel valued about their contributions and will further be motivated to create content.
Numerically, imagine that your employees, on average, have 500 followers on social media platforms. Considering that you motivate only 10 of them to create content, you will have your brand exposed to 5000 more people. Now, if you repost this, you create credibility not just in their minds but also in those who discover about your brand through suggestions.
Now, if you are still wondering how big of a difference can “employ advocacy” make and how effective it is? Research from LinkedIn proves that when employees create content, the click-through rate is twofold of their company’s.
Reposting is a clever way to incentivize and stimulate them to create more content while also promoting your brand.
3. Embed It On Your Website/Intranet
Your website is the most reliable source of information for visitors and potential talents. It creates an impression, and businesses must make sure that it is worth a while and impactful.
One way to do this is by aggregating and embedding employee-generated content on the pages of your website.
Employees being the best spokespersons for your business will help in increasing your reliability and authenticity. Thus, upscaling your business’s potential to drive conversions.
Taggbox Widget can help you aggregate and embed dynamic employee-generated content in the simplest of ways.
It allows you to collect EGC generated via hashtags, mentions, handles, etc. From more than 15+ social media platforms, filter out relevant posts and customize the feed by choosing from amongst 12+ high-end themes and layouts.
The best part is that it has in-built automated analytics that helps you track your widget’s performance and run changes as needed.
An increasing number of brands are leveraging this result-driven strategy to increase their website’s traffic, visitor dwell time, engagement, and to attract new talents by showcasing the culture of the organization.
Can there be a better way to promote EGC?
How Can You Benefit From Employee Generated Content?
Sharing the human side of your brand is becoming progressively important to connect better with people. Through EGC, you can achieve it effortlessly by showcasing employer-brand information.
Moreover, the fact that people rely on people more than brands, creating content that isn’t branded can directly influence their faith.
Employee advocacy is a time and cost-effective way of producing content and alleviating the challenges placed against brands of fetching engagement and generating credibility in the minds of their users and candidates.
To know the amazing benefits that businesses can draw from leveraging employee-generated content, keep reading.
1. Audiences Trust What The Employees Have To Say
Stats show that the content shared by employees gets 8 times more engagement than brand-generated content.
Potential users trust the opinions and company insights shared by the employees more than an advertisement or any other form of marketing. It ingrains transparency and provides users with an overlook of the company’s functioning.
As per Edelman Trust Barometer’s report, building trust gets easy as employees are the most dependable voices that the brand has.
It acts as word-of-mouth marketing and grabs audience attention across various social media platforms.
2. Enhances Employee Engagement With The Company
Employees give a voice to their opinion by creating and sharing content that speaks of the brand. They feel appreciated, inspired, and engaged when they see that the company is invested in them, and they are more likely to remain faithful to it.
On the contrary, if they are unengaged, the business will, according to Forbes, experience 37% more absenteeism, 18% reduction in productivity, and a 15% cut in their profitability.
Marketers can build credibility and engagement within the organization by resharing EGC and also encouraging other members of the team to participate in content creation.
Promotional activities like displaying the employee-generated content on digital signage screens and embedding it on the website can boost brand-employee engagement and interaction by giving them the satisfaction of being well thought of.
3. Can Powerfully Attract Talented Professionals
In Essence, EGC can reinforce the connection with potential employees.
When the team is given the liberty to create content as per their liking, authenticity, and creative flow, it gathers the attention and trust of prospects.
Employees sharing their experience with the company, its undertakings, operations, or the environment, entices talents to be a part of the organization.
For Instance, Chipotle leverages user and employee-generated content in its marketing strategies. Their careers page highlights EGC titled #PeopleofChipotle across diverse touchpoints. Content that is produced and shared on social media by their employees is embedded in their gallery.
In their efforts to attract quality talent, Chipotle uses EGC to build trust and boost conversions by simply reposting what their existing employees have to say.
This practice also effectively reduces the efforts and costs incurred by the brands in the hiring process. A better bet?
4. Amplifies The Visibility Of The Brand
According to statistics, EGC gets reshared 24 times more than a brand-generated post, which proves that it increases the reach and visibility of the brand exponentially. Enhanced audience coverage means more attention and better business.
Every post shared by the employee generates about 4 clicks on Facebook on average.
Now imagine if some of your employees have a powerful presence on social media, the amount of audience engagement it can create for you.
The collective reach of your employees is far greater than your brand’s reach on social media.
Further to this, by incorporating EGC in their social media strategy, businesses stand a 7 times greater chance to convert their lead into a customer. Hence, enhancing its revenue earning capacity effectively.
Starbucks Stood Out In Its Efforts To Maximise EGC!
If you still aren’t convinced about using EGC to amplify your business and employee engagement, take inspiration from Starbucks.
Starbucks, as a part of their brand’s narrative, supports the role that employee-generated content plays. Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, wrote in his book Onward that “employees are the true ambassadors of our brand, the real merchants of romance and theatre, and as such the primary catalyst for delighting customers.”
They aggressively support their employees to generate more and more content by asking them to share their experience and keeps them updated with the undertakings of Starbucks.
But, all of this is done keeping the brand’s value in the line. They tell their employees about what they can and can’t share and provide them with training sessions to understand the brand and its work better.
In fact, they also have a dedicated Twitter feed to help employees share their experiences.
All these efforts cumulatively generated a turnover rate that is just 20% of the industry average.
Over To You
Magnifying marketing efforts to gather better reach, engagement, and conversion is keeping the marketers on their toes amidst the rising competition.
User-Generated Content(UGC), though, has been yielding enough results for brands. But in this time and age, having enough isn’t truly enough! Constant efforts are required to be able to stand out.
EGC is that out-of-the-box strategy you have been looking for. But for it to be lucrative, on-point efforts and promotional activities are non-negotiable.
Reach out to Taggbox to help you derive the best of results with minimum effort!