Faced with the increasingly urgent challenge of generating leads with an ever smaller marketing budget, most companies are overlooking an essential component of any successful digital strategy: their employees!
A committed employee can be the most powerful advocate of your brand and company. But there is much more to successful employee branding than simply encouraging shares and likes on Social media platforms.
Whilst HR and PR departments have been leading this space, few Sales and Marketing departments optimise the full potential of employee branding through the development of micro-segmented content for lead generation.
Why invest in employee branding and micro-segmented content?
- An employee gets 561% more brand engagement when sharing a message than when the same message gets shared by the company. (1)
- The average employee has 10 times the followers on social media compared to their company. (1)
- 41% of people/consumers believe reviews from employees are more credible than from companies. (1)
- Gartner predicts that organizations that excel in personalization will outsell companies that don’t by 20% (2)
- Micro-segmented content is a key step towards meeting customer demands for more relevant experienes (2)
Effective employee branding ensures that brand identity is reflected in an employee’s daily activities, including engagement with Social media, and effectively transforms your employees into trusty brand ambassadors. At the same time, the use of micro-segmented content is essential to maximising reach organically by enabling your company and your employees to increase engagement on digital platforms. Higher engagement will ensure you are maximising lead generation resulting in greater sales and revenues.
What is required to increase lead generation through employee advocacy?
- Brand training. Ensuring that all employees are:
- Fully versed in the history, values and vision of the brand and the company
- Trained to introduce the values of the brand/company to prospective clients in an effective, consistent way
- Micro-segmented content that targets your specific audience (B2C) or key decision makers within organizations (B2B)
- Constant refining of segments into smaller and smaller micro-segments (starting with the 4 broad categories of segmentation: demographic/geographic/psychographic/behavioural)
- Feedback loop based on consumer data: accurate micro-segmentation is critical to delivering digital experiences that truly resonate because it enables you to get a clear picture of what each tiny sub-group within the scope of your larger audience needs. (2) It is essential to have a process to review new data in order to continously refine the micro-segmentation.
- Integration of employee branding and advocacy as part of a holistic digital campaign designed to generate leads
Conclusion: Employees can be the most powerful of brand advocates and lead generators but only if their advocacy goes hand-in-hand with micro-segmented content as part of a holistic digital lead generation campaign.
References
- The Future of Branding is Personal: Employee Branding, (August 2020), available at: https://blog.vantagecircle.com/employeebranding/#:~:text=Employee%20branding%20is%20a%20new,in%20the%20best%20possible%20light [Accessed 7th November, 2020]
- Understanding Why Micro-Segmentation is Critical to Digital Experiences, Heidi Unruh (June, 2020), available at: https://www.chiefmarketer.com/understanding-micro-segmentation-critical-digital-experiences/ [Accessed 7th November, 2020)
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