by Sprout Social

TAC T ICAL GUIDE

4 Critical Functions
Marketing Controls Using
Internal Communications
Introduction
Internal communications and employee advocacy are not new
concepts in businessthey've been around for decades and have
consistently been topics of conversation among companies. While
the term itself may not be new, the way we view and execute on
the concept has definitely shifted. The reason for this shift (and
why its garnered so much attention) is primarily due to the
constantly changing landscape businesses have to operate in
today. Given the tools and technologies availableand how our
workforce functions as a resultcompanies recognized the need
to be agile and quickly pivot to accommodate to these changing
market conditions. Employee advocacy is no exception.

In this guide, well discuss how employee advocacy has changed

and how this new landscape allows Marketing teams to gain
control of key business functions that will drive a big impact.

1. Increased Brand Awareness

Anyone who has had the responsibility of managing and growing a companys
social media presence knows that its not an easy undertaking. Aside from the
fact that most social platforms build their algorithms to favor content from a
personal page versus a brands, were also fundamentally inclined to interact
with people. Its human naturewe gravitate toward the word of someone we
know and trust over a brand we may never have even heard of.

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That said, its incredibly difficult for a company to grow a social audience and
establish a significant footprint on the web without the added boost from
employees. Aside from an employees voice humanizing the company
message, advocacy through social sharing also allows for a post to spread
across networks under a different set of limitations than that of a branded
company page.

When brand messages are shared by employees on social media, they get
561% more reach than the same messages shared by the brands social
media channels.

In addition to the dramatic increase achieved by leveraging your employees

social networks, youll also see a significant increase in engagement.

Content shared by employees (who, on average, have 10x more followers

than a brand) receives 8x more engagement than content shared by
brand channels.

Its important to clarify that this doesnt suggest you abandon your companys
social media pages and throw your social presence to the waysidethat
would be very bad advice. This simply indicates that, given what we know
about people today and the way they consume content, theres an increased
need for employers to make a more conscious effort to activate the social
impact within their employees. And more often than not, the responsibility of
helping employees activate those social networks is a function that falls
under Marketing.

The goal is to increase brand awareness and social reach, without

compromising quality or consistency in the messaging used to do so. The
problem many employers face in achieving this balance is often in their
approach to empowering and enabling employeesits outdated. As a result,
employees struggle to connect with the concept and fail understand how, or
even why, they should be social advocates for the company. One way to
address this problem is to check your strategy and confirm that its in line
with evolutions in the industry.

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Make Sure the Approach Matches the Growth
The way we historically viewed the concept of internal
communicationsincluding the way companies initially approached the
facilitation and support of such a programhappened in a landscape entirely
different than the one were in today. There werent always platforms
dedicated to simplifying and streamlining this function, meaning many
programs took shape under a different set of circumstances using a much
more limited set of resources. That said, weve evolved far beyond these
limitations, and by leveraging the resources available today, the intensity of
employee advocacy has the potential to be a more powerful force.

As soon as we understand that there might be a more relevant way to approach

employee advocacy and internal communications, we can take a step back to
review the program in its current form. By taking a retroactive look, versus one
that focuses only on whats ahead, were able more clearly identify where things
might be breaking down, and then aim to find a solution that speaks directly to
those needs. There are multiple areas that could cause a rift in your ability to
fully recognize employee advocacy benefits on a wide-scale. This struggle
alone speaks loudly to the need for finding a best-in-class solution that can
mitigate these issues, bringing us to our next section.

2. Consistent & Contextual Messaging

There are many benefits to using an employee advocacy platform to
complement your teams communication efforts (both internally and
externally). However, one of the first decisions that to be addressed, and
something that will define the success of your program moving forward, is
identifying which team will be in charge of actually managing this program.

In most cases, companies find this responsibility falling on their

Marketing/Communications teamsand for good reason. These are the team
members who are most confident in their ability to convey company voice,
brand and overall image.

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They can also easily navigate the content library, identify the most up-to-date
content and point co-workers to industry-specific resources that speak to
relevant trends. All of these capabilities are critical to have when leading
employee advocacy. Another important abilityand one that often comes
naturally for Marketersis crafting social messaging thats concise yet
impactful, and relevant to the platform it's being shared on.

Controlling this distribution of content, while simultaneously ensuring that the

associated messaging stays consistent with the companys brand, is nearly
impossible to execute without a platform streamlining this process. If you dont
have something in place to regulate social sharing, theres a good chance of
your message either not being heard, getting lost in a sea of emails or being
shared incorrectly with messaging thats potentially misleading
and inconsistent.

Identifying a Solution in Internal Communications

This is where your internal communications platform comes into play. By
bringing the process online and into common space, you enable the most
qualified teams to be in control of providing guidance and structure for the rest
of the company, creating predictability for how employees can expect to
receive, digest and share information.

You also create a culture where the right strengths are leveraged in the right
places. Sales or Customer Support teams probably dont have a lot of
experience crafting language around industry content or company newsits
not in their wheelhouse of everyday tasks. On the other hand, it is within the
wheelhouse of Marketing. By removing the uncertainty other teams have in
finding the right wording to match the purpose of the post, they can instead
look to Marketing to provide that guidance within the platform.

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With more sharing opportunities (and easier ways to do so), you also open up
opportunity for more thought leadership among employees who otherwise
might not have had the confidence or knowledge to be seen in this light. This is
especially relevant to salespeople who have a lot to gain by coming across as
credible and trustworthy in the eyes of prospects and potential customers. You
also end up fostering an environment where different teams are encouraged to
work together and leverage each other's strengthscreating collaboration in
place of competition.

3. Visibility Across the Organization to

Support Department Goals
One of the most impactful ways to drive up the value of an employee
communications program is to leverage it as a means to gain visibility into
departments across the organization, at all levels.

Looking at it through a Marketing lens, many of us are familiar with the amount
of time required in executing a large-scale campaignif not directly, then at
least through a co-workers experienceand if time is money, then Marketing
campaigns can get very expensive. From initial conceptualization all the way
through to final reporting, its critical to wring out as much value as possible
from every resource in the campaign. This applies to efforts across the board,
from conferences and tradeshows, to webinars and guides, all the way to
general awareness of company initiatives at large. The more ways you can
repurpose content and find new value props to offer different groups of
people, the broader your reach will be. Each of these things will eventually
contribute to the ROI you recognize at the end of the push.

In order to wring the most value possible out of each campaign, you need a way
to loop in all departments with information regarding the campaigns topic,
messaging and resources for promotion. In other words, you need something to
sit in the middle and facilitate this exchange, unifying the information and
repackaging it in a way thats actually usable for multiple departments. Without
this, all you have is a lot of disjointed information that no one knows what to do
with or how to leverage.

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Unifying Internal and External Information in
One Place
By leveraging internal communications platforms to regulate this exchange of
content and information, employees know, with confidence, what to share,
where to share it and how to share it in a way that will drive the most impact.
This is a key example of driving external visibility and cross-promotion, but
theres also opportunity to leverage this platform for internal communications
as well.

From important company updates to industry news or competitive intelligence,

you can share information across the company thats in line with how
employees already consume content. These different types of company
communicationsboth internal and externalshould live in the same place,
but they need to have different functionality. Information distributed for
internal purposes should be labeled as such and shouldnt have a social
component, making it easily distinguishable from the content intended to be
shared. By leveraging this tool on a regular basis, employees will get into the
habit of looking here for important updates or announcements, and leadership
can confidently disseminate information to a place they know employees are
being driven to.

4. Measure & Adjust Your Program Based

on Data, Not Intuition
The last piece that brings everything full circle are the metrics you choose to
surface in order to evaluate your programs success. Since the reporting
functionality wasnt always available for employee advocacy programs,
identifying which metrics are important and worth tracking can vary from
company to company depending on the goal of the program. There are a few
common KPIs we see used pretty widely across companies, and they can be a
good place to at least get started.

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User Behavior & Activity
Youll want to gain insight into overall activity on the platform, and then
analyze those findings through a few different lenses. First, look at it from an
overall company perspective. This requires digging into metrics like the
number of users in your advocacy program, the percentage of active users
within that group and the number of shared stories or average shares per user.
This will be the first indicator of whether your not your program is at least
being utilized the way you intended.

From there, look at a team breakdown. This gives you insight into the
individual activity of each of your teams by measuring shares and impressions
per team. Looking at data on this level will give you insight which teams are
most active (Sales, Engineering, etc.) and the content they engage with most.
If you can identify trends here with content that better resonates with one
team over another, you can begin to curate portals that take these findings
into consideration and then actually act on that to improve the experience.

Last, evaluate the program on an individual level. This view gives you insight
into specific employee sharing habits, the number of impressions generated
and other indicators that enable you to identify company evangelists.

On the other hand, this can indicate employees who might be at flight risk,
given a lack of engagement or activity. This information can be extremely
valuable to your HR or Talent teams, who can then use that information to get
ahead of the situation.

Content Engagement Metrics

In order to continually improve and evolve your program, its important to track
the specific types of content that resonate across your organization by views,
shares and impressions per social network. This can be done by looking at a
few different reports.

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A content breakdown of performance over time will be indicative of when
content had the most impact, allowing you to reference that time frame and
draw conclusions on the reasoning behind that. Additionally, you should be
measuring active story metrics which shows the amount of content curated
over any given time frame, which can lead you to the answer of whether or not
volume correlates to the number of shares and engagement. Last, its
important to have an overall understanding of which specific pieces of content
performed better than others by total shares and impressions across networks
(you can also dig into who shared it most from a team and individual level).

Customizing the portals to match the interests of each team will increase the
likelihood for that person to find interesting in the content, and thus, increase
the likelihood theyll want to share it with their networks.

By analyzing your program with this data-driven mindset, leaning on the

historical data of employee activity to make changes or improvements, you
can attribute much more value to your programvalue thats actually
measurable. We should be holding these programs to the same level of
accountability that we do any other business function we choose to invest time
and money into. It helps keep everyone engaged and invested in the program
because the more value we can recognize, the more willing people will be to
be a part of providing that value.

Conclusion
Employee advocacy has the potential to make a driving impact on your
businessso long as its met with the support needed to reach these peak
results. By shifting our viewpoint to look at the function through a more
modern-day lens, we can match it more closely to the way people naturally
consume content on a daily basis. As a result, employees can seamlessly
incorporate your process into their own, which in turn enables them to be
active participants in your companys growth and success.

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Advocacy tools from a trusted
social business platftorm.
Bambu is an employee advocacy platform created by Sprout
Social. Sprout builds award-winning software to power social
communication between people and businesses. Our flagship
product helps more than 16,000 leading brands more effectively
communicate on social channels, collaborate across teams and
provide an exceptional customer experience. Sprout is a Twitter
Certified Product, Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer,
LinkedIn Company Page Partner and Google+ Pages API Partner.

Request a demo at getbambu.com.