You can have the best content, the best website, written by the best marketing agency, with the best photos on the best website, with the best SEO and the best adverts and do you know what? That only is 30% of your branding perception.
It may sound old fashioned and this applies to B2B as much as it does B2C but it's all about word of mouth and even more social in a social world.
70% of your brand perception is provided by your employees, your customer service employees, the people who hire for your company, your sales people.
Now this article goes onto to talk about how if you activate just 6% of your employees you will increase customer engagement by 60% and if you activate 10% employees you will get 100% increase in customer engagement.
There is a reason why they talk about such figures of employee engagement (6% and 10%) and why activation levels of employees are so low. So what are the reasons for this?
1. Employee advocacy is treated like a corporate marketing activity. What I mean by that is a "tool" is used to spray (via the employees) the corporate marketing materials that have been already created and nobody reads. But the employees are seen as a mechanism to use for this. When I worked for a company that did this, whenever I shared corporate materials I lost followers so I stopped doing it. Everybody I talk to have the same impact OR don't get follower growth. It all becomes a pointless exercise and a waste of money. People are not interested in corporate marketing regardless on how it's delivered.
2. Why not activate the employees without the need for tools? Let them generate the content? Your people are passionate, about what they do and their company, just activate them to write. We are working for a company that one of the things they do is make and sell glue. Most people agree this isn't very exciting, until you read what the sales people from that company write. And do you know what? When you see glue written about in that way, you would buy it over and above the competitor. So whatever your product, your employees want to write about it and in our experience are a little baffled, that management haven't kicked of a project to enable them to do it.
But please put the fire hose of corporate content down.
The bulk of customer brand perception – about 70 percent – doesn’t depend on the ingenuity of your video marketing strategy or the quality of your products – it’s human interaction with customer service representatives, your employees at in-person events, email and live chat responses, and the content your employees are sharing about your brand.
