Content Conversations

Conversations and resources for small business, startup, and solopreneur content marketing and social media.

How Employee Advocates Can Improve Your Content Marketing Results

October 19, 2017 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

Your most engaged employees are the ones most likely to raise their hands to become employee advocates. They’re also likely to be your most prolific referrers of job candidates. They’re committed to the success of your company, and willing to pitch in to help corporate efforts whenever they can. This makes them ideal partners for expanding the reach of your content marketing efforts.

Getting Employees Involved with Your Content Marketing

To initially get your employee advocates involved with your content marketing, create an employee content curation and sharing program. Ideally, you can integrate this into your existing employee advocacy platform. But, you can also do this by simply sending out regular email roundups with click-to-share links. Then, once budget allows, you can create a more formal program that involves gamification with an online employee advocacy portal.

The best tools to use to implement your employee advocacy program vary depending upon your objectives and what other brand advocacy programs you may need to implement. You have two different types of platforms to choose from:

A brand advocacy tool like Influitive for both internal and external advocates
An employee-only advocacy and social sharing platform like PostBeyond, Spredfast, or Bambu by Sprout

The Importance of Downtime to Keep Your Content Marketing Skills Sharp

September 21, 2017 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

When I tell other marketers I’m an avid gamer and a long-time World of Warcraft player, I get one of two responses.

The first—and best—response is from fellow gamers. They are typically psyched to have met a fellow gaming content marketer. Often, they are recovering “warcrack” addicts. We reminisce about the golden days of WoW (as we refer to the game) and promise to add each other on Battle.net.

But then there are the non-gamers.

They furrow their brows and narrow their eyes at my sharing my favorite hobby. “Shouldn’t you be spending that time on something…more productive” is a comment I’ve heard so many times.

Why yes, I DO have a number of professional projects I’m working on right now, including a book. Thank you very much.

Hello Content Marketing World 2017!

September 4, 2017 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

As I write this post, I’m sitting on a plane from San Francisco to Cleveland for the 2017 Content Marketing World conference a.k.a. CMworld.

Believe it or not, this is my fifth consecutive year making the trek from the City by the Bay to Cleveland for this event. No other conference I’ve attended even comes close to that!

So what keeps me coming back to #CMworld, year-after-year? It’s the people and the unrivaled opportunity to hear from the smartest minds in my profession all under one roof.

I’ve met so many amazing colleagues and friends thanks to this event. At this point, even as a shy introvert, I can easily count on a hundred or so people I am personally excited to see and give a hug to over the next few days.

And that’s saying something!

This year, I’m privileged to be speaking on a panel with a group of awesome content marketers I met through the #CMworld weekly Twitter chat and bonded with during last year’s in-person event. We’re going to be sharing our perspective on the intersection of content and community, and we’re leaving plenty of time to answer YOUR questions. I hope I see some of you there on Thursday!

If you’ve been considering attending CMworld in the past but haven’t gotten around to it, I can’t encourage you to do so enough. I’ve paid for this conference and the travel out of pocket. I’ve used precious vacation days to attend. And it’s always been worth it.

Isn’t it time you invested in yourself?

New Research Makes the Case for Retail Influencer Marketing

August 30, 2017 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

By now we’re all pretty clear on the fact that consumers trust word-of-mouth from their friends and peers a lot more than they trust brand marketing. That’s why so many brands have thrown significant sums of money at retail influencer marketing programs. But does spending thousands of dollars for Instagram posts have any ROI? Maybe. New research from Experticity says retail influencer marketing has a positive impact on the bottom line, though perhaps not the way you might think.

New research from Experticity says retail influencer marketing has a positive impact on the bottom line, though perhaps not the way you might think.

Experticity’s research isn’t focused on third-party brand influencers. Rather, it’s focused on the impact of influencers on the sales floor itself. Turning individual retail employees into expert influencers by providing brand education led those retail employees to sell 69% more than their peers. Those employees who completed six or more Experticity brand sessions sold 123% more than their peers.

This research makes the case for better employee onboarding, regardless of the vendor, in addition to identifying a distinctly profitable influencer audience for brands.

The Challenge: Tracking Offline Influence

When I was in college, I worked for a large music and video chain store. My employee onboarding consisted almost entirely of being shown how to operate the register and where various items were on the floor. Record labels did send the occasional promo item our way, but everything went to the store manager’s attention. Which meant that even though I was probably responsible for the bulk of the store’s Depeche Mode import sales, It was highly unlikely I’d ever see any promotional materials for other artists I’d probably have liked and been happy to suggest to my customers.

The challenge in all of this is how to connect brands with retail influencers. As marketers, we’ve gotten good at spotting micro influencers from their activities online. But how can we spot them when the bulk of their influence is happening one-on-one in the store? It will be interesting to see how we rise to this challenge.

For more details from the research, check out the Experticity infographic:

5 Elements to Include in Your Employee Onboarding Program to Encourage Employee Brand Advocacy

April 15, 2017 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

Is your employee brand advocacy program meeting your goals? Or are you finding it to be a challenge to widen your range of engagement? Are you sure that your employees know that you want them to regularly share company news through social?

You may think that your intentions are clear when it comes to encouraging employee social engagement. But one of the most common obstacles that businesses are facing is hesitation from employees. They don’t know what exactly they should be sharing, and they’re afraid of sharing something that gets them into trouble. Don’t just take my word for it—take a look at the recent research from Bambu by Sprout.

So how do you ensure employees know that you want them to share work-related content on social? You need to tell them it’s OK to do so. That’s a message to repeat early and often—starting with employee onboarding. Include an employee brand advocacy module in every new employee onboarding training plan. This helps you connect with enthusiastic new recruits as they start their journey with your company. It’s a great opportunity to give them the tools and guidance they need to fuel comfortable with advocating on behalf of your brand.

Although there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach for employee brand advocacy during onboarding, I recommend including the following elements:

1. An introduction to the brand’s social channels

At Anaplan, we included an employee brand advocacy component in our new hire orientations. This included a tour of the company’s official social media channels. The session facilitator encouraged the new recruits to accompany the presentation online and follow the social channels as we walked through them. We tapped our social media manager or one of our engaged employee advocates for this session, to bring it to life.

Additionally, we gave concrete examples of the sort of employee advocacy activities the company was looking to encourage. For example, following the company’s LinkedIn page and twitter account to keep informed of corporate news and marketing activities, and liking or sharing content.

If you have multiple brand channels on a social network, such as having dedicated recruiting or customer service handles on twitter, this is a good time to explain the different strategies and owners for these channels. Do company employees use special hashtags to define themselves or for tagging life at the office posts? Be sure to let the newbies in on them.

If time allows, also consider including some social media best practices or gamification based upon recent employee online interactions.

We often assume that everyone we hire has experience navigating social media conversations, but that’s not necessarily the case. Put together a packet with a few brief tip sheets or tutorials to give your new hires information they can use to conduct themselves in the best professional light.

Content Conversations

Getting Employees Involved with Your Content Marketing

The Challenge: Tracking Offline Influence

1. An introduction to the brand’s social channels

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