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World Employer Branding Day 2024 is proud to Partner with more than 35 industry leaders from around the world including the team at The Martec, who you will meet in Amsterdam when 800 leaders from around the world come together in-person from 9-11 October 2024.
The team from Martec will also be hosting the Amsterdam Canal Cruise on the final day of World Employer Branding Day and in their article below they share some great tips on elevating your employee advocacy program.
As we approach World Employer Branding Day 2024 in Amsterdam, it is fitting to draw inspiration from a classic Dutch tale.
You may have heard the tale of the little Dutch boy who saved his village by plugging a leak in the dike, holding the sea back with his finger all night. While it's more legend than history, this story captures something quintessentially Dutch: the power of the individual.
The impact of just one individual story is not to be underestimated.
With this in mind, our Employer Branding content strategy team put together this Employee-Generated Content (EGC) Pinup Playbook, which shows how just one employee’s responses can fuel five weeks of powerful content across your entire recruitment process!
Candidates are hungry for authenticity and truth and are programmed to look for lies in what they consume, so content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels [Social Media Today].
When a company only shares “outlier” stories—the exceptionally notable, the rags-to-riches, and the conveniently diverse—it erodes the trust of its audience and subsequently gets a type of emotional engagement that it may not be looking for. So, authenticity has to be the backbone.
But I know I’m preaching to the choir.
Most of us in employer branding want more authentic EGC, but where most of us stumble (or give up in the first place) is when it comes to activating enough employees to create content.
At The Martec, our clients can collect hundreds of employee responses in weeks. One client collected 60 video and written responses from 30 interns in 10 minutes at a recent in-house internship event. How did they do it?
We’ve put together three key things our clients do differently to those who don’t get the employee participation they are after:
1. Collect Written Content, NOT Just Video
Video content is the most CHALLENGING type of content to collect, and it excludes shy, busy, perfectionist, and technically-minded people.
Employer branding content should always include a cross-section of your people, from the most extroverted to the most introverted.
Speaking to people from all corners of your organisation and empowering and enabling them to tell their stories in writing or on camera gives a much wider variety of perspectives.
Our client with the best employee participation rate (1,000s of responses) has found that over 70% of responses come in WRITTEN form, not video!
2. Use AI to Segment Your Employee Stories
Collecting a story and then dropping it on LinkedIn and your career sites is not good enough to reach the type of candidates you want to hire. Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs the same messages just being shared via official brand channels (Forbes).
To address this, our clients build a diverse library of constantly growing and adapting employee content to target specific candidates at different stages of the process.
For example, in addition to employee testimonials, produce content that discusses employees' roles and day-to-day projects and shows what it’s like to work for you. The 5-Week Playbook contains over 60 real examples of this authentic content.
This is where AI shines. AI, like The Martec, can collect highly segmented EGC stories at scale and with a precision that’s impossible for a human and channel the right authentic content to your critical talent pools.
AI does not replace your team’s skills but allows them to focus on more strategic tasks by making the collection, creation, and distribution process easier.
Personalisation and segmentation of EGC delivery are as important as creating authentic and personal employee content!
3. Use AI to Enable Employee Collection
Gathering enough employee responses is a core challenge when creating EGC. Even when you engage hundreds of employees, they don’t consistently respond within a set timeframe.
You can flood their channels with posts and stories, only for the responses to dry up for weeks or months afterward as your employees get busy.
However, this stop-and-start approach to EGC can harm your employer brand as consistent content shows that your company culture and employee experiences are genuine, ongoing aspects of your company rather than one-off events or staged photo opportunities.
To achieve content consistency, consider getting help rather than adding more headcount. AI is one way you can now keep things humming behind the scenes.
An AI platform, like The Martec, enables your employee content collection by helping you identify top advocates, providing topic suggestions, allowing advocates to respond in ways they are comfortable with (video, written, dictated, or in their native language), creating the content, distributing it across multiple channels, pushing it out to employees to share, and repurposing it for maximum longevity and impact.
Amplifying each content piece allows you to maintain a consistent and steady EB presence rather than overwhelming your audience with many different stories.
Ready to Enable Your Employees?
As our 5-Week EGC Playbook shows, it doesn't take many employees to start generating content faster than you can say, "Nu komt de aap uit de mouw!" ("Now the monkey comes out of the sleeve!") a common saying in the Netherlands, often used when something is suddenly revealed.
P.S. Ready to discuss how The Martec’s AI-powered EGC platform can help you activate your employees? Let's chat.
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