Okay, cake analogies aside, social amplification takes your content consumption to the next level and ensures people ACTUALLY see what your company creates. 

We know your company’s social media pages still matter, but sharing a piece of content once and moving on just isn’t enough for maximum influence today. 

Below is our modern guide to driving content ROI via social media amplification. Let’s dive in!

Why Social Media Amplification? 

Pretty much everyone in marketing knows how important content is for social media. It’s why most marketing teams invest so much time and money into creating content.

However, the amplification side is often neglected because marketing is quick to move on to the next piece of content.

Once something is published, it’s assumed everyone will easily find it. WRONG. 

The problem with ignoring social media amplification is that most people won’t see that great content your team spent so much time researching and writing. 

Sure, if you rank well in Google, it can be discovered, but that’s only if someone is already aware and searches for that topic. 

What about all the people you want to educate and inform who aren’t already aware?

Social feeds move quickly and many of your company page followers or employee networks will miss that content. For example, most social posts will realistically be seen by less than 5% of followers. 

There are lots of factors to the algorithm’s reach, but your content posts aren’t reaching quite what you think they may be. 

The benefits of social media amplification

I’m sure the benefits of amplifying content are a bit obvious to you, but let’s list them all out. 

• Gets more eyes on your content
• Ensures the story you want to tell gets out
• Increases lead quantity and quality
• Leads to more opportunities for sales
• Contributes to better brand awareness and trust
• Encourages improved consumption of information
• Generates more clicks, impressions, and engagements
• Increases your share of voice
• Improves your company’s reputation

No wonder more organizations are dedicating more time to distribution today. Is your company one of them? Let’s get into how to amplify and more. 

How to Amplify Content on Social Media

Content distribution certainly goes beyond social media. However, social networks are the BEST place to reach the right people with your content. 

Just think of the sheer size of some of the most well-known networks right now:

• LinkedIn has 800+ million users 
• Twitter has 350+ million users
• Instagram has 1 billion+ users

Company Brand Pages

Company social pages have their challenges with organic reach, but they’re still valuable to your business. This is usually the most common place you start to amplify your content.

But usually that’s it and then teams move on. However, your company’s content can be remixed into various formats, easily transforming it into 5+ different social posts.

These variations should be distributed to your social channels. That way the content will be engaged with — and you never know which format followers might see. 

Also, your company page shouldn’t look like a bunch of link posts every other day. That’s not going to build your following or drive engagement with your content.

Founders & Leadership

Social media amplification should 100% also come from founders and leadership at your organization. 

Whether they’re part of your employee advocacy efforts (see further below) or have their own approach, they must be active on social media. 

While audiences still trust employees who don’t rank highly in an organization, there’s a profound impact on the business when leaders share their thoughts and insights.

Some of the best B2B companies today have highly active leaders or founders on LinkedIn and Twitter.  

And while these folks might be super busy, taking 15-20 minutes every other day to amplify company content or share insights is really all it takes to win. 

Paid Social Ads

Setting up your paid social ads successfully will need to be its own completely separate topic. There’s just so much information to dive into. 

But when it comes to social media amplification, paid social is typically a very common channel to distribute content. 

The reason companies love it is you can immediately reach people you want to see your content where organic reach can take time to build. Of course, this does take money and it can be expensive, pending your audience and number of competitors bidding, too. 

But social media channels are where almost everyone hangs out these days — and where your audience is most likely consuming information. 

So it makes sense to amplify your content to specific companies and audiences that you want to see your message. 

Social Influencers

While influencer marketing has been more common for B2C brands, the B2B space is primed for this to grow! And we know it generates some awesome results. 

For example, iInfluencer marketing can bring brands up to 11x more annual ROI than more traditional methods.

But thought leaders with 5,000 – 10,000+ followers on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. can be great ways to distribute your content, story, and messaging further on social media.

What I can tell you is that the creator economy and B2B influencers are starting to boom, yet many companies haven’t taken advantage of this.  So there is still an opportunity for your company to leverage social media amplification in this way. 

Employee Advocacy

Remember one thing: Social media algorithms prioritize content from individuals.

Why? Simply because it’s in their best interest to do so. Plus, it’s how people prefer to consume content.

Think about it this way: Would you really come back if your entire feed was just brands and ads? If that were the case, I bet there’s a 99% chance that you don’t log back in. 

But beyond that, getting employees, partners, and alumni networks sharing and engaging can exponentially expand reach quickly. It’s why employee advocacy has become a MUST for content distribution at scale. 

At EveryoneSocial, we dove into an average of all our customer data. Here’s some simple math that shows the value and reach of employee social networks. 

• Employees have an average of 1,500 social connections. So if you have 100 employees sharing content, you now can reach 150,000 people.

But wait! There’s more:

• We found that among the 250,000+ users in EveryoneSocial, employees will add 300+ new connections to their network each year when they share consistently. Say hello to compounding reach year!

• The additional reach comes from the network effect, or those secondary networks that see employees’ posts because their primary connections already engaged with it.

• We also found that a single employee generates, on a conservative average, $820 worth of advertising value. So those 100 employees generate $82,000 worth of results.

Social Media Amplification Strategy Planning 

If you’re active in social media marketing, you know success starts with a good plan. But maybe some of the above is new to you or you’re starting from scratch. Either way, below are some tips for planning your social media amplification. 

1. Start with your intended goal for social media amplification. 

Before utilizing the tactics above, understand what your goals are for social media amplification. 

Maybe it’s simply brand awareness. Or maybe your goals are a combination of things, such as driving leads and increasing demand for your product or services. 

Always define your “why” before jumping straight in. 

2. Build a strategic plan for each social amplification tactic. 

Although your organization should utilize each tactic mentioned above, it;ll take some time to have the full amplification engine running. 

So you might start with one or two, before moving onto the next one. And that’s okay! 

With that said, each tactic deserves its own plan to ensure its success. Think about how each tactic can be used to reach your intended goals and what you need to make it happen. 

Create a simple outline with the steps you want to take, the people to get involved, the resources you’ll need, and your plan to measure the success of these efforts. 

3. Get ongoing support for your social media efforts.

When building this plan out, you need support, whether that’s more people on your team, a manager, or executive leadership.

Without their influence, involvement, and ongoing support, social media amplification can only go so far.

You’d be surprised today how many executives STILL don’t see social media as highly important to their business’ growth. 

And some still treat social media more as something just an intern can handle. Yes, this is still happening in today’s highly social world. 

4. Bake in your timelines before analyzing further. 

Your social media amplification efforts should be given some time before you switch things up or re-evaluate. Many of these tactics take time to work and resonate with audiences. 

So if you pivot too soon, you could miss the mark on when something was just about to deliver your intended results. 

But if you wait too long, you waste time, money, and resources on a strategy that should’ve been adjusted sooner.  

It’s okay to monitor the impact as you go and keep tabs, but give yourself some time. Set timely expectations for your team, managers, or leaders and understand that the impact won’t be felt overnight. 

Social Media Amplification Tools

Social media amplification tools are pretty simple and straightforward. And there are a few options to look into, but let’s focus on the main categories. 

Social Media Management 

Social media management tools will help you schedule and monitor branded social posts. And some have many other features and integrations to maximize effectiveness. 

For example, you can choose a tool like Khoros. We partnered with them to bring the best of employee advocacy and social media together. 

But there are other smaller social media management tools like Buffer, Agorapulse, and more. Or, if you have a marketing automation tool like HubSpot, you can utilize its social media management tools for brand accounts.

Paid Social Accounts

If you have the budget, amplifying content through paid social is the quickest way to reach more people. But it’s also the fastest way to burn money if you don’t have goals and a plan for how you’ll target them. 

Naturally, you’ll want to set up your paid accounts on places like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You don’t have to use them all, so choose the accounts you’d like to start with. 

Additionally, you could use something like Metadata to help manage spend and targeting on paid social. It works with LinkedIn, Facebook, and Quora). 

Employee Advocacy Software

Enabling employees to help share, create, and engage with content is a HUGE component to helping distribute your content. And amplifying content via employee networks has a reach that your branded channels just can’t touch. 

There are three ways to launch an employee advocacy program, but a platform will make everything easy for both you and your employees. 

The challenges with trying to do this without a platform include:

• Limited visibility and reporting
• No simple way to organize content
• Can’t reach everyone in efficient ways
• Content isn’t personalized to users’ interests

This is where EveryoneSocial comes in. We have a free forever starter plan or the paid option that gives you everything you need for success. 

We aren’t the only employee advocacy software either, so always make sure you vet a potential vendor to ensure it meets your needs. 

Final Thoughts

Phew! Congrats for making it this far!

This was certainly a deep-dive post, but hopefully you now have a better understanding of social media amplification. It’s one of the TOP things you can do at your company to drive more business growth and ROI for your content. 

It’s also important to fully understand your customers and audience with their needs, what challenges they have, and how they engage with content. From there, you can really build a content pipeline where amplification resonates. 

So the question is, are you ready to build a modern social media amplification strategy? 

Want to scale social media amplification and content distribution? One of the best ways is via employee social networks. See how EveryoneSocial can benefit your company and people. Schedule your demo! 

The post Social Media Amplification (The Modern Guide to Drive ROI) appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

It’s why many organizations have a thought leadership strategy in place or are thinking about how to leverage their internal expertise further. 

And it’s even more important today since standing out among a sea of brands, products, and channels is insanely challenging. Plus, you need an effective way to distribute insights and messaging to where people regularly consume information. 

Below, I’ll get into the goal of thought leadership, who’s involved in it today, and some tactics to get your thought leadership strategy headed in the right direction. Let’s dive in! 

What’s the Goal of Thought Leadership?

Before maximizing who’s involved and the tactics, you need to understand the goal of exploring thought leadership. 

While your company may have a slightly different vision than the next, most thought leadership strategies aim to accomplish the following: 

• Help your brand create a unique point of view in your specific market.
• Establish you and your brand as the go-to source of industry information and trends.
• Organically improve your company’s reputation and increase trust in it.
• Grow marketing and sales results over time through consistent content. 
• Give your organization an edge and competitive advantage. 

Don’t forget the thought leadership data.

There’s plenty of data out there that illustrates the impact a thought leadership strategy has on business. Here are just a few quick highlights: 

• 54% of decision-makers — and 48% of the C-Suite — say they spend more than an hour per week reading and reviewing thought leadership.
• 65% of buyers say thought leadership significantly changed the perception of a company for the better.
• 63% of buyers say thought leadership is important in providing proof that an organization genuinely understands or can solve specific business challenges.
• 90% of decision-makers say that referrals from people they know and respect will be moderately, very or extremely effective in earning their attention and purchase consideration.

Who Can Establish Thought Leadership Today?

Any company in any industry can establish thought leadership.

Certainly, some industries are more competitive and others are saturated, but you can still win and stand out as THE trusted brand in your niche.

And here there are three specific groups of people within the organization from which thought leadership can emanate: 

• Executives
• Subject Matter Experts
• Employees 

There could be some overlap among these groups of people, but it’s the best way to think about your internal thought leadership. 

“Thought leadership is one of the most effective tools an organization can use to demonstrate its value to customers during a tough economy — even more so than traditional advertising or product marketing, according to B2B buyers.” – 2022 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report by Edelman and LinkedIn. 

Executives 

Leaders or executives within an organization are no-brainers when it comes to helping establish thought leadership. People gravitate toward executives’ content and are already interested in what they have to say. 

Many businesses today have grown significantly in brand awareness and revenue just because their leaders are highly active on social media, on podcasts, at events, and more. In other words, they’re regularly sharing their knowledge and innovative ideas. 

A few such execs I can think of right now include:

• David Cancel, Founder of Drift
• Chris Walker, Founder/CEO Refine Labs
• Rand Fishkin, Founder/CEO SparkToro

Subject Matter Experts

A subject matter expert (SME) is a person who’s an authority in a particular field. These individuals are sought out to offer insights, solve specific problems, or meet challenges unique to their expertise.

It’s very similar to how we define a thought leader — just a different term that’s often used interchangeably.  

An executive can be a subject matter expert as well, but an SME can also be someone else within the organization with highly specialized knowledge. This is why I separate them out. 

For example, here at EveryoneSocial, we have a few subject matter experts that are on the frontline of sales demos and implementation kick-offs of our product, but are not in the C-Suite.

Employees

Traditionally, thought leadership tended to be executive leaders of an organization or an internal subject matter expert. 

And while that’s still certainly true, employees can also be “micro-thought leaders.”

Everyone has a social network, from the intern to the CEO. And everyone has experiences and knowledge in their job field or interests.

While not every employee may be an expert in the high-level industry they work in per se, they can still do two very important things:

• Amplify the reach of thought leadership. If you use an employee advocacy software to help (which you should!), then this can be loaded with thought leadership content that can be easily distributed to people’s networks. And if you want to further boost posts from executives or brand handles, you can encourage others to engage with that content. 

• Build their own personal brands. Whether an employee is highly active on social media or hangs more on the sidelines, this provides an opportunity for them to increase their expertise, grow their professional development, and contribute on social media in a meaningful way. 

And you never know what employee might become more established as an even larger go-to source of knowledge within. 

We’ve seen it happen numerous times when an individual employee contributor develops a reputation as a direct thought leader within the company.

How to Build Your Thought Leadership Strategy

Alrighty, now that you understand some high-level items and who’s involved, it’s time to piece your strategy together. There’s no perfect process, but these are some essential steps to head in the right direction. 

Define your goals.

What’s the overall goal of your thought leadership strategy? Beyond the high-level results you can achieve, it’s good to understand why you’re enabling this.

First, is this strategy just specific to you and your role? Or is it more of a company-wide effort where you get multiple executives, subject matter experts, and employees involved? Or is it both?

I’ll give two examples of goals below. 

• Individual goal: I want to share my knowledge and get more professional opportunities based on my skills and expertise. 

• Company goal: I want to enable various thought leaders in our organization to better distribute content and build trust for the brand to increase revenue.  

Understand your audience.

As with most things  in business, you need to understand your audience. And there are lots of questions you’ll want to address to ensure your thought leader content appeals to the right people. 

Some examples questions you should have answers to include the following: 

• Who is our target audience?
• What do they care about?
• What information and content would get their attention?
• Where do they currently consume content?
• Who are they already following and trusting in their space? 
• What are they engaging with and showing interest in? 
• What are they sharing or saying? What are their perspectives?

Naturally, there are probably more questions you may have. 

But asking these questions and looking into how your target audience interacts with content, will help guide your overall content and story needs. This then also leads into your point of view. 

Define your point(s) of view.

One way to help you and your company stand out as a thought leader is to have a unique point(s) of view.

So ask yourself the following questions?

• What is your stance?
• Why do you believe this
• How can you show people how they benefit from this knowledge?

And the reason I mentioned about really understanding your target audience is because your point of view only connects if your audience insights are baked within it. 

This means that your point of view needs content tailored toward how your audience will pay attention and consume these insights. 

Taking a stance within your content is a must. And then consistently communicating and telling that story in various formats will be how it connects and informs people. 

Don’t be afraid to be bold, but don’t make outrageous statements just for shock value. Instead, believe in your views and back them up with insights and evidence. 

Organize for efficiency.

A good thought leadership strategy requires strong organization. If you want to reach your goals, it’s about consistency in creating and sharing content and engaging with your audience.

And if you aren’t organized or have your framework in place, it’s more challenging to generate desired outcomes. 

So figure out how you want to organize your content and share it.

What resources or tools do you need to make this easier for you and your company? Maybe it’s podcast software, a project management tool, or an employee advocacy platform, for example. 

Find the tools and define the processes necessary to help you be organized and more efficient with your time. After all, you have specific job duties beyond thought leadership, so being smart with your time is key. 

Distribute thought leadership.

How do you want to get this targeted content to your audiences? 

Well, since you’ve already defined the audience and where they consume content, you should know where you need to be active.

For most thought leadership strategies, there are some standard channels that make sense to be highly active on. 

But there are also many more places to distribute your message than ever before that are worth considering. 

Here are a few important ones to consider:

• Your own social media channels
• Company social media channels
• Amplification through employee social networks
• Podcasts (Your own, your company’s, or others that you can appear on as a guest)
• Guest writing on popular websites
• Speaker on webinars or different events
• Join communities related to your industry (Slack, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, etc.) 
• Provide quotes to other publications related to your topics
• Answer industry questions on Quora

Remember, the goal is not to spam all of these distribution channels. 

Instead, it’s about finding effective ways to engage and share your knowledge that educates and teaches your audience something. Sales will come later! 

Determine how you’ll measure results.

So all this sounds pretty good, right? But the big question executives or managers might have is how you plan to measure results or show ROI. 

That’s really what is going to matter most as you present a plan and spend time, resources, and money on thought leadership. 

I won’t get into every bit of detail in this post, but these are all the ways you can start to measure the impact of your thought leadership content strategy.

• Are engagements (likes, comments, shares, etc.) increasing and reaching the right people and companies?
• Do you or your company get more brand mentions in articles or on social media? Are you getting invited to events and asked to appear on podcasts? 
• Are your social network followers increasing? (This can be your company’s page or social handles, as well as executives’, subject matter experts’, and employees’.)
• Is direct traffic and organic traffic increasing to your website? Those can be indicators that your insights and company awareness is growing. 
• Gain insights to how people hear about you or your company by asking directly, on website forms, or during sales calls. You’ll start to learn more about where people are consuming your content, and this can help you tie thought leadership in to lead generation and revenue. 

Now, some reporting is more on the vanity metric side. The real value is that target audiences are consuming, engaging, and raising their hands to work with your company.

And when you can tie this strategy to pipeline and revenue closed, you’ll have no problem getting ongoing support. 

A note about measuring results

Many of the tools you’ll potentially use, such as employee advocacy software, Google Analytics, and your CRM, can start to tell a data story about the impact of thought leadership. 

But you need to remember that measuring every little thing in marketing is hard. Privacy laws continue to tighten up and many places where your audience hangs out aren’t easily accessible in attribution software. 

Thought Leadership Content Trap

Since content plays a major role in the success of your thought leadership strategy, it’s worth noting how careful of a balance you need to have. 

If you don’t produce enough content, it’s easy for the message and insights to get lost. There’s just so much content and information out there that if you do too little, your message will never land. 

But if you create too much content, you also run the risk of overdoing it and annoying people. Now you end up with people ignoring your content because it’s constantly in their face. 

And the other challenge is if your content is too generic. If your posts are mediocre or not fully developed, people will assume everything you’ll create is fluff. 

It’s much harder to convince your target audience of your knowledge and insights if you continually parrot general information that’s already well known. 

Sounds scary, huh? But don’t be intimidated!

Just put yourself in the audience’s shoes and find the balance of how you distribute and share various content and messages. 

Ready to distribute your thought leadership and company content more effectively? Learn how you can enable everyone in your organization to share and create content with EveryoneSocial to drive marketing, sales, and employer brand growth. Schedule your demo today.

The post How To Build A Thought Leadership Strategy Today appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Yet we still see LinkedIn content strategy poorly executed or even neglected today.

If you want to drive real growth through this social network, there are ultimately three main ways to do that: 

• Employees
• Founders/Execs
• Company Page

Below, I’ll get into the strategy behind each of these, complete with tips and examples to ensure you have a strong LinkedIn content strategy going forward. Let’s dive in! 

1. Activate Employees 

If you lead social media for your organization, then you’re likely familiar with employee advocacy or have at least heard the term before. 

The concept is simple: It’s all about enabling employees to be social, so they can drive attention both to the company and to their own personal brands. 

A few years ago, that would give every company a heart attack.

For quite some time, the train of thought was, “No way are we going to let employees have access to social media at work. What if they say something that reflects poorly on the brand!?” 

Sure, there are probably plenty of company executives that STILL think that today. But it’s outdated thinking, especially given how today’s buyers conduct product research.

In fact, more than 90% of B2B buyers and more than 80% of senior executives use social media for research before making purchasing decisions.

Why should employees be in your social strategy?

Social platforms will always prioritize the individual, whether you’d like to think that or not. Mostly because:

• User growth is important to these platforms, so they want people on the platform engaging with people they know.
• People prefer to learn and engage with real humans over brands. 
• This is how social platforms get ad revenue. In other words, your company has to pay for its content to appear in people’s feeds. 

Now, company pages are definitely still important and impactful (see below), but individuals outperform them. And unfortunately, the majority of B2B companies have weak company page Linkedin content strategy.

Luckily, you can tap into the power of individuals by encouraging your people to create, share, and engage with content on social media. Ingrain this into your culture, lead by example, make social media a part of the onboarding process for new hires, and provide resources, training, and the right tools. 

Everyone in your org has an influence and has expertise/experiences to share. Let them do it, or get left behind as employees at your competitors dominate the social feeds. 

Need some convincing?

Skeptical? Or maybe you get it, but would love to see some data to back it up?

We’ve got you covered. Here’s a sample of some data around the value of employees on social media

• Content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels. (Social Media Today)
• Leads developed through employee social marketing convert 7x more frequently than other leads. (Marketing Advisory Network)
• People are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on a social media referral. (HubSpot)
• Companies with a successful employee advocacy program are 58% more likely to attract — and 20% more likely to retain — top talent. (LinkedIn)

2. Founders and Executives

The founders or executives leading the organization must be on social media today. Period. It’s the best way to tell the company’s story, mission, and values. 

And people want to hear from leaders of the company, whether it’s about the business or industry they represent or their own personal insights.

While people want to hear from your brand’s employees, the company’s execs are the face of the brand, so they’re essential to building trust and fostering interest on social media.

Typically, founders and executives have some of the best reach on social media. Mostly because people like to understand and learn from those who have experience starting a company or leading the organization.

And even if your executive team doesn’t have much of a following yet, once they start getting consistent with social media you’ll notice their accounts begin to snowball in growth. 

A LinkedIn content strategy where executives are involved does a few things:

• Expands brand reach
• Tells the company story
• Builds brand trust
• Drives leads and sales
• Attracts top talent

And, most importantly, when other employees see execs taking social seriously, it encourages them to share online as well. Leading by example is another way to encourage employee advocacy (back to #1 above). 

How can founders and executives get involved?

The main challenge is that leaders have to BELIEVE in social media. If they still see it has a commodity or waste of time, it’ll be near impossible to convince them otherwise. 

And unfortunately, there probably isn’t much that can be done until they see the value for themselves — like AmFam CEO Jack Salzwedel does — or start opening their minds a bit further. But if they’re onboard, here’s how they can get involved: 

• Founders and executives need to make social media part of company culture. They can do this by encouraging employees, ensuring social is part of the onboarding process, sharing their thoughts about being a social company, and more.
• Leaders should dedicate 30 minutes a day to social media. It doesn’t need to be a massive time commitment — just commit 10 minutes to create and post, 10 minutes to respond to comments, and 10 minutes to connect with others. Done! 
• If you work directly with the founder or executive, you can assist with their LinkedIn content strategy. Help them define what they want to be known for and work with them to optimize their LinkedIn profile.
• They should be the face of the employee advocacy program and use it. When executives share why this program exists and how employees can get involved, participation increases. “Lead by example” has a huge positive impact. Founders and executives don’t need to run the program specifically, but they should be highly visible within it. 

We covered a lot about executives on social media, so make sure you check out this in-depth post with tips and more examples. 

3. Company Page

Although individuals take priority in social media, it doesn’t mean your branded company pages should be ignored.  

But it can be difficult to make company accounts stand out when LinkedIn prioritizes individuals and paid advertising. Seriously, I was looking at a few brand accounts on LinkedIn that have millions of followers, and most of their posts reach just 1% of that. 

Another reason company pages sometimes fall flat is simply because they’re boring and too formulaic. It usually follows the pattern of blog post link, product link, event link, and open job link. 

While we don’t know all the intricacies of LinkedIn’s algorithm, its goal is to keep users on the platform and consuming content in their feeds, so links are often deprioritized, especially if that’s all you post on your company page. 

And, honestly, you probably don’t care too much about a company’s self-promotional stuff unless you’re a customer, investor, or employee, right? So why is that the only thing your company page is doing? 

What can you do?

The formula of a successful company page shouldn’t be too surprising and is much simpler than you may realize. The main challenges for most social media managers — or companies that don’t have an in-house social media expert — are the following:

• Finding the right brand voice
• Creating unique content for their ideal audience
• Being consistent

Here’s how you can approach a LinkedIn content strategy for the brand page:

→ Post educational and unique content 90%+ of the time. Save the sales pitch and requests to download/join things to 10% or less.

→ Post 5-6 times per week, like clockwork. Consistency is imperative. 

→ Add creativity and establish a brand voice. Yes, even those stuffy corporate industries need to do these things. 

→ Comment as the brand on relevant content and respond every time someone tags or comments on your company content. This shows that you’re paying attention and engaging with user..  

Want to see a brand that does this incredibly well?

Look at Remote, which comments on others’ content almost daily. This consistent engagement helped the brand gain hundreds of followers a day and surpassed 200k company page followers as of this writing. 

Another great example is Gong, a company page that has an amazing LinkedIn content strategy that fueled both its growth and its brand affinity. Their LinkedIn content strategy includes all the tactics from this post, which helped them reach unicorn tech status. 

What About LinkedIn Paid Ads? 

You may have noticed that my above tactics do not include LinkedIn ads. 

Are ads still relevant for an effective LinkedIn content strategy? Yes.

Are they absolutely necessary to drive results? Not really. 

I see LinkedIn ads as an additional lever to pull once your other LinkedIn content strategy tactics for this social network are in place. A few reasons for this:

• When employees, founders, and your company page content is great and reaching more people, your ads become more trusted and familiar when they appear in the audience’s social feeds.
• People will go to the company website directly or search on Google because of the strong organic LinkedIn content. We see it all the time. But now you’ve increased your retargeting list of more informed people who already trust your team and brand. This ultimately leads to better results from your remarketing ad spend. 

Often companies jump to paid ads before they really have a strong LinkedIn content strategy figured out or even their best target audience. This can result in wasting thousands of dollars.

LinkedIn ads are certainly an effective channel, but they’re costly, so think of them as the icing on the cake to your overall strategy. 

Final Thoughts

In my opinion, LinkedIn is one of the best social networks for B2B and SaaS organizations to establish credibility and drive revenue today. 

Will that happen overnight for your brand? Of course not, but your content strategy on this social network can pay huge dividends for years to come. 

As you think about a deeper LinkedIn content strategy, you really need the three key areas I discussed in this article: employees, founders/execs, and the company page. And you can utilize LinkedIn ads to further reach your ideal customers. 

However, the above three tactics will do amazing things for your brand, marketing, sales, and recruiting efforts. So what are you waiting for? 

The post 3 Ways to Build A Strong LinkedIn Content Strategy Today appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

It’s a hot topic and today more companies understand the competitive advantages they gain by enabling their people to be employee influencers. 

A team of socially active employees can fuel marketing, sales, recruiting, and employer brand for their organization. Whether that’s 100 or 1,000 employees, their impact can be exponential.

Plus, it helps employees’ own personal brands and professional endeavors to boot. Score!

So how exactly can you launch and run your employee social program?

Currently, the three common main ways are:

• Manually
• LinkedIn Company Pages
• Employee Advocacy Software

1. Manually

One option you have to begin getting your employee advocacy strategy in place is to manually handle it all. 

With this method, you don’t use a specific tool. Instead, everything is done by maintaining spreadsheets, sending newsletters, Slacking your team on a company-wide channel, sourcing content, or using a project management tool.

There are quite a few organizations we’ve talked to that do this or it’s where they began their employee advocacy journey.

The challenge with taking a manual approach, is it’s much more work to manage. Plus, it’s fairly ineffective to scale. 

Pros

• Good if you have no budget. You can utilize the tools and content you already have.
• Allows you to test out advocacy without fully committing to a strategy and platform. 
• Helps you learn the ins and outs of employee advocacy fairly quickly.
• You can manage and run it on your own time. 

Cons

• Can be time-consuming and a lot more work, especially when you have other job duties. 
• Easy to get disorganized with various moving parts that effective employee advocacy requires. 
• Doesn’t get employees engaged. People can easily forget about it, especially if you use only a specific channel like email to notify employees to share or engage.
• More challenging to get employees to create and share content, especially since not everyone is confident with social media.
• Lack of support from outside experts. You’re on your own to figure things out and learn from mistakes. 
• Not as easy to put compliance guards in place, especially if you work for a regulated industry, such as finance or healthcare, where this is a must.

2. LinkedIn Company Pages

Not too long ago, LinkedIn had an employee advocacy product called LinkedIn Elevate. It was pretty popular among enterprise organizations to get employees engaging and sharing content. 

However, LinkedIn shut down that business and combined the advocacy features for free into Company pages.

Great, right? Well, to some extent, yes, but it still comes with challenges and limitations.

Pros

• You already use your LinkedIn company page, so now you can engage and get employees sharing from it. 
• It costs you nothing to get started and get more content in front of more employees. 
• More organized and can also see what other employees are sharing to boost views and engagement.
• Fairly easy to start using and navigating to begin your employee advocacy journey. 

Cons

• Only has the ability to share via LinkedIn. Neglects other social channels that might matter more to you and your employees. 
• No further support, integrations, or other features that make gathering content and generating results easier. 
• Lack of adding RSS feeds or keywords to pull in third-party content beyond your company content. However, you can filter trending articles on Linkedin for people to share. 
• Alerts to employees will be useful only if your people log in to LinkedIn often and primarily use this channel. Not all employees are as active on LinkedIn though or utilize this one social platform as much, so this could be a big missed opportunity to be where your employees are.

3. Employee Advocacy Software

So how are some companies crushing their employee advocacy results? By utilizing a platform completely dedicated to this strategy, of course! 

The number of advocacy products has grown over the years — just take a look at the G2 Category of software in this space. 

But the reason these tools are so popular is because they have powerful features and are easy to learn and use. Let’s get into some quick pros and cons of using software for your employee social program.

Pros

• One central hub for all content and for employees to read, engage, create, and share content. 
• Content can easily be distributed in multiple ways like organized groups/feeds, through push notifications, Slack or Teams, mobile apps, etc. This enables you to easily meet employees where they’re most active, so if they don’t want to log in to social media all the time, they still have the content to engage with and share. 
• Saves time not only for the admin managing the program, but also for the users who are all very busy beyond worrying about sharing on social media. 
• Detailed data and analytics to understand the program impact internally and externally. 
• Ongoing support, training, and product features that drive more ROI for your organization. 

Cons

• To effectively scale and grow, it will require a budget. So if your company is tight on money, a platform might not be possible or affordable at the moment. 

Fact: However, the good news is EveryoneSocial has a free-forever version, although it does not include all our functionality. We also have a more affordable Teams plan, if you need to activate only a handful of users. 

• Program adoption among employees can lose steam, so it may require more time to strategize and curate content for your people. 
• While easier, an effective program will need more of your or your team’s time. However, if this is a priority, you’ll no doubt see some amazing ROI.

What Route Should You Go?

Employee advocacy software! 

Now, you can say we are a bit biased as an employee advocacy platform business, but it’s because we know how powerful utilizing a tool is for this process.

Just take a look at some of the ROI and results our customers have experienced.

Remember: You can use EveryoneSocial for free or upgrade to get the maximum features and support from our team. Interested? Schedule your demo to learn more. 

But you also have to choose the option that’s right for you, so here are a few questions to consider:

• Do you have executive and/or leadership support?
• Will you have multiple departments and/or all employees active?
• What kind of budget and team do you have to support the initiative?
• Do you see this as a “must-have” program and priority internally? (We definitely recommend it to be a priority in today’s social media-focused world.)
• Are you giving employees a voice and encouraging user-generated content?
• Do you have an easy way to reach employees where they’re most active?
• Are you looking to have employees share to other channels beyond LinkedIn? 

If this is completely new to you, you have no budget (even if you work with multiple teams), and you want to activate only a select few people, the manual route or LinkedIn’s employee advocacy function will certainly suffice. 

Building manually or via LinkedIn can also be a great learning experience and a way to dabble into activating employees as influencers. 

And when the timing is right and the budget is set to turn your social program into a massive competitive advantage, EveryoneSocial will be ready for you!

The post 3 Ways to Launch Your Employee Advocacy Program appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

As a marketer myself, I’m right there with you. The marketing industry is filled with acronyms and cliche jargon. 

While the term brand affinity might appear to be another generic term in the marketing cog, it’s actually fairly important to understand today. And not only is it critical to understand, but it’s also necessary to know how to actually build it within your company. 

Here’s our modern playbook to all things brand affinity.

What is Brand Affinity?

Brand affinity is how customers feel about your brand and the connection they have to your mission, values, and goals as a company. There’s an emotional trust built over time, which can’t be improved just by spending more ad dollars or trying to increase conversions. 

While your product or services plays an important role in helping brand affinity, it’s not the main driver. It’s the leadership teams, the employees, and the feeling people get when interacting with those folks and your brand in various channels. 

Customers become invested in your brand because they’ve established trust in the company. Your product or service might also be top-notch, but brand affinity is built through the emotional connection.

The difference between brand affinity and brand loyalty

But wait, this feels kind of similar to the term brand loyalty. Well, you’re not wrong, as they’re often used to describe the same thing, but there is a difference between them. 

Someone can still be loyal to a brand because the product or service delivers results, but they can also not have any affinity toward the company.

Why is building brand affinity important?

When people feel connected to your brand and believe in it, it’s much easier to grab their attention, build word of mouth, and create demand for those wanting to use your product or service. People trust your vision, content, and leadership over time and see your brand as an industry leader.

The Benefits of Brand Affinity

As you see, brand affinity is pretty valuable and contributes to your company’s success. But here’s a list of benefits, just in case you or your colleagues need more encouragement to begin investing in this area. 

• It builds stronger relationships with customers, employees, and general audiences that could one day become customers. 

• It helps give your company brand an identity and personality. No more stuffy corporate branding — it’s time to develop a stance and voice to your brand. 

• Your company trust factor increases among all types of audiences. Treating customers and employees well, having a clear mission and values, and being visible across various digital channels begins to establish trust. 

• It drives overall brand awareness. Content and word gets out about products or services much faster when those already supporting it have affinity toward the brand. 

• Word of mouth compounds. Today, getting referrals or others talking about your company with friends, family, and colleagues is a huge channel for driving growth. More than 90% of people trust suggestions from family and friends, according to HubSpot.

• Brand affinity can increase sales. When customers feel your business shares their values, it drives confidence in choosing your product or services. And loyal customers will continue to buy from a company they trust and may also make even bigger purchases in the future. Brand affinity increases your customer base, which leads to more revenue. Cha-ching!

How to Build A Brand Affinity Strategy In Today’s Climate

The way marketing and brand affinity is built today has changed. There’s certainly overlap with past times, but with digital tools, the evolving way buyers conduct research, and social media, the same-old strategies just won’t cut it.

You’ll find there are some consistent things that’ll always matter, regardless of the business space evolving. 

But there are also strategies and channels that, if ignored, will make brand affinity much more challenging for you. And this is exactly when your competitors get a head start. 

Below are some ways to better build brand affinity today in order to emotionally connect with people and create a trusted brand personality.

1. Talk to customers and audiences.

It might be cliche and eye-rolling to hear it, but talking to your customers and audiences is necessary. It’s hammered home by every business leader and LinkedIn influencer. 

Why? Because it’s so true and often people STILL forget this golden rule. 

But it also matters for your brand affinity strategy. It’s the best way to understand how customers and audiences feel about your brand, what emotions your brand evokes, how they’d describe your brand, etc. These insights can help you adjust your messaging and strategy or know if you’re on the right track. 

Get on calls, have your teams that are customer-facing ask questions, send out surveys, do pulse checks, etc. Whatever it is, start gathering feedback and information from those outside your organization.

2. Refine your brand personality.

Often in B2B or SaaS companies, the brand can be kind of stale and lack a personality. With so many online channels and ways to connect with the audience, your brand needs a personality. 

What’s its tone? What’s its style? How do you interact with your audiences? Knowing the answers to these questions won’t only help your company stand out, but it’ll also give people a reason to gravitate toward your brand more. 

The challenge is that your brand personality needs to be conveyed through every communication channel and touchpoint through the customer and buyer journey.

3. Engage with people from branded social media accounts.

With your brand personality defined, it’s time to get your messaging out to the world. One of the best ways to do that is through social media and your branded company accounts.

When people want information about your brand or its product, social media is one of the first places they’ll turn to. In fact, 54% of them use social media to research products.

Plus, people want to follow companies on social media, which is why 86% of social media users follow at least one brand.

And how you engage with people online can have a positive impact on brand affinity and your bottom line — even when the person hasn’t purchased your product yet. Research shows that 71% of consumers who’ve had a good experience with a company on social media are likely to recommend the brand.

So keep your branded social accounts updated with fresh, relevant content, and consistently engage with your audience to help build that valuable brand affinity.

4. Activate employee social networks.

As a company, one important go-to market strategy today is elevating your people and brand through your team’s own individual social networks. This is called various terms but common ones are employee advocacy, employee influencers, and employee amplification. 

The key here is that the content shared and created by employees is a mix of their expertise, personal interests, and company content. This increases reach and trust among audiences, which become synonymous with the company brand. 

When your people’s connections see the company and look into what it does, positive brand affinity develops. These are some of thoughts that start to develop: 

• If employees are actively sharing and engaging with their company, it must be a great brand and place to work. 
• Clearly, the company encourages and supports their people sharing their voices out to the world, and that’s awesome to see. 
• I’ve never heard of “XYZ company” before, but I really enjoy “ABC’s” content. I’m going to see what their employer is all about.

The audiences may not all have a need for your product or service now, but you can bet they’re already building trust and affinity via your people. 

So when they may be in the market, who do you think will come to mind first? If someone in their network has a need, who do you think they’ll recommend? That’s the power of employees creating and sharing content! 

5. Work on your founder brand.

While not every founder is a great marketer or content creator, it’s still important that they’re highly visible to audiences. 

After all, they came up with the business and have the most insights about the value it provides. So who better to tell that story and drive the brand mission forward?

Although it’s amazing when C-Suite leaders post on social media, write articles, speak at events, and appear on podcasts, it’s not always realistic for every leader to do it all at a high frequency.  

But this is another valuable way to build brand affinity by humanizing the person(s) leading the company. Even if there’s a team around these leaders, helping schedule and craft their narrative, it’s a mistake to not have the founders be heard in some way. 

6. Build customer relationships.

Talking to customers for intel is one thing, but it’s also building that trusted relationship with them. It helps you navigate through the good and bad, as no product or service is going to be perfect. 

But the reason so many companies invest in customer support teams (if not, they should!) is to nurture these relationships. When people have good experiences with the people in your organization, that fuels brand affinity. 

People trust that your team will get things done for them, that you’ll deliver value, and that your team treats everyone with respect. That fuels word of mouth, because people will talk about the great experiences they have. 

Plus, it influences how they’ll continue to purchase your product or services when they move on to new organizations.

How Does Social Media Build Brand Affinity?

While there are many parts to developing a strong brand affinity strategy, social media plays a major role. As you saw above, there are a few separate call outs for social media. But why is it so important? 

It comes down to four buckets:

• Social media allows you to humanize your brand easier.
• Social media is the quickest way to directly engage with audiences.
• Social media is the easiest way to gather intel and feedback.
• Social media is the best way to distribute great content and experiences. 

While I’m simplifying these buckets, it should help paint the picture of why social media is so crucial to your brand affinity and go-to market strategy. 

How to Measure Brand Affinity

With all your company efforts, naturally you’ll want to measure brand affinity. But how can you calculate those efforts?

At first, it will appear not super easy to measure results, since many of the efforts tie to driving connection and emotion to your brand. 

But there are a few ways that show your strategy is having an impact. Here’s what to measure and keep track of for brand affinity campaigns:

• Ask customers and audiences. See what they feel about your brand anonymously in surveys and what words they associate with your brand. 

• Brand search volume. Look at Google Search Console to see how often your brand is searched and clicked on. You can also look at your company page on LinkedIn, and see the amount of brand searches for your page in the last seven days. 

• Social media engagement. Is your company getting more followers to engage or comment on its content? Are you organically getting more positive mentions on social media? 

• Time spent with content. If audiences spend more time reading and viewing your content, it’s another indicator they trust your brand. You can find this data in Google Analytics, watch time on videos pending the channel you use, etc. 

• Number of subscribers — newsletter, Youtube, or other channels. Not only does it signal that you have interesting content, but it also demonstrates that people see your brand’s value and want to be part of a community around it.

These are some popular ways to measure your brand affinity. But as you think through this, you may have additional ways you’d like to keep track or signals to monitor. 

Best of luck on your brand affinity journey!

The post How To Build Brand Affinity Today [The Modern Playbook] appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

But within marketing, there will always be channels that are part of the overall playbook. One of those being paid advertising, whether it’s paid social (LinkedIn, Facebook) or paid search (Google, Bing). 

However, paid advertising can be challenging today for a few reasons:

• Paid channels are more competitive than ever.
• The costs continue to rise, increasing your spend for less results.
• People are more accustomed to ads, often ignoring or scrolling past them.
• Ad blocker use continues to rise.

Does that mean ads are completely ineffective? Not quite, as they still create brand awareness and drive revenue. However, we’ve found that scaling your advertising results improves by activating employer influencers. 

Let’s explore! 

The Employee Influencer Effect

I don’t want to spend a ton of time on the value of employee influencers, but let’s have a quick overview for context. 

Today, social media is the place where people consume, connect, research, learn, and buy. Social channels are undoubtedly important for your company to be active on. And part of that now is enabling employees to be influencers.

Whether employees have 100 or 1 million connections, every member of your team is capable of driving growth by leveraging their social network. And here’s some data to back up the value: 

• Content has 2x higher engagement when shared by employees. (LinkedIn)
• On average, your employees have a network reach that is 10x larger than your company’s follower base. (LinkedIn)
• Brand messages reach 561% further when shared by employees vs. the same messages shared via official brand social channels. (MSLGroup)

Additionally, when employees actively create, share, and engage on social media, it benefits their own personal brands as well. A win-win!

3 Ways Employee Influencers Improve Paid Ad Strategies

Promoting your content via ads is important, but it’s not the only thing you should rely on, especially given economic changes and varying marketing budgets. 

While there are many benefits of employee influencers for marketing, activating your people as influencers who can share your content to their networks will improve the efficiency and overall results of your paid efforts. 

Let’s explore how. 

P.S. Make sure to share this content with your marketing team members and leadership.

1. They optimize paid ad dollars.

Companies spend thousands or millions per year on paid ads. Here at EveryoneSocial, we’re in the six-figure range by the end of the year ourselves. 

But think about what your company is spending on ads right now. Depending on its size and marketing budget, it can be quite a bit just for ads. Then add an extra expense if you have a marketing agency running these for you. 

Yet even as ads become more expensive, many businesses rarely bat an eye about throwing more money into campaigns to “keep up.” It’s so ingrained in marketing strategies, that when results taper off, the solution is often to dump more money into ads to try to turn them around!  

Instead, you can optimize your paid advertising dollars with employee influencers. Simply take a portion of that ad budget and put it toward an employee influencer program.  

A program like EveryoneSocial costs a fraction of paid ads. For example, outcomes from employee influencers we found is about $0.05!

Think about the reach of employees, all who typically have an average of 1,000 social connections. Say you have 250 employees actively sharing and creating, that’s a reach of 250k people! And this doesn’t include employees’ secondary networks seeing that content or the growth of employee networks over time, which results in further influence of more people.  

The impact: 

• Save money from the increased costs of ads/targeting.
• Cost per click and cost per conversion on ads improves.
• Your dollars go farther with employee influencers.

In EveryoneSocial, you can see what the employee influencer impact would cost you in paid ads to understand the cost savings and ROI. Plus, you can also enter actual paid ad data points if you’d like to be even more accurate compared with default averages.

2. Improve Ad Consumption and Engagement 

Think about the two stats below for a second: 

• The average global social ad CTRs are down 30% year over year. (Statista)
• 42% of people say ads that showed up based on their online searches were annoying. And 36% said social ads targeted based on their interests and behavior were annoying. (eMarketer)

What you see from this data is that your paid ads may not be as effective as you think.

Ad consumption, reception, and engagement all improve when employee influencers are part of your marketing strategy. Why? Because they provide a humanized touchpoint. 

The beauty here is employee social posts don’t need to be all about the company or its product. When your people share personal content, talk about their interests, or post about their expertise or even tools they love, such as in the example below, this content still triggers trust and brand awareness.

Social users can easily see where employees work, based on their headlines or bios, and they can simply click to learn more about the company. In other words, employees sharing even personal content kickstarts the brand-awareness cycle! 

As someone in marketing, who’s inundated with technologies, I tend to overlook most ads targeted toward me. Being in the industry has made me ignore most of them, unless something catches my eye as a good ad. 

However, I still engage and consume some ads. You know which ones those tend to be? Those where I’m familiar with the brand name because I’ve seen employee content first. 

This is exactly how I heard about a few companies and their products. Then, when I start seeing ads, I’m more interested in the content and brand because I already have some awareness and trust toward them. 

Sometimes, there might be superior competitors’ products out there. But when I need a product to solve a particular problem, the one I’m going to think of immediately is the one that I’ve seen employee content and ads from.

The winning combo is employee social content + ads. These touchpoints continue to influence others and create demand for your business. 

The impact: 

• More people stop and consume the ad content.
• There’s an increase in potential engagements and clicks.
• There’s additional influence in creating demand and pipeline.

3. Strengthens Retargeting Lists

If you have a paid advertising strategy, then you probably have retargeting campaigns running. Here’s why they’re effective:

• Website visitors who are retargeted are more likely to convert by 43%. (Criteo)
• 25% of online viewers enjoy seeing retargeted ads. (CMO)

Retargeting already has some good ROI. Now imagine those statistics amplified by employee influencers and social content because there’s a much better connection to the ad content and the brand itself.

Here’s the scenario. 

People who discover your company and its content from employees may end up on specific retargeting lists by clicking links or independently exploring your website. 

These retargeting lists are triggered by actions people take on the site and, from there, they see more tailored ads that your company has set up. And because people already trust your employees and their content, retargeting keeps the brand top of mind for when users are ready to buy. 

And your strengthened retargeting now improves ad relevance, which can be another problem with paid ads. 

According to Adobe findings, 70%+ of advertisers believe their ads are relevant to the audience they target. Yet only 8% of people think ads they see online are always relevant. 

That’s a huge gap!

But with increased retargeting lists influenced by employee networks, your targeting strengthens based on how they’ve interacted with your brand website.

The impact:

• It increases your retargeting lists that are influenced by employee networks.
• It strengthens retargeting ads when users see employees’ content in their social feeds.
• It improves ads’ overall effectiveness and relevance, as well as lowers ad costs.

Final Thoughts

As you think about your paid advertising strategy, it’s good to understand the impact employee influencers can have on the effectiveness of those campaigns. 

You won’t catch us saying paid advertising is dead, because it’s not true and we aren’t here for clickbait. But paid advertising does have its growing faults, which is why an employee influencer program is a strong complement. 

Instead of spending $100k on an ad campaign, you can spend a fraction on an employee influencer program that greatly improves your ad campaigns and yields results in multiple areas of your business.

Often. if a $100k ad campaign doesn’t work as it used to, the first thought tends to be to throw more money at it! But today, you have other options to optimize your money, drive ROI, and strengthen the results of your marketing strategy. 

Want to better optimize your marketing ROI via employee influencers? Request a demo of EveryoneSocial.  

The post How Employee Influencers Improve Your Paid Ad Strategy appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

In fact, as of 2021, the average person was estimated to encounter between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every. single. day.

And digital advertising is probably never going away — at least anytime soon — and it can still play an important role in your marketing strategy. 

But there are also many challenges to paid advertising, which are often recognized (and ignored) by leadership. By this I mean, the answer to the ad problems is typically to shovel more money to ineffective ads to stay competitive.  

Below, we’ll take a look at the world of paid advertising today and the alternatives to paid ads you can consider. 

Pros and Cons of Paid Ads

Before we jump in, it’s important to note that my colleagues and I recognize the value of paid advertising. 

We run them at EveryoneSocial, and ads are key to distributing great content to people we know would benefit from both it and our product.

Our Head of Paid Ads even wrote an insightful post about optimizing and saving money on paid ads.

But ads aren’t your only option and there are some good alternatives to paid advertising that can empower marketing, sales, and hiring.

I don’t want to spend much time here, so here’s a brief list of some paid advertising pros and cons. 

Pros

• Easily distribute content, product, and brand story to target demographics
• Various targeting options to better reach desired audiences
• Flexibility of campaigns, targeting, content, testing, etc. 

Cons

• Rising costs of paid social and paid search
• More competition to stand out, which further drives up costs
• Consumers tune out ads because they’re accustomed to avoiding them
• Ad blocking increased. In the United States alone, it increased from 15% to 30% since 2014. 
• Only 8% of people think ads they see online are always relevant.

The problems with most ad campaigns is they follow outdated formats, they have little creativity or educational value, their targeting is wrong, or their goal is simply to collect an email address. 

There certainly is an optimization problem in the ad world, but that only gets you so far. 

Alternatives to Paid Ads

Whether you have a tight budget or just want to pair your ads with other options to save money and still generate ROI, there are a few paid ad alternatives worth exploring.

Here are some that we not only do ourselves, but also recommend to other organizations. 

1. Email marketing campaigns 

Although email has been around for what feels like an eternity, it’s still a powerful marketing channel. It’s also a great alternative to paid advertising, especially if you’re on a tight budget. 

Email marketing is relatively low-cost, but it can generate some serious ROI if you set your email campaigns up for success. The other cool thing about email is that you can easily automate things, which is useful if you have a small marketing team. 

But your company can do all sorts of email campaigns, including the following:

• Giveaways
• Newsletters
• Automated Drip Campaigns
• Product announcements 
• Sales/Discounts 
• Events 

The biggest hurdle in email marketing is building your database. But once you start, you’ll be able to generate awareness, convert leads, and retain customers with ease. 

2. Affiliate marketing program

A great way to spread the word about your product or service is through an affiliate marketing program. 

This essentially lets other people tell potential customers about your product. In return, they get a percentage of any sales or other completed actions.

The main advantage here is that the only cost to your company is when someone converts via your affiliates by making a sale or filling out a form for a quote, for example.

Since you pay affiliates only for conversions, you don’t have to pay for ads that generate clicks or awareness.

It’s a lucrative business model.

Need some data? Check out these affiliate marketing statistics: 

• Advertisers generate between 15% and 30% of all sales from affiliate programs.
• More than 80% of brands have affiliate programs.
• America is the biggest player in the affiliate industry with a 39% share.

3. Employee influencer program

Ah, now we get to one of my favorite paid advertising alternatives: an employee influencer program!

You might also call it employee advocacy or social selling or by another term entirely. 

This is the process and strategy of encouraging and motivating employees to be the authentic voices of your brand. Essentially, you enable them to create and share content on social media, exposing their personal networks to your company and its products in an organic way.

Employees have an average of 1,000 social connections, so here’s how that reach breaks down if your company has the following:

• 50 Employees = 50,000+ additional reach
• 100 Employees = 100,000 additional reach
• 500 Employees = 500,000 additional reach 

Note: On average, an employee influencer program involving 1,000 active participants can generate $1,900,000 in advertising value.

And this doesn’t include the network effect.

The network effect is what occurs when the people in your employees’ followers’ networks end up seeing your employees’ content in their feed, too. Hello, exponential reach.

Seriously, check out these brands that have experienced success by making it a part of their go-to market strategy. 

And using an advocacy platform like Everyonesocial to centralize everything makes it very easy to maintain and scale. Plus, it’s a fraction of the cost of paid ads. 

4. Podcasting 

Another alternative to paid advertising to consider is podcasting. This involves a bit more work and time to start scaling, but you can get started with very little money. 

And podcasting is huge! Just take a look at these podcasting stats: 

• In 2022, 51% of the population has listened to a podcast and roughly 78% are familiar with the medium.
• Over one-third (104 million) of Americans listen to podcasts regularly.
• Each week, more Americans listen to podcasts than have Netflix accounts.

People love listening to podcasts, making them a great way to attract and reach your desired audiences. 

You can distribute podcast content easily through major platforms like Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and Google at no cost to you. Plus, episodes can be repurposed on social media, in blogs, on your website, into video channels like Youtube, and more. 

The chief challenge is the same one you face with content creation and SEO: It takes time for people to discover you. Luckily, by taking advantage of distribution channels, your podcast can really take off. 

Look at Refine Labs, it built its multimillion dollar business from podcasting, live videos, and social media. No ads. No SEO.

5. Live webinar series 

Similar to podcasting, your live webinar series can be an easy and cost-effective way to attract revenue to your business. But, like podcasting, it takes steady growth to get people to register and consistently attend your webinars.

However, if you have amazing content, provide access to top subject matter experts, and foster solid discussions, a consistent live video series can have huge ROI on your marketing and sales efforts.

Plus, a regular webinar provides you with additional video content that you can clip and promote on social media, in emails, or in blog content.

You can even extract the conversation and turn it into a podcast episode for another distribution channel. Boom! 

Most of what this entails is strategy, planning, and time. But the costs are very low and can have compounding ROI.

Want to see how it’s done? Check out our monthly live webinar series, and please make sure to register if you’re interested in seeing more! 

What You Should Do Today

So what should you do? 

First, it’s definitely important to take a deep dive into your paid search and paid social strategies. Look at how you can best optimize and create better messaging that drives attention to your ad campaigns. 

Generally, the solution shouldn’t be throwing more and more money at your ads just to keep up with the competition or the rising costs of ad platforms. 

Nor should you completely stop paid ads altogether — unless you need to because of a strict budget.

From there, the winning combo is doing all the above solutions.

This can (and typically does) enhance results for your ads, too, by building better remarketing lists and creating more brand touchpoints so that when someone sees an ad, they’ll be more receptive to it. 

If you had to choose one to start, we are naturally biased towards employee influencer programs. But for good reason: they work and they generate serious ROI. 

Seriously, look at this chart of the average costs for paid ads compared with using EveryoneSocial. You can read more about this here.  

Interested? Schedule a demo with our team or you can sign-up for FREE to give the platform a spin.

The post 5 Alternatives to Paid Advertising That Save Money appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Answer: Enabling employees to become influencers.

Or maybe you prefer the term advocates, evangelists, or subject matter experts. By that, I mean encouraging employees to create, share, and engage with social content during work.

Here’s What You Miss Without This Strategy

~ Competitiveness. Buying has changed and word-of-mouth is more important than ever. Plus, employees have awesome networks, many of which know nothing about your brand, industry, or value.

~ Growth. Look at Refine Labs, Gong, and Chili Piper as some quick examples. A solid portion of their results and reach is influenced by employees sharing their expertise and personalities and engaging on social media. 

~ ROI. To get the same reach and impact employees on social media can have, you’ll need to spend big $$ on paid ads. Media spend won’t go away (nor will PR), but you can maximize results with employee social networks without needing nearly as many marketing dollars.

~ Top talent and hires. While this might be a candidate market, employees influence employer brand and the recruiting pipeline massively. People trust people as a clue to what it’s like to work at your company and the culture.

Every company needs to market, sell, and hire, and there’s no better way to build trust and reach thousands (or millions) of people than through the employee voice.

An employee advocacy tool can do all this — and more

Remember: Anyone from the intern to the CEO can influence others via their knowledge, skills, or expertise in something.

You don’t need thousands of followers. If you impact just one person, you have influence.

While you can launch an employee advocacy program manually, via Slack, or a project management tool, there’s a better option to consider: an employee advocacy solution. 

These platforms, such as EveryoneSocial, make it easy to organize, share, and create content from one location, as well as distribute communications via Slack, email, and push notifications.

Plus, you get all the ROI and reporting to see the value your program generates. 

But if this concept is new to you, getting a budget or committing to a paid plan can make you a bit hesitant at first. While we at EveryoneSocial know the value — and that it costs a fraction of what you’d spend on paid media — we get it. 

So, is there a free employee advocacy tool?

You bet!

Get started with a free employee advocacy tool by signing up for EveryoneSocial’s Starter Plan, which is free forever! 

While we work with companies of all sizes, we want to make it easier for any company to get into the product and harness the power of employee influencers. 

And when you sign up, you get a two-week free trial of our Teams Plan to start, which has more features and reporting capabilities. And don’t worry — no credit card is required! 

After the trial is up, you’re automatically downgraded to the Starter Plan (Free forever!), unless you decide to pay and continue with Teams (or want to go Enterprise). 

Why It’s Good to Start With a Free Employee Advocacy Tool

A few reasons it might be good for your company to begin with a free employee advocacy tool like EveryoneSocia’s Starter Plan:

• You’re completely new to employee advocacy and activating employee influencers/
• Your company has fewer than 50 employees. (However, larger organizations can still use a free tool like EveryoneSocial, too)
• You currently have no budget for additional paid technology.
• You want to test and create a strategy around a platform
• You don’t need reporting, gamification, or other features
• You don’t know if you’ll use it for marketing, sales, or employer branding — or aim go company-wide
• Your company is just curious and wants to poke around.
• You’re unsure of how employees will take to this strategy/platform.
• You don’t have executive support yet, so this is a place you can start.

Why You’ll Want to Upgrade Your Employee Advocacy Tool

To truly generate amazing ROI via employee networks, you’ll want to upgrade to more valuable product features and support. 

With the EveryoneSocial Teams Plan, you have access to these additional features:

• Account analytics and ROI data
• Gamification and leaderboards
• Automated content emails
• UTM tracking on all shares
• Private groups and moderators

Need more support? Use our Enterprise plan, which includes:

• Lower cost per active user
• Dedicated client success team
• Tailored implementation and training
• Powerful help center
• Speedy, industry-leading support
• SSO and SCIM provisioning
• Security and compliance SLAs

Signs You Need an Upgraded Employee Advocacy Tool

• Your work culture is strong and growing.
• There’s a solid content strategy in place.
• You have management and executive support.
• You want to support employee personal brands.
• You’re ready to make social at work a key business strategy.
• You have the budget for it or are willing to create budget from other channels.
• You eventually want to grow and scale the program.

If you want to know more about the power of employee influencers, check out the various use cases:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Recruiting
• Communications

Ready to learn more about our Teams or Enterprise plans? Schedule your demo with our team. We love to answer any questions you may have. 

The post Is There A Free Employee Advocacy Tool? Yes! appeared first on EveryoneSocial.