MARKETING
How To Create a LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Program
People buy from people, not companies. That’s why your brand’s employee advocacy on LinkedIn can be a powerful and effective form of marketing.
The benefits are many for your brand as well as individual employees. Their LinkedIn advocacy can:
- Help build their personal brands.
- Drive traffic to your company’s LinkedIn page and website.
- Establish them as subject matter experts.
- Lead to invitations for guest appearances on podcasts, LinkedIn Live streams, and other events.
- Capture customers at the top of the funnel.
- Drive deals down the pipeline.
- Win and close deals.
An employee advocacy program on @LinkedIn can be a powerful and effective form of marketing, says Emily Brady of @SweetFishMedia via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
With all those positive outcomes, an employee advocacy program on LinkedIn makes sense for most brands targeting a business-focused audience. Now comes the harder part – organizing the program.
How to structure an employee advocacy program on LinkedIn
Step 1: Get leadership on board
Employee advocacy on LinkedIn is a long play. Secure executive buy-in by encouraging them to do it first-hand. Ask or help them post consistently on LinkedIn for at least 60 days. If they can grow their following, connections, and engagement, they might see the value in implementing an employee advocacy program companywide.
Secure executive support first. Ask them to post for 60 days and see the growth in followers, connections, and engagement, says Emily Brady of @SweetFishMedia via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
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Step 2: Choose a channel champion
You’re going to need someone to oversee this operation. You can hire a social media specialist or assign it to someone on the content marketing team well versed in LinkedIn.
The channel champion creates the strategy and owns the results of the program. Among their possible responsibilities:
- Onboarding employees through one-on-one personal branding meetings
- Working with each evangelist to document their personal brand strategy detailing their content pillars
- Creating written and video training resources to teach employees posting and engagement strategies on LinkedIn
- Curating an archive of company content categorized by job function
- Leading monthly training workshops
Every employee advocacy program needs a champion who develops the strategy and helps members implement their own plans, says Emily Brady of @SweetFishMedia via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
Step 3: Document program requirements
Outlining the expectations of employees, in the beginning, can help them make an educated decision on whether they should or can participate. Then, when they sign up for the program, they know the commitment.
The requirements for an employee advocacy program on LinkedIn might look like this:
- Be active for at least one quarter.
- Post three to five times a week.
- Engage with people who comment on the post.
- Actively engage with others on LinkedIn.
- Agree to promote curated company content.
At this stage, you also should document the do’s and don’ts — the guidelines outlining what is acceptable to post, what is inappropriate to post, and what are the best practices.
Step 4: Onboard employees
The channel champion should invite employees who opted into the program to an onboarding meeting. That conversation should help define their content topics, personal brand, positioning, and LinkedIn workflow. Often, people are overwhelmed at the possibilities and appreciate having someone facilitate the process to help identify their content pillars.
How to motivate employees to post on LinkedIn
Just signing up and having a one-on-one meeting isn’t enough to motivate your employee advocates to start posting and stay involved. They may lack the confidence and/or the capacity to execute. To help, consider these tips:
1. Identify their why
People need internal motivation. “Because it’s good for the company” usually is not a sufficient motivator for a person. By learning their personal reasons for joining the advocacy program, you can better identify the corresponding benefits, such as:
- Increased awareness of their existence and expertise
- Recognition as a go-to expert in the industry
- Participation in a community of thought leaders with whom they can learn and collaborate
- Portfolio of the content they create
2. Educate them about the benefits for their employer
While helping the company may not be their only motivator, it makes sense that they want their employer to succeed. Share how the company could benefit by detailing how it can increase brand awareness, shorten the sales cycle, and increase talent attraction and retention.
NOTE: This tip intentionally comes after personal motivation. Companies usually struggle to get participation on LinkedIn because they make it about the business, not the employees.
3. Check in frequently
Dedicate a Slack channel or another communication tool in your company just for the employee advocates. Invite them to share their posts, questions, and wins.
Share analytics weekly to show which posts resonate and which might benefit from improvements.
Once a month, have a one-on-one check-in meeting with advocates who may be struggling.
4. Provide assistance resources
When you share videos, articles, or training sessions about how to create good content, employees are more likely to get active on the platform.
In the onboarding, incorporate internal training videos and documents on personal branding and LinkedIn best practices.
Every week, share editorial calendar prompts, curated content, or educational LinkedIn posts in your work dashboard.
Every month, schedule a LinkedIn training workshop, a live brainstorm session, and/or one-on-one meetings to go over their content strategies.
5. Celebrate
A sense of belonging is a huge factor in a successful employee advocacy program. Celebrating wins reinforces that camaraderie. Commend employees individually and highlight their results on your internal communication channel. You also can praise them on LinkedIn.
How to measure success
Success can be difficult to measure. You can look at their profile views, connections, and following. If those numbers are rising, their personal brand is growing – and likely impacting the company’s brand, too.
Also, encourage employees to share things like direct messages and replies, invitations to guest on podcasts, virtual events, etc., and reshares and mentions. You could set up a tracker to record them if you want to compare and contrast with others in the program.
You also can assess individual posts to better understand if they’re having an impact on thought leadership. For example, a post with a large number of comments indicates the employee is giving valuable insight into creating and engaging in meaningful conversations. If the reshare number is high, your employees are saying something that resonates with or helps someone.
You can use a tool like HubSpot to attribute deals won or closed to LinkedIn activity though it’s a lagging indicator.
How others are doing it
Here are a few B2B companies that do employee advocacy really well:
Chili Piper’s company social profiles have seen impressive growth in recent years thanks to their employee social advocacy enablement.
How do they do it? They encourage employees to post about whatever they want. They created a #Chili-Love Slack channel to help amplify each other’s posts, and they do periodic “social takeovers” to promote new content, product launches, company news, and more.
Gong used LinkedIn employee advocacy to grow eight times in a little over two years. They post consistently and focus on providing valuable content over securing marketing-qualified leads.
How do they do it? Gong hires outstanding talent who want to post, their C-suite leads by example, and their social media team makes it easy with internal comms and writing prompts.
Chris Walker and his Refine Labs team of employees are known for the value-added content each provides via their personal accounts on LinkedIn.
How do they do it? All Refine Labs teammates go through a LinkedIn Accelerator training during onboarding. Chris hosts office hours where he helps people dial in their personal strategies. They host competitions around experimenting with new channels like LinkedIn or TikTok and give prizes and awards people actually want.
Here are some other brands sharing details about their employee advocacy programs: Angelpoint, Dreamdata, and our team at Sweet Fish Media.
Get the benefits of employee advocacy
One of, if not the most, efficient and cost-effective ways for companies to build their brands and drive revenue growth is through employee advocacy on social media. Why? Your employees are individuals who are more likely to earn trust and gain credibility from your audience in a way that a brand name never could.
All tools mentioned in the article are identified by the author. If you have a tool to share, please add it in the comments.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
MARKETING
How To Develop a Great Creative Brief and Get On-Target Content
Every editor knows what it feels like to sit exasperated in front of the computer, screaming internally, “It would have been easier if I’d done it myself.”
If your role involves commissioning and approving content, you know that sinking feeling: Ten seconds into reviewing a piece, it’s obvious the creator hasn’t understood (or never bothered to listen to) a damn thing you told them. As you go deeper, your fingertips switch gears from polite tapping to a digital Riverdance as your annoyance spews onto the keyboard. We’ve all been there. It’s why we drink. Or do yoga. Or practice voodoo.
In truth, even your best writer, designer, or audiovisual content creator can turn in a bad job. Maybe they had an off day. Perhaps they rushed to meet a deadline. Or maybe they just didn’t understand the brief.
The first two excuses go to the content creator’s professionalism. You’re allowed to get grumpy about that. But if your content creator didn’t understand the brief, then you, as the editor, are at least partly to blame.
Taking the time to create a thorough but concise brief is the single greatest investment you can make in your work efficiency and sanity. The contrast in emotions when a perfectly constructed piece of content lands in your inbox could not be starker. It’s like the sun has burst through the clouds, someone has released a dozen white doves, and that orchestra that follows you around has started playing the lovely bit from Madame Butterfly — all at once.
Here’s what a good brief does:
- It clearly and concisely sets out your expectations (so be specific).
- It focuses the content creator’s mind on the areas of most importance.
- It encourages the content creator to do a thorough job rather than an “it’ll-do” job.
- It results in more accurate and more effective content (content that hits the mark).
- It saves hours of unnecessary labor and stress in the editing process.
- It can make all the difference between profit and loss.
Arming content creators with a thorough brief gives them the best possible chance of at least creating something fit for purpose — even if it’s not quite how you would have done it. Give them too little information, and there’s almost no hope they’ll deliver what you need.
On the flip side, overloading your content creators with more information than they need can be counterproductive. I know a writer who was given a 65-page sales deck to read as background for a 500-word blog post. Do that, and you risk several things happening:
- It’s not worth the content creator’s time reading it, so they don’t.
- Even if they do read it, you risk them missing out on the key points.
- They’ll charge you a fortune because they’re losing money doing that amount of preparation.
- They’re never going to work with you again.
There’s a balance to strike.
There’s a balance to be struck.
Knowing how to give useful and concise briefs is something I’ve learned the hard way over 20 years as a journalist and editor. What follows is some of what I’ve found works well. Some of this might read like I’m teaching grandma to suck eggs, but I’m surprised how many of these points often get forgotten.
Who is the client?
Provide your content creator with a half- or one-page summary of the business:
- Who it is
- What it does
- Whom it services
- What its story is
- Details about any relevant products and services
Include the elevator pitch and other key messaging so your content creator understands how the company positions itself and what kind of language to weave into the piece.
Who is the audience?
Include a paragraph or two about the intended audience. If a company has more than one audience (for example, a recruitment company might have job candidates and recruiters), then be specific. Even a sentence will do, but don’t leave your content creator guessing. They need to know who the content is for.
What needs to be known?
This is the bit where you tell your content creator what you want them to create. Be sure to include three things:
- The purpose of the piece
- The angle to lead with
- The message the audience should leave with
I find it helps to provide links to relevant background information if you have it available, particularly if the information inspired or contributed to the content idea, rather than rely on content creators to find their own. It can be frustrating when their research doesn’t match or is inferior to your own.
How does the brand communicate?
Include any information the content creators need to ensure that they’re communicating in an authentic voice of the brand.
- Tone of voice: The easiest way to provide guidance on tone of voice is to provide one or two examples that demonstrate it well. It’s much easier for your content creators to mimic a specific example they’ve seen, read, or heard than it is to interpret vague terms like “formal,” “casual,” or “informative but friendly.”
- Style guide: Giving your content creator a style guide can save you a lot of tinkering. This is essential for visuals but also important for written content if you don’t want to spend a lot of time changing “%” to “percent” or uncapitalizing job titles. Summarize the key points or most common errors.
- Examples: Examples aren’t just good for tone of voice; they’re also handy for layout and design to demonstrate how you expect a piece of content to be submitted. This is especially handy if your template includes social media posts, meta descriptions, and so on.
All the elements in a documented brief
Here are nine basic things every single brief requires:
- Title: What are we calling this thing? (A working title is fine so that everyone knows how to refer to this project.)
- Client: Who is it for, and what do they do?
- Deadline: When is the final content due?
- The brief itself: What is the angle, the message, and the editorial purpose of the content? Include here who the audience is.
- Specifications: What is the word count, format, aspect ratio, or run time?
- Submission: How and where should the content be filed? To whom?
- Contact information: Who is the commissioning editor, the client (if appropriate), and the talent?
- Resources: What blogging template, style guide, key messaging, access to image libraries, and other elements are required to create and deliver the content?
- Fee: What is the agreed price/rate? Not everyone includes this in the brief, but it should be included if appropriate.
Depending on your business or the kind of content involved, you might have other important information to include here, too. Put it all in a template and make it the front page of your brief.
Prepare your briefs early
It’s entirely possible you’re reading this, screaming internally, “By the time I’ve done all that, I could have written the damn thing myself.”
But much of this information doesn’t change. Well in advance, you can document the background about a company, its audience, and how it speaks doesn’t change. You can pull all those resources into a one- or two-page document, add some high-quality previous examples, throw in the templates they’ll need, and bam! You’ve created a short, useful briefing package you can provide to any new content creator whenever it is needed. You can do this well ahead of time.
I expect these tips will save you a lot of internal screaming in the future. Not to mention drink, yoga, and voodoo.
This is an update of a January 2019 CCO article.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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MARKETING
Microsoft unveils a new small language model
Phi-3-Mini is the first in a family of small language models Microsoft plans to release over the coming weeks. Phi-3-Small and Phi-3-Medium are in the works. In contrast to large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, small language models are trained on much smaller datasets and are said to be much more affordable for users.
We are excited to introduce Phi-3, a family of open AI models developed by Microsoft. Phi-3 models are the most capable and cost-effective small language models (SLMs) available, outperforming models of the same size and next size up across a variety of language, reasoning, coding and math benchmarks.
What are they for? For one thing, the reduced size of this language model may make it suitable to run locally, for example as an app on a smartphone. Something the size of ChatGPT lives in the cloud and requires an internet connection for access.
While ChatGPT is said to have over a trillion parameters, Phi-3-Mini has only 3.8 billion. Sanjeev Bora, who works with genAI in the healthcare space, writes: “The number of parameters in a model usually dictates its size and complexity. Larger models with more parameters are generally more capable but come at the cost of increased computational requirements. The choice of size often depends on the specific problem being addressed.”
Phi-3-Mini was trained on a relatively small dataset of 3.3 trillion tokens — instances of human language expressed numerically. But that’s still a lot of tokens.
Why we care. While it is generally reported, and confirmed by Microsoft, that these SLMs will be much more affordable than the big LLMs, it’s hard to find exact details on the pricing. Nevertheless, taking the promise at face-value, one can imagine a democratization of genAI, making it available to very small businesses and sole proprietors.
We need to see what these models can do in practice, but it’s plausible that use cases like writing a marketing newsletter, coming up with email subject lines or drafting social media posts just don’t require the gigantic power of a LLM.
Dig deeper: How a non-profit farmers market is leveraging AI
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