Joe Rogan has managed to get himself in the news again. And once again, in a controversial way. Now, I’m a bit of a fan of his podcast, especially because he doesn’t take himself too seriously. As with most of the other controversies he’s been involved in, I think his detractors take him more seriously than he does – or than most of his audience does, including me.

But rather than wade into the controversy, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite moments on his show, and why that moment is relevant for marketing teams on the fence about employee advocacy.

 

Competition

In an episode from a few years ago, Rogan says that he has a positive attitude towards competition. He explains that, rather than feel jealous when he sees someone doing something more skillfully than he does it, he takes it as motivation to perform better. If someone does something more impressively than him, “that means it can be done better” than he’s doing it.

Rather than get down about this, he takes it as a sign that he can improve – whether it’s his lifts, his fighting, his comedy-routines, or even his podcast.

 

What Does This Have to Do with You?

One common sticking point that content marketers and social media managers have about embracing employee advocacy, or letting their employees (from outside the marketing team) write articles and craft social posts, is a worry that those employees’ content might perform better than content created in-house.

Let’s face it. We all get jealous sometimes. Even when it’s your best friend. It’s easy to feel a pang of envy when your buddy beats you in a race or a game of one-on-one basketball.

But rather than wish ill of our friends, some of us take that stab of jealousy as a motivation to improve our own performance.

 

It’s Okay to Feel a Little Jealous

It’s pretty natural to feel nervous about opening up content and social media to the entire company. It’s new. And, yeah, some employees might write better articles than you or post videos that go viral. But that’s okay – if you take the right lesson from it.

You can either have a healthy attitude to competition, or an unhealthy attitude. And like high-school football, attitude makes a difference in what you’ll get out of competition.

If someone on your engineering team posts a graphic that outperforms every graphic you’ve ever created, you can learn from that. You can up your content game to match your employees.

If someone on in your frontline staff masters TikTok influencing, maybe you can learn something from them. Maybe you’ll discover how to do even better in the future.

Joe Rogan has the right attitude towards competition. You can too. If you take that attitude, you’ll get the most out of employee advocacy.

 

Friendly Competition

The key here is the word friendly. Competition sucks when competitors try to sabotage one another and best friends stab each other in the back. It’s okay to be a little jealous. But then you have to get past that. You’ve got to turn that jealousy into fuel for your motivation.

So, try opening up your digital presence to some friendly competition. Don’t worry too much. Let your employees post cool pictures and send awesome tweets. Watch what they do well. Then try to one-up them. If you can beat their stuff, your company will do even better.

And not only will that be fun, it will be good for your company’s bottom line.

A couple stats jumped out at me from Hubspot’s recent “Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2022,” including that “69% of marketers invested in SEO” last year, and that the company “website is the #2 channel” for reaching customers, “behind social media.”

It’s no surprise that SEO remains highly relevant in 2022, or that social media is taking over as the #1 place to reach buyers.

But I would have thought that first statistic, “69% of marketers,” would have been much higher.

Whether you’re currently investing in Search Engine Optimization, or whether you’re on the fence, it’s important to understand how SEO has changed in the last two decades.

Let’s have a look at some best practices for SEO in 2022.

1. Get the Basics Right

SEO isn’t new anymore. You can’t afford to have a glitchy website, or pages that aren’t indexed by Google. Yet some businesses still fail to fix basic problems that hurt them with the algorithm.

Here are a few things to get right.

Core Web Vitals

Google introduced its Core Web Vitals (content loading speed, visual stability, and interactivity) in May of 2020. Since that time, marketers have learned that while it isn’t necessary to optimize all three (doing so won’t improve your rank all that much), if your website fails all three you can guarantee it will rank poorly.

Speed is still important. Just not crazy important. As long as your website loads reasonably quickly, you shouldn’t have to worry too much.

Broken Links

Don’t do it. Don’t be that website – the one with all the redirects to pages that don’t exist. Fix your broken links.

If customers can’t find what they’re looking for on your site, they’ll leave. Google penalizes broken links for a reason, and when people click away from your site quickly due to a broken link, that hurts your rank even more.

Great UX

Solid User Experience (UX) is a must-have.

If your website is difficult to navigate, people won’t hesitate to go elsewhere. Good design is what every website needs. This isn’t so much something that will boost your rank tremendously as it is something that can kill your rank if you screw it up.

Testing

A/B testing (or A/B/C/D testing) is the standard in 2022; however, only 17% of marketers use landing page A/B tests to improve conversion rates, which might be why Cyrus Shepard listed it first in his “22 Smart Google SEO Tips for 2022.”

Be the Last Click

Speaking of Shephard, when it comes to getting the SEO basics right, I thought the most important thing to highlight was his “favorite SEO tip of all time,” “Be the Last Click.”

If you give users exactly what they want, they won’t go anywhere else. The purpose of Google’s algorithm is to give users the result they want, so 10 times out of 10, being the last click is going to boost your ranking.

2. Don’t be Too Clever

Don’t try to outsmart the algorithm by getting fancy with your SEO. I’m talking keyword stuffing, spammy practices, etc.

Keyword stuffing is like overusing Microsoft Word’s thesaurus function in your first 9th grade English paper. You end up with a bunch of big words you can’t understand, and your teacher can tell. It’s unreadable, and so is your webpage.

Shephard calls this “nuking the fluff.” According to him, “Google is rewarding sites… that provide quick answers and more direct engagement.” Not flowery category descriptions and keyword-jammed title tags.

Real quick on gaming the system (i.e., spam): don’t do it. In his list of SEO practices to avoid in 2022, Neil Patel highlights “spammy backlinks” and “spammy link building.”

3. Go Beyond the Basics

Internal Linking and Deep Linking

Both Patel and Shepard point to the need to optimize your internal links. Not only will this help the ranking of each page, it will help the ranking of your website as a whole, because Google’s algorithm doesn’t just consider time on page, it considers time on site, and if you can direct people to other pages on your site, you’ll increase that. Patel recommends including 2-5 internal links in each blog post.

Likewise, deep linking is a strategy you should be implementing. Instead of linking to a URL, link to a specific passage or text fragment. This may help you with Google’s passage ranking. It also gets people deeper into your site, and ideally brings them to exactly the information they’re looking for.

Multiple Media Types

Patel also recommends taking advantage of the growth in video and audio by embedding different media types into your pages. This can “improve the user experience and increase dwell time on your site.”

Long-Tail Keywords

Finally, long-tail keywords are the way to do SEO in 2022. Patel notes that 91.8% of Google search traffic is for long phrases, and that “long-tail keywords tend to have a lower search volume and, as a result, lower competition.”

You might think longer keywords, which are naturally more specific, might reduce your potential traffic. But, they’re easier to rank for and they have a higher search intent. Quality, not quantity.

Long-tail keywords give you a greater chance of giving site visitors exactly what they’re searching for. Meaning you’re their last click, and they spend more time on your site. Which improves your ranking.

4. Optimize for Mobile

I could have included this under “Get the Basics Right,” but it deserves to be called out by itself. According to that Hubspot article, only about 25% of companies are investing in mobile optimization, even as about half of all web traffic worldwide is from mobile devices.

In 2022, there’s no excuse to have a website that doesn’t work well on mobile devices. And yet, too many businesses still haven’t optimized for mobile. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been frustrated trying to navigate clunky business websites on a smartphone in recent months. This isn’t something you can afford to screw up anymore.

SEO in 2022

SEO has changed a lot in the last 20 years. Following these best practices will help you ensure you’re getting it right, so you can build and engage your audience.

Is it time for you to do a content audit?

2022 is fully off and running now. We’re about halfway through the first quarter. It might be time to reassess your 2022 content strategy now that it’s had time to work for a few weeks, but before we really get deep into the year.

A content audit can mean a few things, but basically, it’s just a way of stopping and checking yourself.

Look at the metrics you’ve gathered. How’s your content doing? How does it perform week-to-week? Is engagement trending upwards or downwards?

More importantly: would you read it?

As a writer, I can say that this question is a good gut-check. If you’re bored with your own content, other people probably are too. If I’m bored writing it, you’re probably bored reading it.

Is it Boring?

It sounds like a harsh question. But it’s worth asking. If your articles are tedious, of course they might not perform well.

What if it is boring?

Don’t worry too much. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Every writer’s been there (except maybe William Faulkner). You’re pressed for time. You’re stressed out. You churn out some piece of internet-speak to meet a deadline. It’s okay. It happens.

If you decide that your content is boring, congratulations. You’ve learned something. You know that it can be improved. You may even have a clear path to improving it.

If your posts are fire, but they’re still not performing well, it’s harder to figure out what the problem is. If your posts are lame, well, then you know how to improve their performance. Make them un-lame.

But How Do You Do That?

“Just make your content less boring.”

That’s easier said than done.

So, what are a few strategies you can actually use to write more interesting articles and design more intriguing posts?

1. Bring More Humanity into Your Voice

Ditch the jargon. Lose the corporate-speak. Write like the real human being that you are.

Note: this isn’t just, “write like you talk,” which is a common bit of advice given to copywriters. You may not talk the way your audience talks. You want to write like they talk. But, more importantly, showing emotion and feeling in your content is a better way of having a “human voice” than just throwing in some slang to make trite points.

Take a stand. Maybe even do something controversial.

2. Outsider Perspectives

Voices from outside your organization can offer fresh perspectives and help you mix up your content. Freelancers, influencers, contributors from other organizations (who might reciprocate by hosting you at a later date), and thought leaders in your industry can all give you those fresh points of view.

3. Try Asking Your Staff for Fresh Ideas

Ask around your organization. What do your employees care about? What stories can they tell?

Your workers can give you those fresh ideas that can help you to ditch the boring content. And maybe, just maybe, you could even try letting them write content for you, too.

Just Do Something

It really doesn’t matter what you try, if your content’s boring, you need to change things. But also, if it’s boring, almost anything you try will be an improvement. At least it will be different.

Now, maybe your audit confirms that you’re already doing everything right when it comes to content marketing.

Or maybe you find that it’s perfectly fine, but there are a couple of ways you could tinker around the edges to make it better.

But maybe you fail your audit. In which case, you’re in luck, because – just like the U.S. healthcare system – almost anything you do will be better than letting it stay the same. Truly terrible content marketing is also the easiest to move in a better direction.

But before you know just where your content ranks on the scale from three poop emojis to ten fire emojis, you need to do the audit.

So ask yourself: do I enjoy reading this?

Early on the morning of January 3rd, an 8-12-inch snowstorm hit the Mid-Atlantic, causing widespread power outages throughout Virginia. I-95 was shut down for over a day, stranding some drivers – including Senator Tim Kaine – for over 27 hours. In central Virginia, tens of thousands of people (including me and my relatives) are still without electricity, with outages projected to continue for days.

Just as people who lost power did in 1981, many of the affected customers have been calling their utility companies, hoping for a voicemail update with an ETA for when they’ll get power back. Others have been checking the website, dealing with clunky outage maps that update occasionally.

But in 2021, the fastest, easiest, and clearest line of communication between electric companies and their affected customers is social media. Facebook – not the company website – has the most up-to-date information. It’s the best way to reach the largest number of people. And companies are able to give their customers much more detail in Facebook posts than they can through other means.

Like many others, I’ve been checking the Facebook page for my relatives’ electric provider, too. Posts include useful information, and typically include a picture of ice on the power lines, or of a road crew hard at work, or of a fleet of trucks heading out. The comments are dominated by thanks and well-wishes and prayers for the road crews. While everyone is understandably frustrated, they also truly appreciate the hard work these men and women are doing to restore power.

 

But We Want to Hear Directly from the Road Crew

At the moment, I don’t think anyone wants members of the road crew taking a break from fixing the power lines to get on Facebook. But when all this is over, I think many customers, including me, would like to hear directly from the brave men and women who worked in the cold and in the dark and in the snow to restore our power.

Human beings want heroes celebrate. We want to have people to thank, real people. It’s nice to see a quick picture on the company page. But if dozens of people are already commenting with prayers and messages of appreciation, think how many more will engage with stories posted by some of these brave men and women themselves.

 

Frontline Workers

Similarly, throughout the pandemic, we’ve learned to praise and laud frontline workers, healthcare workers, and all the men and women who labored in obscurity to fight the virus and keep their fellow citizens safe.

But praising “all healthcare workers” is too generic after a while. Humans want faces and names to connect to. Hospital workers, nurses, doctors, sanitation workers, and frontline workers aren’t monolithic. They aren’t a general collective all pulling in unison.

Healthcare workers are individuals. A hospital is an organization of individuals. Grocery store clerks are a group of individuals. Each with their own individual stories.

During the pandemic, we’ve been able to hear some of those stories. We celebrate scientists like Katalin Kariko, whose research led to the mRNA vaccines. We thank the traveling nurses we know, or our relatives who are EMTs, or our friend who is a hospital janitor.

But most of the stories still go unsung. Some frontline workers would prefer that it stay that way – not everyone wants publicity, for good reasons. But others no doubt would like to share their stories. And hopefully, as we pull out of this pandemic, they will have the opportunity to do so.

 

The Broader Lesson

In crises, we want to know our heroes. We want to actually see them. We want to thank a person, not a collective.

That applies not just to healthcare, not just to power crews, not just to soldiers and sailors, not just to frontline workers, but to anyone who takes personal risks to serve a community. Many people who make sacrifices every day go unnoticed. But today, thanks to the free flow of information, it is easier than ever for us to learn their stories and thank them personally.

For any organization – not just one facing a crisis – the people being served want to hear from the individuals who serve them. Individual stories are not just a powerful way to engage with any audience, they also humanize an otherwise faceless organization.

When the power is back and the road crews have a chance to rest, I hope some of them also get a chance to share their stories.

At first glance, employee advocacy might seem like it works better for consumer-oriented brands than for B2B ones.

After all, most of the “cool jobs” that make for great “employee influencer” content are in B2C companies. And social media seems better suited to B2C than B2B (although not necessarily – we plan to address that soon in a follow up post).

But actually, employee advocacy might be even better for B2B than it is for B2C.

 

Let Me Explain

The idea of employee advocacy, or employee ambassadorship, isn’t just that workers throughout a company craft and post content. It’s that every person who works for the company can and should be a representative for their employer, especially in the digital realm. And actually, this might be most important in business-to-business transactions.

The business-to-business market is about relationships. The buying process is long. No one-click, free-shipping, instant purchases.

Even before the Internet, the B2B market typically involved a long sales cycle: with white papers, phone calls between the buyers and various company representatives, and even in-person meetings between the buyers and the technical staff. If you’re buying a new line of forklifts for your warehouse, you’re probably going to want to speak to the engineers who designed the latest model.

Discussions of social media tend to focus on news feeds, going viral, and engagement (in the form of likes, comments, and shares). But social media was originally designed to facilitate relationships. And it still can.

Employee advocacy is about giving faces to large organizations. Your company isn’t faceless. It’s made up of a diverse group of real individuals. You know that, but do people on the outside? Not if you don’t let them peek inside and see a thriving group of individuals working together.

That’s what a company is: a large group of people with different lives and different interests who work together for a common purpose. Sometimes it can seem opaque from the outside, but it’s really a collaboration between a variety of individuals, each with their own individual stories, who come together because they each get something of value out of their cooperation.

If you have a thriving internal culture, consider showing it to the world. And if you want to foster a thriving culture, show your employees that you trust them by giving them a voice.

Letting buyers see inside your company – by allowing your employees to advocate on your behalf – fosters trust and intimacy. Not just in your workforce, but in your audience. When people see that you’re willing to let your employees say what they want to say about you on social media (even though you’re managing what they get to post), that’s powerful.

Buyers are more willing to believe you when your employees all represent you well.

 

Meeting Buyers’ Needs

You already focus your products and services (and marketing messages) on meeting buyer needs. Many buyers, especially in the information age, especially in B2B, need to see inside your company a bit. If they’re buying something for their employer, they need details. They need the kind of in-depth information your employees can provide.

This goes beyond having your technical people write white papers. In 2022, you want your technical people to have genuine relationships with representatives from all of your buyers. And digital technology empowers them to do that.

If you use digital technology in a positive way – by letting each of your employees put their best foot forward on your behalf – you’ll reap dividends. With employee advocacy, you can make your sales cycles simultaneously more professional and more intimate.

More engaging and more informative. More informal and more thorough. More open and more collaborative.

Employee advocacy doesn’t have to be flashy or salesy. Often, it’s the opposite. And that’s why it’s perfect for B2B companies of any size.

For forward-thinking companies in 2022, crafting thought leadership has become the next level of content marketing. When your business produces thought leadership, you no longer follow trends. You create them. Your company goes from up-and-coming to influential. You drive actual change in your industry.

So, it makes sense that everyone from Deloitte to McKinsey to the RAND Corporation is writing about thought leadership. But while many CEOs and public relations people talk about thought leadership, genuine and trendsetting insight is still relatively rare.

What Sets Apart Real Thought Leadership?

The difference between those who merely talk about thought leadership and those who actually drive change is action. The people and companies who take action are the ones whose thought leadership matters. This action can take many forms, but – at its core – action is the tangible follow-through for the message and vision of a company.

Action drives change. Action demonstrates commitment to the principles laid out in articles and white papers. It backs up in reality what was written down in words.

That is not to say that words don’t matter. They do. Language is the means by which we convey thoughts and ideas. For it to be put into practice, an idea must be expressed and communicated (to the relevant parties). Without words, there is no thought leadership.

But action reinforces and complements the written word. Together, words and actions create something real. Together, they drive change.

A Few Lessons from This Insight

While there are many takeaways from the understanding that action and words work together to change hearts and minds (and reality), there are a few lessons we’ll focus on today. 

1. Doers vs. Communicators

We believe that the dichotomy between doers and communicators within a company is a false one. Why? Because the doers can be communicators.

The people on the ground can be the ones communicating their experiences and broadcasting their perspectives. In fact, audiences want to hear from the doers. Employee advocacy is a great way to make that happen, by allowing your audience to hear directly from your engineers, designers, architects, frontline staff, software developers, and your test team.

But there’s another reason the dichotomy is a false one. Rather than working in tangent to one another, we believe that the doers and communicators need to work together. They need each other. The doers can create their own content. But the guiding architects and managers need to be the marketing and public relations team, who actually design the overall thought leadership message.

Instead of writing every post themselves, the communicators can now become the designers who shape and direct the flow of content.

2. Commitment to Employees

Lots of companies talk about their commitment to their people. But we believe that one way to actually demonstrate that commitment is to give employees a voice. Empower them to craft content. If you’re proud of your diverse workforce, this is also an excellent way for you to pursue equity.

3. Trendsetting

A precondition for being a trendsetter is doing something first. Being an early-adopter. Trying novel ideas. Employee advocacy is a novel concept. It’s new. Not many businesses practice it. By trying it out, you can be a trendsetter. You can set a new standard within your industry for employee engagement and crowdsourced content. Your action can drive change.

Taking Action on Employee Advocacy

It’s a new year, and there’s no better time than the present to take action on resolutions made in 2021. We believe that if you make 2022 the year you take action on empowering your employees to be content creators, you’ll never regret it.

Action is difficult, which is why it’s often so much rarer than white papers. Action requires risk. But opportunity requires risk. Change requires risk. Genuine thought leadership requires risk.

So, if you’d like to demonstrate through your actions that you are a thought leader in your industry, take a leap on employee advocacy. It just might pay off for you.

If you’ve read any of our previous posts, you’ll know that here at Mobibi we believe strongly in employee advocacy. We not only think it will be good for your bottom line, we think it will be good for your workforce.

We also think it’s the right thing to do.

Empowering Employees

It’s been a hard two years for all of us. Burnout in the U.S. working population hit sky-high levels in 2021, which contributed to the legendary “Great Resignation.” Fear of the virus, worry about friends and loved ones, fights about vaccines and masks, shortages, inflation, stress about working – whether from home, or in the office, or on the front lines. It’s been a lot.

You might be thinking about cutting your employees some slack. One idea to consider is giving them a voice. As we limp into the end of a worldwide pandemic, this is one way to show your employees that you care about what they’ve gone through. Giving them a voice shows that you respect them as human beings, because you want to hear what they have to say.

Here are a few other reasons we think you should try it out:

Equity

Not every business considers social justice an important part of their role in society. If you don’t, that’s fine. That’s your decision. But if you do want to do something about equity, instead of spending big on DEI trainings, consider inviting your employees to the table. Ask them about their stories. Instead of telling them what to think, listen to what they have to say. Especially if you’re proud of having a diverse workforce.

Younger Employees

We’ve written a little about Gen Z entering the workforce. Your youngest employees may not have much experience or responsibility yet. But many of them want “a seat at the table.” That might seem awfully presumptuous to you, but it might actually work in your favor. Generally, people meet expectations.

If you treat your younger staff-members as little more than children, they’ll act like it. If you want them to onboard quickly, then treat them as full members of the team: with all of the rights and responsibilities entailed by full membership.

Give them a voice, but let them know that voice comes with expectations of professionalism and maturity. By showing them a little respect, you’ll teach them to be worthy of your respect.

Open Culture

Some companies pride themselves on having an open culture. Many teams claim to value employee input. If you do, prove it. Give your employees a digital voice. Bring them into your content marketing operation.

Positive Social Media Image

No company wants to have a negative image online. It’s no secret that the people who often feel the most motivation to leave a review are the ones who want to leave a negative review. Maybe you encourage positive reviews from your customers. But what about your reputation as an employer?

There’s little you can do about Glassdoor or Indeed reviews. So, you probably don’t spend much time there. But, if you’re worried about what people might be saying about you online, you might be monitoring your employees’ social media feeds surreptitiously. Instead of snooping behind their back and hoping they don’t complain, try getting proactive about creating a positive digital image.

How? By encouraging your happy employees to say positive things about you online, just like you encourage your happy customers to write positive reviews. Just by asking them, you’ll show your people that you trust them, making it even more likely that they’ll say positive stuff about you.

You don’t want the only people posting on social media about you to be the ones posting negative stuff. If many of your employees really like you, ask them to rep you online a bit.

How Do You Give Your Employees a Voice?

When we talk about a voice, we mean a digital voice. Let your workers write content for you. Let them use social media for you. Let them send a Tweet, or a TikTok, or an Instagram photo, or even create a YouTube video. Let them post on their accounts, or write under their names, for you.

(Of course, you’ll get to manage and approve what they send out, so you will be able to monitor things and ensure they don’t actually say anything bad about you.)

It’s the Way of the Future

We’ve written previously about the democratization of content (and of the Internet in general). Increasingly, audiences want to see a variety of content from a variety of contributors, most of whom will be regular folks, not billionaires and politicians.

That’s why we think employee advocacy is such a good idea. It’s a way for you to get distributed content. Meaning a variety of sources, on a variety of channels, all flowing through you. The rise of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and similar technologies demonstrates that people are hungry for decentralization. Well, this is a way for you to embrace that.

It might be uncomfortable at first, but if you give all of your employees a voice, you’ll be ready for that distributed future Internet. It won’t catch you by surprise.

For this post, I wanted to take a break from our usual fare to offer up a list of ideas for rewards you can give your top content creators. Hopefully, this should be a fun post that sparks you to come up with ideas of your own.

The number one way to incentivize good content is to offer prizes. So, here’s a list of actual prizes, from low- to high-stakes, to consider giving your top performers.

1. Cup of Coffee

Coffee is the prototypical workplace drink, partly because caffeine boosts productivity, but also because the majority of Americans drink coffee. A coffee-themed reward can range from a Starbucks gift card to office coffee-machine privileges to free coffee for a month. It’s an obvious and low-stakes prize for top creators.

2. Office Playlist Privileges

If your company has an office soundtrack, you can let your top-performing creator decide what songs get played. Not every office has a shared playlist, but if you do have one, you can assign sole curation discretion as a perk for being the creator-of-the-month.

3. Meal Out on the Company

Either treat your best employee advocate to lunch, or let that person go out (preferably with their spouse or significant other – it’s no fun if you force them to go alone) to a restaurant of their choice, on the company’s dime.

4. Best Parking Spot for a Month

Instead of reserving the closest parking spots for your C-level employees, set aside one for rotating use by the best content creators. Each month, the person whose posts generated the most engagement last month would get to use the space. If they want to keep using the space the next month, they’d have to “defend their title,” by staying in the #1 spot on your content leaderboard.

5. Corner Office for a Month

Taking the parking spot idea to a higher level (literally), you can rotate out the corner office for the top content creator of each month.

6. Tickets to a Sporting Event

This is an obvious one, especially if you’re headquartered in a city with great teams. Even many people who don’t like baseball enjoy going to the ballpark. This reward is especially good if your company has access to a box, or to some of the best seats in the park.

7. Tickets to a Concert

Self-explanatory. Just like the above. You can also try other non-sporting events, like comedy shows or theater productions.

8. Subscription to a Jelly of the Month Club

Or a subscription to any food-delivery club, or similar gift-delivery service. Or a subscription to a streaming service – this is 2022, after all.

9. Wine-Tasting or Brewery Tour

Not everyone drinks alcohol, but for those who do, this can make an excellent prize. Millennials in particular claim to prioritize experiences over material goods, and a vineyard tour or tasting event at your local brewery is an excellent way to combine the two.

10. Gadgets

This could be anything from headphones to a smartwatch. Or an offer for an early upgrade to your employee’s company smartphone or their work laptop.

11. Cash Bonus

Increasingly, Americans aren’t taking time off. They’re cashing in their vacation days for more money. If cash incentivizes your workforce more than time off, monetary bonuses for high-performing content might produce the best competition among your employee advocates.

12. Commissions

Similar to the above. Except here you pay commissions based on the revenue generated per post, instead of paying out a single cash bonus to the top performer. Everyone gets a trophy, but some people get bigger trophies than others.

13. Extra Time Off

Just because some Americans don’t take time off doesn’t mean others won’t jump at the extra vacation days. I’ve definitely been in that position. Especially if older workers in your company accumulate vacation days they don’t use, while younger employees – who accrue fewer days off – struggle to save up enough time for a good vacation, extra time off might be a great incentive for the younger side of your workforce.

14. Vacation on the Company

Similar to the above, you might go all the way and actually gift your best content creator of the year an all-expenses paid vacation to Jackson Hole or Las Vegas or a similar destination. For companies that can afford this kind of perk, it’s a great way to show your employee advocates that you care about their performance.

 

The best thing to do might be to offer your employees a choice about which rewards they can earn. Some employees will prefer cash to a vacation or time off. Others don’t drink alcohol or coffee. Some workers don’t have cars or don’t care about where they park or what office they sit in. And a few of your employees don’t like sports or won’t want to go to a live event (especially not during COVID).

But with some flexibility and creativity, you can easily incentivize good advocacy work by your creators, which will drive a healthy, fun, competitive, environment that engages your team.

In a previous post, we talked about “The Benefits of Gamifying Your Content Marketing.” Today, we’re going to go a little more in depth on the steps to actually doing that.

 

Step 1: Crowdsource Your Content to a Team

First, you’re going to need to have a number of different people developing posts and articles for you. If you just have one or two people, gamification is not going to be as fun and it won’t work as well. The key to gamifying your content – and the reason it works to incentivize better posts – is competition. And for competition, you need a large group of people who can compete against each other.

We’ve written at length about employee advocacy. We think you should give all of your employees – from every division of your company – the opportunity to become a creator for you.

But if you aren’t ready for that, you can hire a diverse group of freelancers and influencers and get something almost as good.

 

Step 2: Track All Content

Once you’ve got a solid team producing content for you, you’ll want to start tracking it. The more granular you can get, the better. You’ll want per-post stats: clicks, likes, shares, comments, overall engagement, revenue-generated, and more.

Track everything posted by your team. Luckily, Mobibi handles all of this for you and can give you the most relevant metrics without the noise.

 

Step 3: Leaderboard(s)

Tracking the performance of your creators’ content lets you measure how well each of them are doing. That’s actually the point. You’ll be able to know who crafts the best posts for your company on any given day, as well as who does the best job overall. Once you know that, you can incentivize competition between your team members by creating a leaderboard. Or – depending on the size of your team and how detailed you want to be – multiple leaderboards.

If your leaderboards update in real time, your creators will instantly be able to know who is creating the best stuff. They’ll be able to see who’s ahead of them, and by how much. You can display engagement-per-post, revenue-generated-per-post, or any relevant metric that you think will give your team the most buzz. You want the competition to be exciting. If a revenue-per-post leaderboard is more exciting to your people, go with that. If you prefer to keep that information discreet, base the leaderboard on engagement-per-post.

Mobibi can make this very simple with a points system that makes your leaderboard look more like, well, a game.

 

Step 4: Reward Your Team

Next, everyone on your team gets a trophy.

Just kidding. Actually, while you can reward your entire team if you want to, we think you’ll get the best results if you reward your top performers.

Now, with rewards, your competition has stakes. Your leaderboard means something. It means your team knows who’s in the running to win rewards. It means each individual creator knows how much better each of them has to perform to beat the person leading the board.

Make sure you publicly reward the team members whose content performs the best. Public recognition plays a key role in incentivizing competition.

Also, make sure the rewards actually mean something. A gold star doesn’t really drive anyone to get creative with their posts. A bonus, or a meal out on the company, or a bottle of Scotch, does.

 

Step 5: Iterate

You can think of each time you hand out a new reward as the end of a cycle. Each cycle is an opportunity to improve. Better metrics, more camaraderie, better communication, more interesting rewards, whatever you think might get better results.

We recommend you keep testing out different rewards to keep the competition fresh. And keep trying to add new members to your team, especially outsiders or employees not traditionally in public-facing roles.

 

Sound Complicated? Don’t Worry.

It may sound like a lot of work to set up the leaderboards, recruit your team, track your metrics, assign points, come up with rewards, and keep iterating. But don’t worry. While we won’t push you too hard, we do want you to know that if you use Mobibi, we actually make it very simple for you. All you have to do is recruit your team and hand out the rewards.

And we can even help you recruit your team! We’ll do all the heavy lifting on the tracking, aggregating, scheduling, managing, and even the leaderboards.

In a future post, we’ll also give you a list of potential rewards, in case you’re struggling for ideas. Until then, please let us know if you have any questions. You can reach us on your favorite social media platform.

Once you start contemplating crowdsourcing your content marketing to your employees, you’ll probably start wondering about who on your team will excel at it.

What kinds of employee advocates should you be looking for? What should you consider when cultivating employee influencers?

You can start with the three types of employees your audience already wants to hear from. Those who are already good at social media. Those who can give the mavens in your audience the technical details they crave. And anyone in your company with a “cool” job. We’ll look at each in turn.

 

1. Employees with Large Followings

When you first try to create employee advocates, you’ll want to look for the people at your company who already have big followings on TikTok or Instagram. They’re personally very successful at social media, but it’s not part of their job. They didn’t list “Twitter Influencer” or “50,000 Facebook Followers” on their resumes.

These people already know how to achieve high engagement on the various platforms. They naturally fit the influencer model. By asking them to apply their knowledge of a particular social channel to the work of promoting their employer, you can inject some lighthearted fun into your social media presence.

These employee advocates will not necessarily post substantive explanations of a new product, but they can make a tweet go viral. Off-topic posts can still boost your brand. Look at Wendy’s or Steak-umm on Twitter.

 

2. The Engineers and Technicians

Your technical folks may not be good at social media yet, but that shouldn’t stop you from letting them post for you. Actually, you likely already have an audience who wants to hear specifically from them.

Car geeks want to hear from the mechanical engineers who designed the engine in your newest model. Airplane nerds want to know the details about your airfoil testing. Gamers want to hear from the software engineers who designed your latest upgrade. Soap mavens want to hear from the chemical engineers who researched your newest product.

Your technical people can give the mavens and nerds in your audience the inside details on how the smartphone works or how the motor is actually designed and tested. These are buyers you want on your side. They’ll be your best buyers and your best marketers outside of the people who actually work for you. They’re the ones who’ll show off your products to all of their friends. Your engineers and coders can give these people the content they want.

 

3. Anyone with a “Cool” Job:

Not every company has “cool” jobs. But many companies have careers that sound fun and interesting to the general public.

There are airline pilots, video-game testers (or anyone who tests, for that matter, even taste-testers in chocolate factories), chefs, screenwriters, astronauts, brew masters, pyrotechnicians, demolition crews, movie raters, park rangers, tour guides, event coordinators, sommeliers, and even chauffeurs.

You don’t have to be an airplane nut to want to see a day-in-the-life post by an airline pilot. This is interesting content to the general public, and putting it out there could help grow your social media following.

 

Don’t Overlook Anyone

Finally, don’t overlook employees who currently don’t fit any of those descriptions. Any employee could turn into excellent employee advocate. With the right tools and management, even with an undeveloped knack for social media, in time they might build a large following.

In other words, all of your employees are potentially good advocates for you on social media. As you experiment with letting them create content for you, you’ll see that some are better than others. You can try to cultivate employee advocates who fit each of these three descriptions. Or you can just wait and see whose content gets the best engagement. By tracking each post, you’ll be able to tell who your best influencers are.

Even if you don’t have any “cool” jobs in your company (which you shouldn’t rule out – you might be surprised what can become cool), you almost certainly have people who fall into the first two categories.

In your initial forays into crowdsourcing your content marketing, start with these two categories. Find a few employees who fit each description. And then sit back and see what they can do.