Goals and metrics for content marketing include unique page visits, downloads, conversion rates and more. To meet and exceed these KPIs you need to get your content out into the world using owned, earned and/or paid distribution. With all that’s involved, distribution is often as complicated, time-consuming and costly as creating the content in the first place. A wrong move or a missed step results in sluggish results and missed KPIs. That’s why you need to take advantage of every relevant distribution tactic available to you.
One tactic is, of course, getting your employees to help distribute content by publishing posts that reach their followers and contacts. I mean really distributing content, not simply hitting like and share on company posts, which is less effective and gets fewer points on the impact and trust scale than each person creating their own posts. Simple in theory, but not so easy in the real world.
Why employees aren’t amplifying your content
The problem is that everyone has very limited time in their day to read and take action on “please share this on your social media channels” emails. If they even see the email in their overflowing inboxes, they then need to spend time to read it, copy the text and the URL from the email, go to LinkedIn, create a post, paste the text to their post, submit, and check to see if it posted correctly. Then they have to go over the same process for Twitter and Facebook. That’s a tedious 5-10 minute interruption to their day every time there’s a request to distribute company-sponsored content. Multiply that by the number of employees and that’s a whole lot of company time dedicated to amplifying content. Fortunately, there’s a way to streamline the process.
Enter employee advocacy solutions
The category name is deceiving. An employee advocacy app sounds like it should be managed by HR, but it’s actually a marketer’s secret weapon. Done right, employee advocacy can amplify reach by 5X.
Employee advocacy apps like Please Share offer new, much more effective and faster ways to help internal team members post content. With Please Share, requests appear in Slack and are much more likely to get immediate attention than messages in piled-up inboxes.
Because Please Share enables single sign-on with LinkedIn and Twitter for each employee, there’s no need for them to leave Slack to post a message to each of these channels. They just take a few seconds to click on the Post buttons (for Twitter or LinkedIn) and they can get on with their day.
And because it’s a Slack app, employees with the mobile version of Slack can post from their phones easily, anywhere, at any time.
Calculating employee advocacy ROI
Sounds great, right? But how do you convince your boss that this isn’t just another marketing solution that uses up the budget but never pays off?
You can show the ROI of employee advocacy solutions by placing a value on clicks, estimating incremental posts and clicks, and setting the number of posts to be shared each month.
To calculate the employee advocacy ROI for content marketing, multiply the following:
- The value that you place on a social media click. The average cost of a click for a LinkedIn ad ranges from $7 to $11, but to be conservative you may want to use a range of $1.50 to $2.00.
- The average number of additional employees that will share your post now that you’ve made it so easy to do. For the purpose of this simple calculation, you can assume that each employee posts to just one social media channel, although each employee does have the potential to post to three channels – LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
- The average number of clicks generated by each employee post. Four clicks per employee per post is a good rule of thumb.
- The number of posts that you’ll share via your employee advocacy solution each month.
Take that value and multiply it by twelve to get the yearly return. Then deduct the yearly investment of the solution (use the cost of Please Share as an example) and divide that number by that same yearly cost. For Please Share, the investment pays for itself many times over, and breakeven can be achieved in just a few weeks.
Try it for free today
Please Share is now in beta. For a limited time, you can request beta access to try it for free and start amplifying the reach of your posts right away.
Meeting content marketing KPIs is a constant challenge. Employee advocacy can be your secret weapon to help meet and exceed your marketing metrics and goals. Don’t wait to take advantage of this opportunity to give it a try.