About BCD Travel
BCD Travel is a top 5 global travel company and a leading provider of global corporate travel management. Headquartered in Utrecht, Netherlands, BCD operates in 108 countries, with US$24.6 billion USD in total sales for 2016 and a combined worldwide workforce of 13,000.
The Backstory
BCD has a large, distributed customer-facing workforce in sales and account management. As social media has become a more integral part of customer interactions, BCD looked for ways to activate their global teams on social. With sales cycles that can span 12-24 months, they needed their sales team to leverage channels like LinkedIn and Twitter to stay top of mind with their buyers and showcase BCD’s expertise in corporate travel.
When BCD and PostBeyond first connected, BCD was in the midst of revamping their website and content marketing strategy. As they looked to engage their employees to amplify their content and drive traffic to their website, they encountered the following challenges:
1) Difficult Workflows:
“We would put all of our content into a Word Doc or an Excel spreadsheet. Employees would then have to copy and paste it to share, and frankly, they didn’t. Also with teams across EMEA, Latin America, we had no oversight into the global content strategy.” – Suzanne Kosmerl, Director of Digital Marketing
2) Employee Hesitations on Social Media:
Two common pieces of feedback that the BCD team heard were, “I don’t know what to say” and “I don’t have time.” BCD has varying demographics amongst their sales team and they were struggling to get their employees leveled up on how to use social media for business.
3) Tracking Engagement:
For employees that were already sharing content, BCD had little oversight into how far their messages were reaching and whether or not they were staying on-brand. They wanted to make sure their teams were sharing the most up-to-date material and advocating for BCD in a brand-approved fashion.
Enter BCD Buzz, Powered by PostBeyond
PostBeyond and BCD collaborated to design an employee advocacy program called “BCD Buzz.” Before the platform launch, the PostBeyond team hosted Social Media 101 workshops for each region to get their sales teams comfortable with social networks and best practices. That was followed by BCD Buzz platform training customized for each region. Once up and running, PostBeyond assisted with getting BCD employees involved in promoting BCD’s marketing campaigns and showcasing the company’s presence at their major annual conference, GBTA.
