How Gainsight Harnesses The Power of Employee Advocacy to Build Thought Leadership

Gainsight is known as the Customer Success company. They are recognized as the leader in their space and one of the fastest-growing technology companies. They even have their own hit song about Customer Success available on Spotify! To build thought leadership, Gainsight uses employee advocacy to amplify their content through social media.

Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta has always believed in the power of social media and encouraged his employees to harness it in support of the company. So when Gainsight’s Digital Communications Manager, Saphiya Hindeyeh and Senior Director of Solutions & Content Marketing Zoë Lefeuvre first became interested in an employee advocacy program, it wasn’t hard to get executive buy-in. What took time was finding the program that was right for their company.

The Importance of Being Human First

Gainsight’s stated purpose is to win in business while being human first. And this human-first approach to business guides all of their decisions. They recognized the potential marketing reach and audience growth that they could accomplish with a formal employee advocacy program.

But employee advocacy work is easier said than done in a company with more than 700 employees spread across multiple locations.

If Gainsight really wanted to get employees involved in advocacy that was both genuine and enthusiastic, they would need a solution that accounted for their size and didn’t monopolize Saphiya’s time.

The Challenge: Inability to Scale With Time-Consuming Process and Lack of Analytics

“When we launched our pilot employee advocacy program with another tool, we were able to quickly see the value of that tool, which is great. It had all the basic capabilities we needed,” recalls Saphiya of the time before they’d found PostBeyond. “However, there were a few challenges. As the sole person managing the day-to-day program, it became time-consuming and I needed a tool that was more efficient for me to manage, and also one that provided a great user experience for our teammates, and that wasn’t so clunky, and that made them want to use it more.”

Because it would be Saphiya’s job to manage the platform, she needed something that wouldn’t take time away from her other duties. It was also important that this efficiency didn’t come at the expense of important employee advocacy analytics.

“It was also essential for us to have access to really comprehensive analytics, including an easy way to track and report the ROI of the program. We had basic analytics with the other tool, more vanity metrics, but we weren’t able to see the conversion throughout the funnel with it,” she explained.

Zoë explained that there were additional challenges associated with launching a new program during a pandemic. They had to be more creative in product promotion so that their voice didn’t go unnoticed during a time of turmoil. They had to adjust their content to fit new and different topics while working with a limited budget and an employee base, mostly working from home.

The Solution: An Efficient Employee Advocacy Platform That’s Intuitive and Saves Time

Saphiya and Zoë compared many available employee advocacy tools after realizing that the one they piloted wasn’t quite right for them.

“Fortunately. . .we were able to invest in a more primo tool, which is PostBeyond, and get executive buy-in for that,” Saphiya said, explaining that the transition was much easier thanks to their PostBeyond Customer Success Manager, Sarah Beatty.

Sarah worked with Saphiya and Zoë to create goals and metrics to measure impact and to share best practice tips and tricks to set them up for success.

When COVID-19 left their rewards stranded in an empty office building, their plan to gamify employee sign-ups on the platform went out the window. But they kept working to create buy-in, running training sessions for select smaller groups in advance and celebrating the platform’s kickoff. This ensured that employees heard about the program before they were asked to sign up and that there was a pool of people already familiar with its use when the time came.

After launching the program, they provided multiple channels for new users to ask questions or receive help to sign up.

Results: Engaged Employees and Advanced Analytics in a Fraction of the Time

Gainsight saw stunning success with PostBeyond. In just five months, the Gainsight team saw:

• 2,700+ total shares
• 1.3M+ potential reach
• 22,000+ interactions
• $140,000+ earned media value
• 30%+ above the industry average for employee adoption
• 6,500+ website visitors via content shared by employees

Saphiya has already put the availability of more advanced metrics to good use.

“We try to go beyond some of the more vanity metrics and focus on how it impacts the funnel. . . . It’s very valuable to see how many people are visiting our website from employees’ social posts, and how many of them are registering for our webinars, downloading our gated content, attending our virtual conferences. I think that shows that this program is super important for our company,” she says.

Zoë agrees that PostBeyond has been an important part of audience engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Since we can’t meet our customers in person, which obviously a lot of B2B companies like to do, now we’re thinking about ways of how we can be where they are. . .we’re putting out more content than we ever have before,” she explains.

And with PostBeyond, it’s easier than ever to share that content with employees and have them share it with their respective audiences. Gainsight produces much of their own content, rather than sharing third-party content, but makes sure to make their branded content educational rather than just promotional. This makes it easier to get employee buy-in because they also benefit from the content.

How Gainsight Uses PostBeyond

How do they put out such high-quality content?

Saphiya explains that she spends, at most, an hour per week managing the PostBeyond platform. That includes reviewing analytics, curating content, and even sending out updates about the platform a few times per week. That means that with the rest of her time, she can focus on the content itself.

The clarity of the analytics also continues to inform their content creation and employee advocacy strategy.

“At the end of the day, all of that data helps us understand the type of content people are interested in. It goes back to content marketing. And we can update our strategy based on what’s performing well and what’s not performing well,” Saphiya says.

They can also track analytics to determine what content their employees are most likely to share, further informing the process and making sure that no time is wasted creating unpopular content.

As they look ahead, they plan to introduce even more types of content in the coming year, continuing to engage employees and audience members alike and centering their human-first approach.

They have a new Head of Sales coming soon and are excited to sign up his team for the platform to ensure that use is as easy as possible for a team as crucial as sales.

Saphiya shares her wisdom with other potential users of PostBeyond:

“I believe employee advocacy is increasingly seen as a crucial component to a company’s online strategy. It can complement your social media marketing program because it ultimately still drives that social media influence. So it is very important, it is a part of your online strategy, so hopefully, if you’re thinking about it, you can see the benefits of it.”