GoCardless is a global leader in recurring payments. GoCardless’ global payments network and technology platform take the pain out of getting paid for businesses with recurring revenue. GoCardless works with a range of businesses from SMBs to multinational corporations, like TripAdvisor and the Guardian.
As the Social Media Manager, Phoebe Lebrecht leads the global organic social media and employee advocacy for GoCardless. Her day is spent overseeing the content posted to their corporate social media channels. She also works on aligning with different departments to make sure they’re using social media for employee advocacy, employee branding, promoting the brand, and launching product updates. Her goal is to make sure their content resonates with a wide-ranging audience on social media.
Getting Employees to Spread The Brand Message
GoCardless is scaling quickly. Just this year they were also gaining a lot more media coverage for their funding announcement, company success, and new customer stories. They were creating a lot of buzz surrounding the company, but they were missing a core piece of getting their message out on social media. “We were just not harnessing our employees to help spread that message.” said Phoebe.
Manual and Time-Consuming Process
Phoebe realized there was an opportunity to enable their employees with social content. At first, they had to start their initial employee advocacy efforts using mostly manual processes. Phoebe had to send documents with multiple prewritten messages and trackable links to employees through email. Employees would have the option to choose what to share. They would then copy the message and paste it to their social networks to share it out. The process was time-consuming, tedious, and unscalable for both Phoebe and the employees.
Losing Attribution Data
Any results were manually tracked by following people on social channels and using Google Analytics to track website visitors and lead conversions. If you asked Phoebe, how much time she spent with her manual process? She’d immediately answer, “too much.” The risk of losing out on attribution data was also far too significant. When an employee shared a piece of content without a trackable link, there wouldn’t be a way to attribute a new lead converted on the website.
Core Business Challenges
- Increase brand awareness on social media.
- Time-consuming and unscalable process for employee advocacy.
- Missing attribution data from content shared by employees.
Searching For a Scalable Solution
Their initial results proved that employee advocacy on social media worked. Phoebe and the team quickly recognized employee advocacy was going to be a large part of their social media strategy. “We wanted to expand beyond our original audience, as we scaled internationally as well as targeting new industries.” said Phoebe. With hundreds of employees active on LinkedIn, there was a massive opportunity to harness their networks and communicate with an authentic voice.
Phoebe read a lot of content and researched several different solutions that could fit the needs of the company. Eventually, this led her to several conversations to learn more about the different solutions available.
Both the Sales and Marketing teams planned to be the first group of participants. They responded well to a competitive atmosphere, so gamification was a necessary component for their employee advocacy program.
There wasn’t any time for the lengthy process, so a simple and easy-to-use experience was necessary for both the program admins and employees.
Why PostBeyond?
Phoebe’s search led her to PostBeyond’s employee advocacy platform. What stood out to her was PostBeyond‘s dedicated focus on employee advocacy. She and the employees responded well to the platform’s clean user interface and ease-of-use.
Robust reporting and analytics were also a need-to-have. PostBeyond’s quarterly benchmark reviews were simple to understand, and they provided context to how the company compared to their industry peers. “Reporting has encouraged people to contribute because they’re able to see the content they’ve produced. It has given everyone a boost in their personal brand and the confidence to create content.” said Phoebe.
They use Google Analytics and specific UTM parameters to understand what content shared from PostBeyond resonates the most. They can now track website visitors and leads generated and attribute results back to the piece of content shared and from which employees. By partnering with their dedicated Customer Success Manager, the team has someone who can provide a helpful hand. Their CSM walks through results, provides best practices, and helps improves the program’s performance through a metrics-driven approach.