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Is Employee Generated Content the modern door to door marketing? With door to door marketing leaving the scene and the new generation of employees flowing in, new ways of marketing are emerging, such as user-generated content. It has become one of the leading marketing strategies for brand success online, and employee generated content is not far behind.
Employee generated content (EGC) enables your team to become your brand’s influencers, with their content representing the company on social media. Their relatable and genuine perspective makes the content highly authentic and trustworthy in the users’ eyes. By empowering your employees to share real experiences with personalized insights, you can significantly boost your marketing efforts, increasing your brand’s visibility to a broader audience.
Employee generated content refers to any content-based marketing created by your employees for your brand. This content can be shared through personal or company social media channels, as well as your website, using methods such as:
Reliability and trustworthiness in brand marketing have become key factors in enhancing the customer shopping journey and product experience. This is why the authenticity of EGC has emerged as a more reliable source for customers.
Its fast production also aligns perfectly with the demands of today’s fast-paced business environment. Platforms like Flowbox make it even easier for companies to leverage and showcase this content by automatically gathering employee generated content, created on their platform, and seamlessly displaying it alongside their products on the website.
Let’s see for example how the homepage flow is currently used by the Tom Dixon brand to showcase their UGC. By leveraging the Flowbox platform, they seamlessly displayed the employee collected content to create a visually engaging flow that highlights their connection with the community and enhances the overall website experience.
EGC is most impactful when shared through employee accounts, but don’t hesitate to leverage your company’s social media as well. Reposting content from your employees not only helps increase its visibility to your audience but also fosters a sense of community and shows that the company supports and values its team members.
The leading platform for EGC is TikTok. It has provided a perfect platform for employee generated content due to its trend-driven content and the casual tone of videos. Creating a great environment where employees can be creative with trends and authentically relay company messages.
Carla Menéndez, a stylist for Desigual, often makes videos on her platform about her routine and experiences working with the company.
Instagram and YouTube are also strong contenders. Both platforms allow employees to visually showcase their day-to-day experiences at the office. The dedicated Instagram tag section and highlights make it an ideal place to guide your team on where to collect their content. Employee vlogs on YouTube, like Samantha Gould’s video about working at Petco, have resonated positively with viewers, offering an authentic glimpse into company culture and boosting engagement.
The visual nature of platforms like Instagram and YouTube boosts the credibility and authenticity of employee generated content, as viewers can see real experiences firsthand. Using trending hashtags on these platforms allows you to incorporate your company’s hashtag into the EGC and helps employees stay up-to-date with social media trends and movements. This makes it easier and more efficient for them to generate successful content ideas for their next post!
Incorporating EGC into your e-commerce platform is the final step in fully leveraging its potential for your brand. By using a UGC platform like Flowbox, you can seamlessly create EGC flows and integrate them directly into your website. This allows audiences who may not use TikTok as their primary social media platform to still engage with your content.
Flowbox’s TikTok integration tool makes it easy to embed videos into your e-commerce site, expanding the reach of your employee generated content to a wider audience. Here are some reasons why Employee generated content is beneficial.
Employee generated content has a lot of benefits compared to traditional marketing methods. In addition to being flexible in terms of content structure and where it can be posted, what is the real impact of EGC, and why is it more effective than traditional marketing methods?
Authenticity builds trust, and EGC offers a genuine reflection of employee experiences and perspectives. Unlike traditional marketing, it feels less staged to customers, providing an authentic glimpse into company culture. It allows users to feel more connected to the content by sharing employees’ perspectives, fostering stronger connections between the company and its audience.
A study showed that 81% of consumers consider trust essential when purchasing.
By incorporating employees’ viewpoints, EGC creates a more unfiltered, relatable form of content that reveals the true company environment, enhancing customer trust and engagement.
Imagine a friend telling you about a product they bought… much more convincing than a traditional ad, right? Adding a face to your company and products humanizes your brand. The content becomes more engaging for viewers and leverages your employees’ networks to amplify your brand’s visibility. This helps your brand reach a wider audience and fosters a stronger connection with your brand’s message.
Reallocating Riches: Ever wondered when it’s your turn to enjoy a company-offered massage? Employee generated content is a cost-effective marketing strategy that allows your employees to create content right from your office. This approach enables your brand to maximize its benefits while reallocating your budget more effectively!
One of the significant benefits of including EGC is that it makes your company more attractive to prospective employees. A simple search of your brand can give them valuable insights into your company’s values and office atmosphere. Setting in motion an automatic attraction from applicants who align more closely with your company’s values.
If you already have experience with user-generated content, you’ll have no problem uploading employee generated content. The process of collecting content from social media works the same for both, making EGC a natural fit within your UGC marketing strategy. When it comes to uploading, the process is identical to that of UGC. To effectively use your newly collected EGC and favourite UGC, collection and presentation are key to helping your audience fully appreciate the value of your products. This is why integrating a UGC platform to organize and showcase content from your social media in a streamlined way is ideal.
That’s not all! You can also choose to integrate your EGC or UGC into your social media advertisements, offering an authentic and compelling addition to your marketing strategy. This approach boosts your campaigns by providing genuine content that resonates with your audience.
Tom&co’s example of EGC shows how the natural enthusiasm of employees can be used to boost your website and client engagement. The company added employee testimonials to their website’s homepage, using the flows created with the Flowbox platform to highlight why they chose to join the team.
Filled with positive words, these testimonials have helped attract clients by reinforcing the idea that happy employees lead to satisfied customers who are treated well. Additionally, this employee generated content showcases the company’s positive culture, appealing to potential employees and fostering a community of happy clients.
Employee generated content is most effective when the content creators are genuinely motivated. Here are some tips to help that motivation:
⭐ Creating a positive company culture is the most crucial step in achieving effective employee generated content. Foster open conversations that encourage employees to share their ideas, experiences, and opinions. This approach will lead to content showcasing your company’s diverse perspectives.
⭐ Encourage participation from employees at all levels by recognizing their contributions with rewards and opportunities for career growth. After all, a bit of chocolate motivation can go a long way in inspiring engagement and enthusiasm!
⭐ Respecting their privacy, if your employees prefer to stay private on social media, the Flowbox UGC platform offers a solution. You can still incorporate employee generated content into your marketing while respecting their privacy, ensuring that their contributions remain impactful without involving their personal accounts. The Media Uploader feature can be integrated within a Flow, allowing your employees to directly upload their own images on your website. This provides them with an opportunity to engage while keeping their content separate from their social media accounts.
Ultimately, when employees genuinely enjoy their workplace, they are motivated to help it grow and succeed alongside them. By maintaining a positive atmosphere in the office, you naturally encourage individuals to become your brand’s influencers.
A significant challenge with employee generated content is the difficulty in controlling the message that your employees’ content conveys. Inconsistent messaging, brand misrepresentation, and negative content can severely impact your brand’s credibility and customer loyalty.
As the leader of this initiative, it’s up to you to prevent potential issues. Ensure your employees have the tools and resources they need to enhance their understanding and skills. This can range from providing a clear list of guidelines and user-friendly tools to offering professional media training and examples of effective content creation.
You can easily double-check that the content being produced is targeted to your audience and message. With the function moderating collected content in your Inbox, you have the option of ‘pre-approve’ beside ‘approve and reject’. This feature allows you to assign a social media moderator from your company to review and pre-approve the collected content. Following that, a supervisor can quickly check the pre-approved posts and approve the final content that will be displayed on your website.
After you have taken all the precautions, kick your feet up, relax and allow your employees to do their work. Encourage them to unleash their creativity on their social media as well, as this can help reach a wider audience. Remember, their unique perspectives can make a significant impact so double-check on the ideas that you wouldn’t usually consider. Keep an eye on maintaining the same company value and message. By doing this you could be engaging with a wider audience while still maintaining the same community of users.
If you’re still hesitant about trusting your employees with your company’s image, let the statistics speak for themselves. Use Flowbox’s advanced website analytics to track engagement and monitor fluctuations in visibility and interaction metrics.
These features will help you assess whether the content produced by your employees is effective. By analyzing the data, you can gain valuable insights into the performance of your employee generated content (EGC) strategy. Allowing you to stay ahead of what your audience wants to see from your company.
The Flowbox platform offers session-based calculations to generate data that can be used to inform your business decisions. This allows you to monitor and control how much engagement your content is receiving. Flowbox enables you to download up-to-date data and performance reports, complete with key account-level KPIs, while also comparing current data with historical trends.
The advantage of our platform is that your UGC and EGC don’t need to be combined in the same place. For instance, if you want your EGC to be displayed in a specific section, such as the ‘About Us’ page, you can set up a separate flow.
For each flow you create, you can generate data analytics, enabling you to pinpoint the success of different strategies. From this information, you can gain a clear understanding of how your employee generated content is performing. This allows you to use it as a benchmark for your company’s next progress goals.
MELLER is a digital brand that produces sunglasses with a strong focus on user-generated content marketing, which aligns with its online store model. This approach has boosted customer satisfaction by engaging them with the brand through authentic content.
Showcasing realistic images of their products enhances the buying experience, making customers feel more confident in their purchases. Recently, MELLER has also begun incorporating employee generated content into its platform. Their EGC is prominently featured in their Instagram highlights, showcasing the brand’s evolving content strategy.
By reposting content that features employees wearing the glasses, it allows customers to see that their products are so high-quality, that even employees use them in their everyday lives. This genuine involvement of employees with the brand outside of work makes the content more authentic, enhancing trust and credibility with potential customers.
Additionally, some employees attended the Awakenings Festival, which partnered with MELLER, and posted content while enjoying the event. This not only serves as a reward for the team but also allows them to create engaging employee generated content. In one instance, an employee can be seen at the festival relaxing while wearing a pair of MELLER glasses, showcasing the brand in a fun and relatable context.
When Meller was deciding on the best way to collect their content, they chose Flowbox. Unlike UGC, employee generated content can be more challenging to collect due to private employee accounts or difficulties in tracking down content, as opposed to simply using a favourite picture shared by a user. The UGC platform Flowbox enabled Meller to efficiently collect, organise, and design their employee generated content in a timely and cost-effective way.
When utilised properly, employee generated content is an incredibly effective marketing strategy. It can help elevate your brand and drive greater success. By providing the right guidelines, you can empower your employees to harness their creativity and produce authentic content that resonates with your users during their shopping journey.
To seamlessly integrate employee generated content into your e-commerce and advertising efforts, consider incorporating user-generated content as a fundamental part of your content marketing strategy.
Are you interested in learning more about UGC and EGC? Discover how your company can leverage UGC platforms to showcase your employees’ content and effortlessly enhance your brand awareness. Use the chat to ask our team.
