Employee Created Content: Found money in the couch cushions of the marketing budget ~via @katadhin
Want to get airplay for your marketing groove? Well, you don’t need to look too far from your desk to find a free media channel that will dig your tune. Following the theme of partnership for this issue, John Andrews, CEO of Photofy shares how to engage the often-overlooked channel in the cubicles around you as Employee Created Content becomes a trusted source for influencers and buyers.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard, “Hey, let’s increase our marketing budget because everything we’re doing is killing it!”
Anyone? …. Bueller?
I actually did hear this a couple of times in my career but it was in regards to specific tactics, not the marketing budget overall. When a nice vein of marketing gold is struck, there is always some underperforming parts of the budget where funds can be shifted from underperforming tactics.
The inexorable rise of digital marketing has created some of these honey pots that are ripe for reallocation, but there are few new tactics to take their place. Today’s budgets are dedicated mostly to transactional activities including Google, Facebook/Instagram, and Amazon ads, which account for over 70% of all digital spending. Much of this spending invariably become duplicative and wasteful, especially as consumers use more ad and third party tracking blockers. The fundamental elephant in the room is simply this… marketing investment is being over-allocated in terms of time spent.
“Brands are looking closely at their marketing budgets and asking, “For every dollar I spend, am I getting more than a dollar back? And if that’s not the case, then should I be spending it elsewhere?”
Brett Gordon, Associate Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management
Media models relying on monetizing eyeballs are largely failing beyond this small group of suppliers, so what’s a marketer to do? There are seemingly limitless options for marketing spend today but most are still based on interruptive ad-based models.
Influencer marketing has created a more organic approach to this problem and is now a standard line item in most marketing budgets. Influencer marketing offers a unique blend of scale and authenticity coupled with content creation and discrete audience reach. The beauty of influencers is expanding audience reach beyond a brand’s own channels or largely duplicated 3rd party data. Beyond influencer marketing, scaled reach expansion of desired audiences utilizing methods other than current marketing efforts is few and far between.
One possibility is expanding the impact of people closest to the customer… company employees. Employee Created Content (ECC) is a largely overlooked, yet growing trend among marketers that are seeking to solve reach and localization challenges. Like influencer marketing, ECC helps reach new audiences through the strong bonds of connectivity available via employee’s personal networks.
Like influencer marketing, ECC helps reach new audiences through the strong bonds of connectivity available via employee’s personal networks.
A recent evaluation of Employee Created Content from one of our Photofy platform partners showed a total measurable marketing footprint expansion of 20% from almost 500,000 pieces of employee content created over a 6-month time period. The content was shared via a variety of networks, with the most popular being private email and text, channels that are unavailable to most marketers on a personal level.
[ECC] …showed a total measurable marketing footprint expansion of 20% from almost 500,000 pieces of employee content created over a 6-month time period.
The beauty of content created and shared by employees is that it solves a couple of big problems facing many marketers today, specifically localization and engagement.
At Photofy, our partners using ECC experience an 8X+ level of engagement over brand channels from content created and shared by their employees… there simply is not a better solution for local content at scale. Thousands of employees easily creating content locally from branded elements, pre-loaded in the PhotofyApp, helps drive not only local search optimization but also builds local authority for search which is critical to winning ‘near me’ searches that are increasingly part of Suggested Search results.
At RE/MAX, our agents are independent contractors of individually owned and operated franchises. Their challenge is to differentiate and market themselves with the global RE/MAX brand to create hyper-local content that connects with their audience. Leveraging the customization, branded designs, and video capabilities of Photofy have provided our network with a turnkey marketing solution that instills confidence to create on-brand and engaging messaging to grow their business.
James Schwartz, Vice President of Marketing at RE/MAX
The personalization of content is vital to connection in an increasingly automated world. Many marketers can find an extremely affordable and reliable way to expand their efforts through Employee Created Content.
