Antler’s Authentic and Cost-Effective Strategy to Engage Employees

Antler in the Netherlands uses SpeechifAI’s organic social sharing toolkit to provide simple, cost-effective ways for employees to amplify their brand organically.

Any company that takes its branding seriously in the age of social media needs to have a robust employee engagement strategy. Having engaged, brand-passionate employees promoting the company online can genuinely mean the difference in attracting both potential employees and customers.

Yet, as marketing and HR executives can attest, engaging employees in company initiatives can be a creative challenge at best, and a time-consuming struggle at worst.

Enter SpeechifAI, a new generation social sharing company that empowers employees to use their organic voices online. In 2019, SpeechifAI was founded during the first-ever Antler cohort in the Netherlands. By now, they have helped customers generate $20 million worth of social media visibility — including three billion impressions and half a million clicks on major social networks — that was previously out of their reach. Antler is one of those customers, and we’re proud to be the global day zero investor who brought SpeechifAI’s founders together.

With offices and employees located worldwide, finding simple, cost-effective engagement strategies that amplify employees’ authentic voices is a must for us. SpeechifAI was the solution we were looking for. To date, we have launched over 60 social sharing campaigns with our employees, founders, and external partners, generating tens of thousands of dollars worth of branding activity on social media, and curating a more engaged workforce in the process.

Confronting Engagement Challenges

“I believe that our local brand awareness in the venture capital ecosystem here in the Netherlands wouldn’t be where it is today without mobilizing my team to share on social media,” says Inemarieke Raettig, Marketing Associate in the Netherlands who leads our local content and event strategy.

Inemarieke has worked with Antler since 2019 on amplifying the team’s events and initiatives helping her co-workers’ authentic voices be heard online. However, she acknowledges that it hasn’t always been an easy task.

“Before SpeechifAI, I would need to ask my team to manually create posts on their private social media channels in which I would ask them to talk about Antler. I needed to create a document in which I would write out various versions of copy trying to match the wording my colleagues would use to express themselves, and in parallel, create visuals and attach those to an email.”

After an orientation of new founders joining Antler in the Netherlands’ sixth cohort, Antler quickly assembled a group of posts on SpeechifAI. These easily shareable posts enabled both founders and Antler team members to highlight their participation and boost Antler’s brand profile simultaneously.

The amount of work and time that goes into this process, from creating copy and compiling visuals to getting employees to assemble all these elements into their own social media posts, is not a foreign concept to any marketing professional. But ultimately, it is labor that can be avoided by using the right set of tools.

Leveraging SpeechifAI

SpeechifAI offers a wide variety of features to streamline crafting and sharing content on social media platforms. From an AI-powered writing assistant that can optimize copy to email and website-embeddable toolkits, the SpeechifAI platform can significantly reduce the barriers to sharing content online.

For our Antler in the Netherlands marketing team, SpeechifAI’s social sharing toolkit provides a helpful area to draft copy, plan engagement campaigns, and compile materials that could then be shared with a click of a button.

The team uses the platform to promote social media engagement from employees and the founders of their portfolio companies in a variety of areas. These include promoting program kick-offs, magnifying media coverage, and encouraging recruitment and referral efforts.

One of the best ways to use SpeechifAI’s toolkit is through event promotion. The marketing team in the Netherlands — constantly juggling the task of engaging investors, founders, and internal team members — uses events as a way to promote authentic engagement.

Each SpeechifAI campaign contains individual posts that can be customized and shared across multiple social media platforms. This provides choices for employees to share to their preferred platform and facilitates greater creativity and authenticity in shared content.

“As part of our cohort, we host various expert sessions and panels. One of the latter was an investment panel including key investors from other VCs to share what matters most to them with our founders,“ explained Inemarieke.

“Bringing together this group of exceptional panelists called for a celebration on social media. And so, I created a SpeechifAI campaign, shared it in an email with the panelists, and made it easy for them to post about the coming together before they even left the building to return to their offices and resume their day.”

Engaging People, Saving Money

Advertising on social media is expensive. For example, LinkedIn is the premier social media platform for professionals and companies looking to advertise their activities, build their brands, and recruit or be hired. This influence comes at a very steep advertising cost — an average of $5.26 per click, according to some estimates.

This makes any opportunity to generate organic social sharing from employees a potential boon for companies.

Antler in the Netherlands serves as a prime example. Their 60-plus SpeechifAI campaigns over the past year have generated hundreds of shares and well over 10,000 clicks on LinkedIn alone, emphasizing the reach organic social sharing can have. We estimate that the total value of activity Antler in the Netherlands generated via organic social sharing is more than $63,000.

SpeechifAI’s social sharing toolkit has enabled us to execute a cost-efficient marketing strategy, simplify engagement processes, and facilitate more authentic voices online. As Inemarieke and our Netherlands team continue to enable and invest in the world’s most exceptional people, SpeechifAI will continue to build on its suite of tools to make their jobs easier.

As Inemarieke concluded, “SpeechifAI lowers the barrier for my team to post and is the single biggest factor to make my life as a Marketing Associate easier.”

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey with Antler in the Netherlands? Apply now to join us!