How do you inject personality into a B2B brand?

Employee engagement helped transform Vuzion’s (Europe’s #1 cloud services provider) social profile and drive traffic to its website.

• Employee endorsements up by 978% per month
• 38% uplift in followers
• Earnt media value (EMV) boosted by 1,322% per month
• 7x increase in website leads from social postings

By making it easy for all staff to comment on and share company updates and posts, cloud services provider Vuzion has generated a vibrant social culture within the business. This flourishing engagement and mounting buzz has spilled out across platforms, helping to drive traffic and new business enquiries to the company websites.

Social Engagement

Social engagement wasn’t new to Vuzion; it boasted an active organically grown network of 780 followers across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The company was following a strategy of thought leadership and education; promoting business and digital transformation through cloud technologies and services.

The marketing team were using a leading social sharing platform to manage social media activity, but were unhappy with the granularity of reporting it provided. Without the stats to back up their activity, it was difficult to demonstrate value or drive employee engagement within the business.

‘It never took off and we allowed the contract the lapse,’ explains Vuzion Marketing Executive, Chloe Mustafa, ‘We started using a new social platform offered by our existing marketing automation supplier, but this didn’t meet our expectations in terms of usability.’

Mark Terry, Head of Marketing at Vuzion, confirms, ‘We wanted to work with a tech vendor that is really responsive to the fast-changing nature of the social space and welikeit is exactly this.’

Inspiring Social Advocacy

Vuzion began using welikeit in May 2017, shortly before its team were headline UK sponsor and attended the Microsoft Inspire Conference in Washington DC. Activity began with 10 users, competing to see who could post the most from the event.

The approval engine in welikeit ensured the marketing team were able to easily keep an eye on post quality and relevance and approve only those that made the bar.

The competitive element helped to boost engagement in the early days, and the potential of the tool became clear immediately.

Chloe explains: ‘We were able to drive seven times more leads to our website from our social activity in just one month using welikeit.’

In-depth Social Statistics

The reporting provided by welikeit has helped to transform the perception of the value of social media marketing within the business.

‘It can be quite hard as a millennial to make the argument “we need to be using social media”,’ says Chloe, ‘but welikeit gives us such in-depth stats that we can now discuss social with the executive team and with the sales team. They can see how well they are doing, and it encourages them to keep posting. In particular, the earnt media value (EMV) that welikeit provides really resonates and helps to demonstrate value.’

Previously, preparing a report for the monthly sales and marketing meeting took Digital Marketing Executive, Kreete Pruul, a full day to compile, incorporating data from Google analytics and other date sources. Yet, even then, it failed to deliver the level of granularity Vuzion required.

‘welikeit has made the social reporting much easier for us, by having all the data in one place and not having to go through each social media platform individually. Plus, the insights we get from our reports help us to align our content and social media strategy,’ says Kreete.

Now, welikeit empowers the marketing team to track activity and performance in real time and the reports are far easier to generate and share.

‘welikeit makes life a lot easier,’ says Chloe, ‘and the data is so valuable to us.’

Great Usability

‘When we started using welikeit,’ says Mark, ‘we were planning to use it only as an employee advocacy tool. The fact we are now using it as our posting tool, in place of our marketing automation platform, is testimony to the strengths and usability of welikeit.’

As users across the business have become more comfortable with social media through their use of the welikeit platform, they have begun approaching the marketing team with ideas for posts and asking for support.

‘welikeit has created its own little ecosystem,’ says Chloe, ‘It’s becoming a nice little community and people are coming back to us with ideas and we can keep on improving.’

The marketing team has developed resources to support proactive activity. They are able to maintain oversight and approval through welikeit, which gives the marketing team a quick visual overview of who is posting and in what categories.

Chloe comments, ‘welikeit’s ease of use means that people who have never used an Employee Advocacy platform before are up and running with welikeit in ten minutes. The sales guys like the app on their phones, so they can use it wherever they are. We’re now up to 20 users, and it’s still growing, but the great thing about welikeit is that everyone can get involved. We use Share Point as our intranet and we have the welikeit social wall on our home page, so we can reach the whole company and everyone can share easily and get involved.’

Harnessing AI

welikeit also incorporates a game-changing artificial intelligence technology called Isla which provides pre-post statistics to help with planning. For example, Isla can provide insights into how well a post or topic will be received, e.g. 90% of your followers will find this article interesting.

Chloe comments, ‘We’re keen to explore welikeit’s vast AI potential and are currently collaborating with the welikeit team to see how we can roll out her insights to the wider team.’

Mark concurs, ‘We are in the business of utilising and selling cutting edge tools ourselves and the potential of Isla really excites us. The prospect of continually refining and getting better, and the ability to provide additional information sources for us is something that will continue to add value.’

Pushing Out to Partners

Vuzion has a strong partner network and the team are now keen to explore the possibilities of using welikeit with partner organisations.

‘We are already using the welikeit social wall on our Partner Portal and our partners can endorse our content from there,’ explains Mark. ‘We’d now like to analyse the impact of that activity and the potential to use welikeit not only as an employee advocacy amplification tool, but to involve our partners directly and further amplify our messages and further develop engagement.’

The Power of Social

Vuzion has built a great relationship with the welikeit team.

Chloe says, ‘For us, the challenge was to get people to understand the power of social. With welikeit, we’re reaching thousands more people than we did a few months ago so everyone has sat up and taken notice. Being able to talk about earnt media value gives us more credibility and visibility. As we use it, we are more and more happy with welikeit. And we have a great relationship with them; they really listen to us. When we put welikeit’s ease of use together with the team at welikeit, we have a perfect little package.’

To find out how welikeit can help your business rock social contact us at info@welikeit.io or call us on +44 (0) 31143 4813.

Lean more about Vuzion at https://vuzion.cloud or contact sales on 0333 009 5890.