Banking is probably not the first industry you think of when discussing employee advocacy, but it's another sector that's now looking to utilize employees to help maximize their marketing opportunities.
So how can a bank use workforce marketing at scale? I recently spoke to Camila Romuld of HSBC to find out more.
What prompted HSBC to launch an employee advocacy program?
"I can answer from three different perspectives. From a marketing perspective, we wanted to dismiss the perception that relationship managers are solely operational and not capable of having more strategic and high-level conversations. Second, we really wanted to increase the HSBC brand familiarity across products, building relationships with prospects and current clients. And third, from the HR perspective, was to gain understanding of how employees are sharing content and then how it impacts hiring across various target markets and functions."
What are the benefits to HSBC and to employees in this program?
"From the perspective of HSBC, our relationship managers are building the networks faster. The HSBC company page has been attaining more followers and more prospective hires are applying for jobs than previously.
I thought it'd be nice to give you quotes from whoever is using Elevate in the markets instead of me talking more, so I've got a comment that came from Israel, where we have 70% of employees using Elevate: "Elevate is uber positive. This product helps empower our employees to be social, endorsing HSBC brand while building our own professional brand on LinkedIn. As such, LinkedIn engagement and enthusiasm levels are phenomenal, manifested by highest employees share rate, overall numbers of social engagement figures and overall user feedback." So it's been extremely positive, the feedback that came from our offices in Israel."
How do you measure success and can you share your results?
"We have three initial points there we set up to decide on how we're measuring success. One was connecting audiences and communicating more efficiently within our network. The second was to retain prospective clients and unlock new business opportunities and the third one was to increase HSBC visibility and credibility.
So far the results have been amazing - we've seen a huge spike on the amount of impressions.
To give you some numbers - the numbers of impressions mean the content being shared went from just over 1,600 to over 5,000 pieces of content which means the average employee advocacy user drives 3 times more impressions with Elevate than without it. When it comes down to engagement, our engagement rates went from an average of 37 every month to 80 which basically show us that the average employee user drives two times more engagement than a non-Elevate employee.
The amount of content being shared by our employees on LinkedIn, they went from 0.8% to an amazing 7.7%. This means that on average Elevate user shares content eight times more than a non-Elevate user.
As you can see that the number speak for themselves and these are great results."
Read the full article on the Link Humans blog.