You know your customers’ content engagement preferences and have dozens of stellar story ideas to develop into high-performance marketing assets.
What you don’t have is enough time or team members to execute even a fraction of those ideas. You do an admirable job, but your audience and other stakeholders demand more content than the team can reasonably generate.
Before you reach into the AI toolbox to scale the creative resources, consider a more human approach: employee-generated content (EGC).
By activating your company’s subject matter experts (SMEs), sales and customer service colleagues, and other influential internal voices, you can rev up content production while extending your brand’s reach and relevance to new audiences.
Here’s what you need to know about the technique and what it offers.
What is EGC?
Like the content created by the marketing team, employee-generated content can take many forms — articles, videos, audio conversations, and social media posts. However, EGC has distinguishing characteristics, including:
Voluntarily created: EGC can come from anyone in the organization, including colleagues for whom content creation isn’t part of their responsibilities. It gives an outlet to express their interests, insights, or passion for their role without tying it to their job performance.
Own vibe: While EGC efforts should align with your marketing strategy and content quality standards, participants should use their voice and style to tell your brand’s story. It results in content that’s more authentic and relatable.
Additive technique: EGC complements and amplifies rather than replaces marketing’s role in content creation. It’s particularly effective when working with colleagues who have built strong personal brands. Their publicly shared conversations foster trust in your business and grow your brand’s marketing influence.
Ready to get started? Consider these tips to organize, empower, and activate your employee advocates.
Tip 1: Provide process clarity and examples of success
Enlisting colleagues outside of marketing to help with content creation can be a big ask if not a downright imposition. Be clear about what they would do and how much time it should take, so they don’t commit to something they won’t have the bandwidth to fulfill.
Start by establishing a framework to support your employees’ efforts. The more information you can provide, the better. But at the very least, it should cover the brand’s expectations, style, and quality guidelines, and essential process details. The framework should also answer common questions, such as:
What topics and brand details can be discussed in the content?
What are the preferred content types/formats?
How often will the employee be expected to post and on what platforms?
What company and/or editorial guidelines should be followed?
Will someone review or approve the content before publishing?
How will this content be associated with the company?
Will compensation or recognition be given?
Seeing examples of successful employee-generated content can help novice creators. If you’re starting an EGC program, share marketing-produced or influencer-contracted content to give a feel for tone, style, and voice.
Macy’s offers a good example of a blended approach. An Instagram search for #MacysStyleCrew surfaces the brand’s fashion-related posts. Adding #IWorkAtMacys displays the posts from its internal brand advocates. In this one, Macy's Design Director Michtseng shows off a gala-ready look built around a pearl-handled black shell bag from the department store's collection.
Tip 2: Provide tools, support, and training
Employees might raise objections if they don’t feel creative or have strong writing skills. While experience crafting quality copy certainly helps, EGC doesn’t need to be polished and perfected — or even in written form — to be effective for marketing.
To help participating employees upskill and gain confidence, provide support through these approaches:
Invite them to the creatives’ table: Ask interested colleagues to attend your editorial planning meetings and creative brainstorming sessions. They can help them understand the creative process and goals, and allow them to weigh in with their ideas. Being “in the room where it happens” may deepen their interest in bringing new content to life.
Use technology to sharpen their skills: It’s unrealistic to expect novice creators to memorize AP Style or whatever guide your brand uses. Reassure them that their writing skills can be developed and enhanced with the help of company-approved AI tools like Grammarly and Hemingway, and fact-checking tech like Nexis for Media and Meedan.
Highlight training opportunities: If your company offers a career development program, encourage your volunteer creators to sign up for writing classes, creative workshops, photography and videography training, and other relevant educational opportunities. List and share available courses in your internal newsletter, an intranet portal, or a Slack channel. That lets your colleagues know you welcome their contributions and want them to feel prepared.
Create tutorials and guides: If no formal onboarding process exists, try the do-it-yourself route: Ask your content team to document their creative process in written or video form. Repurpose this content into brand-relevant tip sheets, how-to demos, or behind-the-scenes stories your audience might appreciate, too.
Tip 3: Make content creation easy and organic
Employees intimidated by the creative process may be more open to contributing to the content coffers in other ways. For example, if they post brand-relevant conversations on their social channels, ask to repurpose or reshare those efforts from your brand’s social accounts.
Here’s another option: Ask these colleagues to film themselves while demonstrating a specialized work skill or discussing a topic in their area of expertise. The merits of this approach are apparent in a recent Instagram post from HubSpot’s Andy Pitre. Though Andy’s role as head of product is closely tied to marketing, content creation may not be among his core work responsibilities. Nonetheless, his product expertise and familiarity with the brand’s strategy make him an ideal content partner.
In this Instagram post, Andy provides a cheat sheet on several recent product updates, including new Breeze AI Agents, Marketing Hub Enterprise, and Workspaces. In less than 75 seconds, he explains what makes each feature special and how it helps HubSpot’s customers. He also shares a link to detailed information.
Andy’s simple language and casual, friendly tone make the information engaging and easy for anyone in HubSpot’s audience to understand. It’s an artful balance that could be difficult for marketing to achieve without the participation of the company’s subject matter experts.
EGC videos like Andy's can be livestreamed on the brand’s social streams or published on the organization’s website and other owned media platforms.
Self-filmed videos aren’t the only creative option, especially when the content team includes a videographer. Ask the professional to film willing employees as they go through their workday. The resulting footage can be edited into more polished slice-of-life brand storytelling.
For example, this video from ServiceNow’s #LifeAtNow series highlights the experience and culture at the company’s office in Munich, Germany. ServiceNow employees were filmed at their desks, in meetings, and in group social activities. Voiceover audio, animations, and b-roll were added to share fun tidbits about the region, its history of innovation, and local traditions.
Snippets of interviews with employees like Robert Rosellen, country manager, and Hala Zeine, global chief strategy officer, add a touch of the brand’s personality in between key brand messages, such as how sustainability and design flow through everything ServiceNow does.
This approach offers multiple benefits. It makes it easier for non-writers to participate in content creation. It also gives the participating employees a vested interest in sharing the content with others, which helps increase its reach, search rankings, and content performance.
TECH TIP: Employee advocacy platforms like EveryoneSocial, Oktopost, Sharebee, Haiilo, Sociabble, and Hootsuite Amplify can streamline the process by automatically distributing published assets to employee program participants. Your “content deputies” can easily reshare the stories with a few clicks.
Regardless of the technical support, consider how contributors will balance content creation with their other responsibilities. Discuss your expectations with them (and their managers when appropriate) in advance and agree on a volume and cadence they feel comfortable committing to.
Tim Davidson, founder and vice president of marketing at B2B Rizz, notes, “If you expect them to do it on top of everything else, they simply won’t have enough time, and it’ll always get de-prioritized.”
Tip 4: Allow workers to share their skills, ideas, and experiences
Employee-generated content doesn’t need to be about the company to further your content goals. In fact, focusing on workers’ personal experiences may make your stories more relatable to your audience.
A recent post on Sephora’s employee-focused Sephoralife Instagram account demonstrates this concept nicely. E-commerce engineer Temi advises interns to build valuable connections by sharing how networking at a Sephora intern-week mixer led to a full-time job just 10 days after their internship ended. Temi’s caption reinforces the message promoting the company’s employment opportunities: “The intern to full-time pipeline is strong at Sephora!”
Here’s another viable approach: Allow employees to demonstrate their personal hobbies or unique skills.
For example, brothers Jacob and Joseph Bartoli (aka Doughtoli) have amassed millions of views on TikTok by showing off their pizza dough-tossing talents. They’re both general managers at pizza chain Papa Johns, which makes them organic (or oregano-ic if you will) fits for the brand’s EGC efforts.
In this example, a Bartoli brother puts his irreverent spin on Papa Johns’ stuffed-crust pizza. He artfully spins dough, then folds a ludicrous number of cheese sticks into it, creating the “most-stuffed stuffed crust pizza.”
Both the brand and the brothers benefit from this content partnership: The Bartolis wear their branded uniforms and film in Papa Johns’ kitchens, providing their employer with free product placement. In turn, the brand reshares their videos from its official TikTok account and spotlights Jacob and Joseph’s talents in videos like this one, which co-stars Shaquille O’Neal.
Tip 5: Incentivize, celebrate, and recognize
For some employees, the chance to share their knowledge and creativity is all the motivation they need to jump on the EGC train. But others might want more tangible benefits.
Offers of gift cards or company swag can be helpful incentives. If you lack the budget to provide compensation, focus on how the opportunity might help advance their career or personal goals.
Here’s an example from the B2B world: In a post on her LinkedIn page, Nada Alkutbi, IBM’s manager of global social strategy and orchestration, notes that a favorite part of her role is the ability to give back and volunteer. She describes an event where she and IBM colleagues (in partnership with Wimbledon Foundation) taught local charities about using social media to inspire their supporters and drive their donation goals.
While Nada is a member of IBM’s social media team, content creation may not be a standard component of her strategy-focused role. Taking part in this event aligned with an interest she’s passionate about, which gave her a good reason to advocate for IBM’s philanthropic efforts on her social network.
Here are a few more incentives to consider:
Give a shoutout: Post a word of thanks or an image of gratitude. Tag their social profiles or link to their website (with their consent). It’s a nice thing to do, and it can raise their industry profile, grow their personal brands, and help them connect with others who can help further their goals.
Invite as a featured guest on your team’s social chats, webinars, podcasts, or livestream shows: If the employees’ initial content asset references a personal hobby or specialized skill, they might relish the opportunity to continue the conversation and connect with others who share their interests.
Nominate for company awards and recognition programs: It rarely hurts to raise awareness of the colleague’s above-and-beyond efforts with HR and the management team. It may even help get their name on the shortlist when they apply for a new role or seek a promotion.
EGC formula: Enlist, empower, and activate
Employees’ everyday responsibilities might not have a creative focus, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t ready, willing, and able to show off their knowledge, lend their talents, and spread their enthusiasm for the brand. Often, all they need is some direction, encouragement, and the right motivation to get started.
All tools mentioned in this article were suggested by the author. If you’d like to suggest a tool, share the article on social media with a comment.
Updated from a May 2022 article.
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