How Employee Advocacy Helped Corel Build a Thriving Brand Community

Corel Corporation, the leader in professional creativity and productivity solutions, empowers every day by making it easier, more accessible, and more secure to put ideas to work. With a 35+ year legacy of innovation, the company is behind some of the world's most beloved software brands. Corel's suite of solutions is finely tuned for the digital workforce and constantly evolving, putting its customers at the leading edge of innovation.

Turning Followers into Fans

Corel has been well known for decades for creative products like CorelDRAW, Corel Painter, Parallels, MindManager, and WinZip just to name a few. Today, the company is going through a large transformation of building out a new brand that will represent its entire suite of solutions.

A key part of that transformation is a new marketing strategy that enables Corel to continually engage with communities formed around different products: some people have been there for a while, some are fairly new. The goal is to bring all of them together, engage, share their creative projects, and celebrate companies and people who have supported Corel through the years.

Establishing a Unique Brand Voice With Advocacy

A corporate online presence is a great way for an organization to have a strong voice and influence its audience. But more and more companies, including Corel Corporation, have discovered that the true power of that voice is with the employees.

To build a thriving brand community, Corel has incorporated employee advocacy into its marketing and communication strategy. Advocacy has helped amplify the unique brand and strengthen relationships with customers.

Oktopost Employee Advocacy Board

Every successful employee advocacy program starts with training. The objective of that training is not just to show where to find and how to post content, but to make sure employees understand why they are asked to share company content and what comes next. As part of its advocacy training, Corel introduced advocates to different Oktopost's features that supported that "big picture" onboarding strategy.

Customizing the board with Topics and Filters

Corel's advocacy program brings together more than 120 employees from different departments across multiple products. To make sure every single one of them can easily find content that is relevant to their role and their audience, advocates are encouraged to set up Topics of Interest inside Oktopost. In addition to having a custom board view with content that caters to their needs, employees can also use Board Filters to look for specific posts.

Enabling Microsoft Teams integration to drive internal adoption

Another key training objective for the company was to ensure internal adoption. There are many ways to drive advocacy participation, but nothing works better than bringing content directly where your employees are. To keep corporate news and messages top of mind, Corel is using Oktopost's integration with Microsoft Teams. Having Oktopost Board available right inside their internal communication platform has helped work advocacy into employees' weekly routine and build a habit of sharing content on a regular basis.

Oktopost's Automagically Schedule function for easy sharing

In employee advocacy, some things can be put on autopilot: for example, sharing content using Oktopost's Automagically function that schedules posts for the most optimal times. But other aspects of advocacy require active participation.

"I always say to our advocates: "Don't drop the mic". If somebody has commented or asked a question under a post, that is our opportunity to start a conversation. Who is that person? Why are they liking our content? Is that somebody that we've been talking to before? This is Social Selling 101," Stephanie Carls, Director of Social Media and Digital Content at Corel.

Boosting employee participation with Advocate-Facing Analytics

One of the tools that enable Corel employees to be proactive and hone their individual social strategies is Advocate-Facing Analytics aggregated by Oktopost for each program member.

Once an employee can see how their content is performing, they start to understand the overall impact of advocacy for the company, and for them personally. Having that data available in Oktopost's user-friendly interface is helping Corel motivate advocates and keep participation high.

All-Encompassing Social Suite

For Corel, one of the key advantages of Oktopost is access to all social marketing tools from one platform. For example, when a social media manager is composing a post for a corporate feed, they can copy it directly to the advocacy board in one click, without having to leave the post console.

"Managing all aspects of our brand presence, community, and advocacy program from Oktopost makes it so much easier. Because then we can utilize the data and analytics pulled from all of those channels to one place. When social media tools are segmented, it just doesn't work as well. I've been there before but today I can't even imagine managing our advocacy program from standalone software. For me, it's one platform, one place, one moment of truth," Stephanie Carls, Director of Social Media and Digital Content at Corel.

Corel is currently managing 30+ social media pages and profiles from a single Oktopost account, at once. That's a lot of content that is organized by Campaigns, which allows the team to report on social media wins in a smart way.

Social BI

With such a large volume of social posts going out, Corel has to keep a close tab on what content is actually driving growth for different products. There is nothing simple about this task, but having Oktopost's Social BI has helped the team to master their social reporting.

"Social BI is the most powerful social analytics tool I've ever used. You can slice your data any way you want to create custom reports. I was using a few other social media management platforms before, but nothing has come close to Oktopost. We can bring in advocacy data to the same dashboard where we track our corporate performance, which is helping us understand how our Owned and Earned stack up against each other," Stephanie Carls, Director of Social Media and Digital Content at Corel.

Oktopost's Social BI has empowered Corel to measure and increase the impact of employee advocacy on the company's effort to increase brand awareness and build one big community around its brand.

Embracing the Power of Employee Voice

The results Corel has achieved so far with Oktopost are nothing short of exciting. The amount of posts that are going out has been cut down, yet the company sees a significant increase in the overall engagement and reach. It's a true testament to understanding what type of content is resonating with the community.

"With Oktopost, we're not just shooting arrows all over the place. We're looking at analytics to understand what's working. So our social strategy has this continuous optimization process built into it," Stephanie Carls, Director of Social Media and Digital Content at Corel.

A big part of that success is the contribution of employee advocacy. In the past month, Corel's advocates shared 3,000 posts, increasing the brand's reach to over 1.4 million people. And the community is happy to engage back with the brand: Corel's engagement rate is 42%, with a record-setting click-through rate of 8.5%.

"When it comes to our brand voice, 98% of reach is earned, meaning that it's coming from advocates. While our corporate social pages reach only 45,000 people, employee-shared posts have a collective reach of over 1 million just on LinkedIn. No matter how many followers your corporate pages have, the real power is always with your employees' voice," Stephanie Carls, Director of Social Media and Digital Content at Corel.