UpSlide is the leading productivity and brand compliance automation solution for Microsoft 365. For the past 13+ years, It has been helping some of the most well-known financial and professional services companies boost productivity while improving brand consistency across their corporate documents.

The challenge

UpSlide strives for excellence across all business aspects, including product, support, services, and marketing. As such, they recognized the potential to enhance their social media presence and better align it with their overall brand positioning by launching an employee advocacy program. Their goals were to build brand awareness and aid their demand generation strategy by positioning their in-house experts as thought leaders in their respective industries.

To ensure the success of their program, the marketing team needed to find a way to keep employees engaged by incorporating it into their team members' workflows. After all, the success of any employee advocacy program requires active participation from employees.

In addition, marketing also needed to get buy-in from key business stakeholders and prove social media's value from a revenue perspective. To get this buy-in, they needed their advocacy efforts to be aligned with sales objectives, especially regarding advocacy's impact on target accounts.

The Oktopost solution

Oktopost provided UpSlide with the platform, data, and insights to reach its advocacy goals while ensuring buy-in from sales and other organizational stakeholders. By encouraging active participation from advocates, aligning sales and marketing, and providing the right insights to create an impactful content strategy, Oktopost became central to UpSlide's social success. The positive impact of Oktopost on UpSlide's business is a testament to the power of advocacy programs.

Making advocacy easy, intuitive, and rewarding

To position their employees as industry thought leaders, UpSlide needed to ensure their advocates consistently posted content and engaged with their networks. Keeping advocacy simple so employees can fit into their everyday workflow makes this consistency possible, enabling them to position their employees as in-house experts. UpSlide kicked off its program by providing the right content to its advocates to encourage active employee participation right from the start. Their strategy focused on providing their employees with various thought leadership content sourced by experts in their three core pillars: technology, finance, and branding. UpSlide segmented its Oktopost advocacy board based on the specific niche of the advocate, so each advocate only sees the most relevant content for their area of expertise.

In addition, UpSlide uses "Featured Stories" to showcase the most important content, making it easy to see and share the latest and most strategic pieces. This tactic enhances user experience by keeping interactions straightforward, which encourages better adoption. It also allows the marketing team to frequently update featured content, maintaining engagement and encouraging advocates to return regularly for fresh, impactful content.

In addition to the strategic use of the advocacy board, Oktopost's Teams Integration also powers quick and easy advocacy adoption. By giving advocates the ability to post on LinkedIn directly from Teams, advocates can easily embed advocacy into their everyday workflow, enabling UpSlide to frame it as a simple task that requires only an investment of five minutes per week.

UpSlide also uses Oktopost to empower its employees to be advocates. It encourages them to suggest meaningful content for the advocacy program, using Oktopost's "suggestion" feature to collect and approve content in one place easily. This grants advocates ownership over the program while enriching advocacy content with diverse, high-performing material tailored to their audiences.

Having clients independently contact advocates about their content is just phenomenal. And you can't just quantify that with engagement rates or likes. It's really special to see. Tariq Sinnetamby, Social Media Manager, UpSlide

Bolstering marketing and sales alignment

Alignment between marketing and sales is key for any growth strategy, which is why UpSlide relied on Oktopost data to connect the dots between employee advocacy and revenue generation.

To track the program, they built customized dashboards in Oktopost's Social BI after determining the two KPIs that define success: engagement rate and engagement of key target accounts.

This enabled marketing to easily track which target accounts have engaged with which piece of advocacy content. Knowing which content resonated with their audience and the interest levels of target accounts allowed marketing to create even more relevant posts. Since creating this dashboard, UpSlide has noticed an uptick in monthly 'hits' from target accounts, highlighting this strategy's success. The Oktopost platform also directly connects marketing activities and sales by notifying sales which target accounts have engaged with content, encouraging sales to act.

With data on engagement from specific target accounts, sales can proactively reach out to individuals from those accounts, enabling them to capitalize on opportunities to move deals forward. Using Oktopost's Salesforce integration, a Salesforce flow automatically notifies account managers when individuals from their accounts interact with social content, further enhancing efficiency and responsiveness.

To demonstrate social media's impact on business development activities, we matched our target list with the sales teams' global hit list. We can now report back each month to sales and say, "We've had engagement from 30% of our list," which has greatly improved the sales and marketing alignment. Chloe Stevens, Senior Content Manager, UpSlide

Building an impactful content strategy

In addition to using Oktopost analytics to understand target account engagement, UpSlide has also customized a BI dashboard to compare the performance of corporate social media accounts with advocacy accounts. With this dashboard, they can track which content advocates share and the engagement they receive, then compare this to their corporate posts to identify the most effective content for advocacy and corporate accounts, optimizing their social media posts.

They also use Oktopost to assess the effectiveness of different content types. Their analysis revealed that content featuring client spotlights, content about AI technology, and posts containing links and images are among the most successful. Notably, some of their highest-performing posts stem from advocate suggestions. For instance, a suggestion from a Customer Success Manager to post about a client's rebranding process has proven remarkably successful and strengthened their relationship with the account.

With algorithms always changing, using Oktopost to track engagement by post type is helpful in informing the different quantities of post types we put into our advocacy board. Tariq Sinnetamby, Social Media Manager, UpSlide

The results

Oktopost was integral to UpSlide's employee advocacy success, streamlining the program and securing buy-in from stakeholders on the sales team and the broader organization. With intuitive features and seamless integration with Teams, advocacy was easy for employees to integrate into their workflows, maximizing its adoption. A testament to their success is that UpSlide's clients also share their thought-leadership content, whether it's content about a client's rebrand or content highlighting a new partnership. In addition, Oktopost's data capabilities align marketing and sales, enabling proactive engagement with target accounts.

Since rolling out employee advocacy on the Oktopost platform, UpSlide has experienced impressive growth in several key metrics. Monthly follower growth increased by 55%, with the average monthly followers rising from 82% to 127%. Engagement also saw a significant boost, with a 51% increase in the company page engagement rate once the advocacy program was fully rolled out.

Most importantly, Oktopost has been pivotal in ensuring marketing receives the internal recognition it deserves, clearly demonstrating the direct contributions to the sales pipeline achieved through UpSlide's social media marketing strategy. A standout employee advocacy win involved an advocate who, after consistently sharing social media content from the UpSlide advocacy program, was approached on social media for a meeting by a representative from one of the world's largest banking institutions. This proactive engagement, which sparked a meaningful conversation, directly resulted from her consistent thought leadership posts on LinkedIn, positioning herself as an in-house UpSlide expert.

Oktopost has made it so easy to weave social selling into the fabric of my daily workflows, offering valuable insights that connect content directly to revenue-generating impact. The platform enables advocates to distinguish themselves as genuine thought leaders and engage with prospects and clients with authentic industry insights. Every post feels intentional, and every interaction is tied to meaningful impact. Rosie Stevenson, Business Development Representative, UpSlide