OSG Powered Its Go-To-Market Strategy with Oktopost's Social Selling Platform

OSG is a global provider of leading customer engagement and payment solutions. The company helps clients integrate critical customer interactions to optimize working capital and drive profitable business growth. Their solutions aim to connect the entire customer experience by aligning transactional, payment, and marketing touchpoints for simplified operations and smarter engagement. Plugging into the power of innovative technology and data-driven insights, OSG curates tailored, digital-first strategies for a range of industries.

Developing a successful go-to-market strategy for a new product

The global pandemic hit hard. But it's also become a great catalyst for change. Many B2B organizations, including OSG, were forced to reinvent how they position, market, and sell their products and services, which fueled growth beyond any expectations.

In 2020, the company expanded its vision and offer: from a revenue-focused print and mail company to a digital-first provider of customer engagement solutions. The marketing team was challenged with delivering a winning GTM strategy for a new product.

Reaching and educating your audience through social media

Social media was mapped out as one of the major brand awareness channels for this launch. It offered great potential to help the company reach people who fit the new buyer persona, which was quite different from the target audience OSG was selling to before.

Creating a new category and repositioning ourselves affected the buyer persona we're targeting: now we also sell to a more senior leader, where in the past we were contacting more operational people. Employee advocacy helped meaningfully expand our network and reach the right people," Patrick Flanigan, SVP of Strategic Marketing at OSG.

Employee advocacy - and specifically social selling - has become the main instrument in OSG's social media toolbox. According to our recent report, 56% of B2B CMOs also find this strategy most effective when it comes to choosing between organic and pay-to-play social.

Employee advocacy has been consistently growing as a sales tool in the past few years, and it spiked during the pandemic due to many other prospect communication channels being unavailable or less relevant. In the midst of COVID-19, businesses had to reinvent the ways they sell: employee advocacy proved to be one of the most powerful and flexible ways to do it remotely.

Oktopost Employee Advocacy Board

Your sales team are your best advocates: no one understands or relates to prospects and customers better than they do. At OSG, employee advocacy has had a two-pronged effect for the business: it helped the marketing team to get brand awareness content out there and enabled Sales to get in the door with people who might not normally talk to them.

As one of the most robust and user-friendly employee advocacy platforms on the market, Oktopost allowed the OSG sales team to educate their personal networks about the value of the new product, expand their reach, and eventually connect with relevant people. Some of them were potential customers.

Employee advocacy gave OSG's sellers a strong voice, without coming across as too salesy. And there's one specific tool that made social selling miles easier for everyone at OSG.

Employee Advocacy for Salesforce

Even with an abundance of content at your disposal, social advocacy still can be time-consuming. And it requires dedication from the entire team. Oktopost's Employee Advocacy for Salesforce makes this process a whole lot easier and faster.

OSG owns a sophisticated marketing and sales tech stack, with Salesforce being the entry point for nearly all other platforms and tools. Needless to say, everyone on the sales team spends most of their working hours logged in to their CRM. Oktopost's native integration with Salesforce perfectly played into this setup.

Oktopost's Employee Advocacy for Salesforce is a built-in module designed for simplicity, efficiency, and transparency. It enables sales professionals to quickly discover advocacy content, share it to their social profiles in one click, and track engagement - directly through Salesforce. Having access to all advocacy tools within a familiar environment ensures that sales reps stay productive and save precious time while enjoying a streamlined workflow.

Onboarding, training & customer support

Our salespeople seemed to gravitate towards Oktopost pretty quickly. Even sales leaders from more traditional business divisions reached out to us at marketing, making sure they will have access to the platform. From the internal buy-in perspective, that doesn't always happen for other tools, and it's a really good sign for your advocacy program," Patrick Flanigan, SVP of Strategic Marketing at OSG.

An important part of effectively implementing new software is having access to quick and reliable customer support. One of the things OSG's team appreciated the most about their Oktopost experience is a dedicated customer success manager.

Inside the Oktopost onboarding process, we provide comprehensive training for all employee advocates who use the platform. With the help of a dedicated rep, OSG was able to quickly onboard the sales team and scale up their program according to changing needs.

To solidify the success of the OSG social selling program, Oktopost onboarding was built into the sales training process for new hires. Being familiar and comfortable with the tool right off the bat allowed OSG's salespeople to incorporate advocacy into their daily routine.

Marketing is everybody's job

With the tools to measure all engagement on advocacy posts in one place, OSG is tracking what content and specific interactions help connect with the right audience. Six months into using the platform, OSG has increased social traffic to its website by 540%, with a third of it coming from employee-shared posts. The company also has 15 times more new followers every month compared to six months ago, effectively expanding its network and brand community with the power of employee advocacy.

Oktopost's custom dashboards and reports also help the OSG marketing team to understand how well the new messaging resonates with the audience.

When you launch a new product, brand awareness is crucial. And that includes internal awareness too: making sure your own people understand what was changed and getting the most up-to-date content on the subject. For many of Oktopost's customers, OSG included, employee advocacy is not just about pushing content out into the world, it's also about having a quick way to reach employees with company news.

Oktopost can truly benefit different business functions, proving that marketing can and should be everybody's job.

As a B2B company, if you're not doing things on social media, you're missing out. That's where everybody is right now: from your top of the funnel engagements to prospects further down in the sales process. If you have a solid social strategy, you don't really need to spend a lot of money on other channels that everybody used to heavily invest in before," Patrick Flanigan, SVP of Strategic Marketing at OSG.