[Episode Ninety-Five of ‘The Employee Advocacy and Influence Podcast] 🎧
In this episode, Lewis Gray and Elliot Elsley sit down with Beatrice Edera Panariello, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Aviva Investors, to discuss how she scaled an award-winning program across global markets, including the UK, Europe, APAC, and North America.
Discover how Aviva Investors manages over £250 billion in assets while maintaining an employee advocacy program that delivers over £500,000 in earned media value. Beatrice shares her journey from B2C influencer marketing to B2B financial services, explaining how to turn invisible experts into digital leaders.
Key Takeaways:
- Why your compliance and legal teams must be partners in defining safe social media guardrails.
- How employee activity drives a significantly lower cost-per-engagement compared to paid social media.
- Moving the focus from helping the company to fueling the individual’s professional growth.
- Using automation to streamline compliance flagging and help creators get started.
Co-Managing Risk Through Legal and Compliance Partnerships
Rather than viewing compliance as a barrier, Beatrice emphasizes the importance of making legal and compliance teams your best friends from the start. In asset management, even a single unvetted statement can trigger regulatory enforcement or market sensitivity issues. Beatrice suggests that the goal is to co-manage it through shared guardrails. By asking these teams what keeps them up at night, marketers can define non-negotiables and build a framework that allows employees to speak safely and confidently.
Reframing Advocacy as an Engine for Professional Growth
A key strategy at Aviva Investors for high adoption is by positioning employee advocacy as a benefit to the individual. Beatrice notes that while the company sees exposure, the program is actually a key engine for an employee’s professional growth and personal brand. During training at Aviva Investors, the focus is on how building a digital profile helps the expert first, with the business value naturally following as a byproduct. This shift in narrative helps overcome the apprehension many experts feel about being vocal on social media.
Leveraging AI for Compliance and Content Efficiency
AI is becoming part of the management of employee advocacy at scale, particularly for automated compliance vetting. Beatrice shares that they use a rating system to automatically flag social media posts as red, amber, or green based on regulatory risk. Furthermore, AI is being tested to help experts overcome the blank page problem by generating copy variations for their review. This technology enables a small marketing team to deliver a wide variety of content to hundreds of ambassadors without sacrificing safety or quality.
Ready to start your own employee advocacy program?
Whether you’re exploring employee advocacy or considering DSMN8 as your platform, we can help you get started with confidence.
Learn More About Employee Advocacy:
Selina Sher Gill
Selina has a Master's Degree in Marketing and Brand Management, and is DSMN8's Digital Marketing Executive. She's a pro at creating and editing video content, using these skills to create short-form social media videos and edit the Employee Advocacy and Influence podcast.
