When Sofia Lönegård took the reins as Head of Marketing & Communications at MU, she was tasked with leading a rebranding campaign. The rebrand would be a total overhaul, and the goal was to reinvent MU in the executive search space while maintaining familiarity with its existing client base.

In the consultancy world, it’s less about selling the service and more about selling the person who will execute the service. That said, audiences today want to work with and for organizations that align with their beliefs and values. Elevating both your corporate and employer brands is what sets the best apart from the rest.

In a business world that is becoming increasingly faceless and transactional, the MU team knew they had to establish trust and real relationships with potential clients to ensure their brand stood out.

“They’re seeking advice, and they want someone they can interact with.” – Sofia

Recognising the opportunity that social media presented, Sofia and her team made it their mission to increase their consultants’ presence on social media.

This would be a win-win for MU – Maintaining its people-first approach by helping its consultants develop their personal brands, while also leveraging their networks to promote the rebrand campaign.

This, however, is easier said than done. While personal branding and employee advocacy are top of mind for marketers and those in branding, communicating the benefits and changing the habits of consultants (of whom around 50% were non-digital natives) would be the real challenge.

Increasing their consultants’ presence on social media was not a new idea for Sofia and her team. However, previous attempts to do so fizzled out without proper training or a technology solution. In a previous attempt, they were producing so much content for employees to share, but it was a huge effort to actually get them to share it, and monitoring the impact became near impossible.

Feedback from their consultants also indicated that many were fearful of negatively impacting their digital footprint by saying the wrong thing. They were overly cautious to the point where they weren’t sharing. All in all, it was seen as a high-risk time-taxing task with unknown benefits.

So, they had to rethink, and the challenge was set:

How would MU empower their consultants to use their voices online to establish relationships with top talent and clients?

After previous attempts fell short of expectations, Sofia and her team decided to seek out a technology partner for their program. They had already witnessed the potential of employee advocacy, but they knew they’d need a technology solution to truly optimize, scale, and measure their efforts.

After evaluating vendors, they chose DSMN8 due to its advanced analytics suite, ease of onboarding, and content curation tools that allow admins to provide pre-written social media posts for their advocates.

Following a few setup sessions with our customer success team, the MU team got to work with laying the groundwork for future success, beginning with setting up Teams. For MU, these Teams were based on both business departments and geography. This would allow for content grouping; ensuring that the content in every advocate’s feed was relevant to them and their role.

A previous pain point had been getting employees to share the content that had been provided, so, to ensure that first impressions were positive, they made their new platform feel like home for their advocates and filled it with content.

Not only was the content ready to share in just a few clicks (with marketing-approved captions provided), but every advocate’s feed was tailored to them and their role, thanks to content grouping.

Their new platform alleviated all employee concerns around what they can/can’t share as Sofia effectively communicated that all provided captions were pre-approved for use. She also encouraged them to add their own take where possible as this elevates authenticity.

The program and rebrand campaigns were launched simultaneously, and the response from the first group of employee advocates could not have been better. People began signing up, and some shared upwards of 3 posts per day. An overwhelmingly positive response and a positive indicator of appetite for sharing. However, realising that authenticity played an instrumental role in employee advocacy success, Sofia suspected that too much sharing could look inauthentic in the eyes of their consultants’ audiences.

Sofia was quick to realise that posting limits needed to be enforced (capping the amount of shares any user can do over a chosen time period). This wasn’t considered originally as they weren’t expecting such a positive response from their consultants, based on previous experiences. Nevertheless, it was a luxury problem to have – too much appetite!

Fast forward a few weeks, and perhaps the best possible result was realised – the employee advocacy branch of the rebranding had overperformed and was so effective that they decided to make no additional investments in the campaign – A huge cost saver.

Of course, though, this was about much more than just a rebranding campaign. The goal was long-term, and showcasing their employer brand was a key part of reshaping the MU brand.

Sofia recognised from the start the role that current employees could play in shaping MU’s employer brand, and so the focus shifted and the team began uploading more company culture-focused content for their advocates to share. This included things like company outings, new joiner posts, celebrating promotions, and behind-the-scenes content from events.

Sofia recognised that asking employees to share these posts increased the visibility of those who work at MU, making everyone seem more approachable. This gives prospective candidates a real feeling of what it’s like to work at MU.