Your most influential creators are already on your payroll

Today’s brands spend a lot of time looking for great creator partnerships. The playbook is simple. Scour TikTok and Instagram, vet the influencers, then negotiate the rates.

But what if the best, and most trustworthy, creators are already in your building?

Employee-generated content, or EGC, has the simple premise of turning employees into a new kind of brand creator. When these employees share content online, it comes with key advantages like behind-the-scenes insights and built-in credibility.

What if, as Dani Markovits, CCO of Shake Content, recently put it, “The next successful creator cohort is already on your payroll”? Here’s what brands will need to know.

Why employee content can work, and work surprisingly well

Think of employee-led content as user-generated content (UGC). Only swap out the U for an E. EGC is brand-friendly social media in which employees share posts, videos, and streams about their companies.

There’s a lot of evidence that EGC not only works, but is increasingly effective online for a few reasons:

• Employees have reach. According to LinkedIn research, “employee networks have, on average, 10 times as many connections as a company’s Company Page followers.”

• Employee shares get clicks. The same research points out that “employee shares tend to have 2 times the CTR of corporate shares, even when it’s the exact same content.”

• Employees engender trust. 40% of consumers, according to Sprout Social, say they frequently discover a product or service through employee-generated content. And according to Edelman, people are 3 times as likely to trust company information when it comes from an employee.
• Younger consumers trust employees. The number above (40%) rises to 61% for Gen Z.

In short, today’s social media browser is more likely to trust branded information if it’s coming from an employee and not from the CEO.

This may say something about our collective distrust for executives. However, there’s another element that makes EGC especially effective: employees have their own unique networks. Those networks create more entry points into the brand that feel less corporate.

According to Lucy Roberts, the Global Head of Brands for Buttermilk, this entry-point variety is part of what engenders the trust possible through EGC.

Instead of relying on one brand account to reach an audience, you’re creating a network of people who each become a different entry point into the brand.

Lucy Robertson, Global Head of Brands, Buttermilk

The numbers make sense on paper: more trust, higher click-throughs. However, the opportunities become even more clear when you can see what employee creators are already doing for their brands. Typically, these fall into one of three categories:

• Behind-the-scenes content. Selling pizza online isn’t always engaging unless you already want pizza. But showcasing employees and their dough-spinning skills is interesting for anyone on the scroll.

• Mundane, everyday-life details. Sometimes, what goes into something as simple as creating everyday office supplies or art prints can be interesting…especially if you’ve never seen how they’re made before.

• Unique skills. Whether twirling balls of dough into pizza shapes or simply explaining how something works at an otherwise ordinary-sounding company, people on TikTok and Instagram are fascinated when they can learn something unique and new.

Case study: Papa John’s enlists employees for hundreds of millions of likes

Papa John’s is an example of a company that lost trust with executive-led branded content. (In 2018, former CEO and “face” of the organization, John Schnatter, quit after controversial remarks about the NFL).

The brand still had a national, corporate-level presence, with over 3,000 chains across the United States. Now, it has multiple large employee accounts getting millions of views on their own.

Enter EGC.

Creators like @Bartoli have shown off their dough-spinning skills, yielding millions of likes. Dough Joe is another example. His spinning video has received over 11.5 million likes on TikTok.

The key: the dough spinning is fun to watch, for one. But behind-the-scenes demonstrations are more interesting than the front-facing content that brands would often push instead of EGC.

“A barista showing you the actual drink,” says Tobias Hoss, Co-Founder & Senior Advisor of 30 Dishes, “beats a paid influencer every time on trust.”

The lessons for brands:

• Search for viral-ready content behind the scenes. Preparing pizza can be interesting, if a little mundane. Showing off unique skills with pizza dough twirling was a winning combination for Bartoli and Dough Joe.

• Give employees the chance to show off. Employees develop skills when they work for you! Those skills are fascinating for people who don’t work at your brand. Giving them a chance to show off won’t only encourage engagement, but will reflect well on your company.

Case study: From ordinary Staples employee to “StaplesBaddie”

Kaeden Rowland wasn’t trying to be the face of Staples, either. Instead, the 22-year-old, a bit bored during a shift, created a TikTok explaining Staples’ direct mail service.

The idea was to bring in enough customers to alleviate that boredom. Surprisingly, the post got millions of views. People seemed fascinated by the mundane details of working at Staples. So Rowland kept going, building an audience of over 500,000 followers:

• One video highlighting how to make a personalized stamp received 5.7 million views
• Another, explaining personalized art prints at Staples, racked up over 1 million views

Rowland kept going until becoming known as the “Staples Baddie” online.

The lessons for brands:

• EGC can make mundane content interesting. Employees know the fascinating little details about making your products (like how to create a personalized stamp) that customers don’t. It’s the peek-behind-the-curtain element of EGC that resonates with viewers so often.

• Employees go beyond creator briefs. Rowland wasn’t working from a creator brief about what the brand wanted to highlight. Instead, it was the everyday, lived experience of working at Staples that brought a new element to the social posts.

Case study: How Starbucks turned baristas into a creator network

“Staples Baddie” might have emerged organically, but Starbucks decided it didn’t want to wait for that.

The coffee company launched Green Apron Creators. The campaign’s goal was to turn Starbucks employees into active social creators. Given that “Gen Z make up the majority of Starbucks baristas,” per MarketingDive, it seemed like a natural way to encourage EGC and build an online presence.

Results? Too early for that, as it’s still in the pilot stage. However, we do know that Starbucks will share creative briefs with employees and allow them to share in advertising revenue.

The lessons for brands:

• You don’t have to wait for EGC to happen organically. You can actively encourage it. Starbucks is taking the unique approach of including creative briefs, however, which is a hybrid strategy of old-school influencer marketing with EGC. We’ll see how it works.

• Incentivize people to create good content. By sharing advertising revenue with employees, Starbucks is at least incentivizing employees to go viral.

Employees vs. outside influencers

EGC doesn’t mean brands should give up on influencers altogether. Both sides have their distinct advantages:

“They play different roles. Influencers are incredibly effective at creating desire, introducing brands to new audiences and providing product proof; employees can give audiences access to the people, expertise and processes behind a brand,” says Lucy Robertson, Global Head of Brands, Buttermilk.

For outside influencers, the advantages include:

• Established audiences. Outside influencers can introduce a brand to people who wouldn’t have otherwise come across it.
• Slick professionalism. Many established creators have a detailed process for how they drive attention and engagement for brands. In that way, they might be more “bankable.”

For employees, the advantages are:

• Unique insights. There’s something built into the appeal of employee content: behind-the-curtains access and intrigue. Not every video is guaranteed to go viral, but many do.
• Access to blind spots. Employees don’t always work from creative briefs. They can highlight some fun aspects of your brand in a way you never saw coming, as the Staples example shows.

The takeaway: avoid thinking of creators versus employees. It’s not a zero-sum game between the two. Instead, recognize that each fulfills a different role in the creator mix, and both roles are equally valid.

Employees also function as a creative testing pool

There’s one more advantage built in when employees create content: more experiments.

The traditional marketing approach is for a big brand’s marketing team to brainstorm a handful of creative concepts. These concepts then go through testing. The winners get the backing, and the backing goes to launch: a campaign.

Is that always the right approach in the post-TikTok environment? Not always. Sometimes a brand simply needs more shots on goal. More attempts and more experimentation. And the benefit of EGC is that it lines up with the low barrier-to-entry that comes with social media. It’s simply too easy to try lots of different experiments:

“At a large retail or CPG brand, employees are a creative testing pool you cannot buy. They often look more like the actual customer than the marketing department does, they know the product cold, and there are a lot of them,” says Nick Cicero, Founder & CEO, Mondo Metrics

Cicero adds that conventional creative testing is both slow and expensive. You may not have a fully validated idea before it hits the market.

EGC inverts that. Hundreds of employees can produce thousands of variants, says Cicero, and the organic feed responds with free, real-time feedback.

Additional aspects to consider when working with employees on unique content

EGC isn’t a blank check in which a brand gets to declare: go make content, and make sure it all goes towards us!

You’re inviting employees to be creators, too, and creators get paid. As Marketing Dive notes, 61% of consumers believe brands should compensate the employees who promote the brand on social media.

In fact, treating employees like real creators can improve how well it works, per Tobias Hoss:

The brands that win this treat it like a real creator program, not a free content hack. Revenue share, clear usage terms, a path that grows with the employee. The ones that fail treat their own people as unpaid distribution and act surprised when it backfires,” says Tobias Hoss, Co-Founder & Senior Advisor, 30 Dishes

“Are you compensating these people like creators,” asks Sarah McNabb, CMO at GigaStar, “or are you just getting free marketing out of people who already depend on you for a paycheck?”

Don’t regard EGC as a free lunch. Instead, see it as a unique pool of untapped creators who can offer fresh perspectives on your brand. Best-case scenario, one of them surprises you with a completely fresh take on how your company needs to market itself.