Forget celebrities, your next marketing influencer is sitting at the desk beside you

It’s a perfect storm of consumers demanding more from brands, and brands being exposed for inauthenticity. Just look at high-profile cases of greenwashing, or the recent news from an iCubesWire survey that 53% of audiences do not trust influencer content. But how do we start to go about building trust with audiences?

Enter employee-generated content (EGC).

What’s trust got to do with it?

EGC is content featuring, yes, your employees, bringing them to the forefront of brand comms through entertaining, educational or just plain silly content.

This is not anything new (just search for #AgencyLife on Instagram), but it’s become a key pillar for brands looking to provide a more transparent and authentic image to audiences. B2B brands have been doing this for forever, but now we’re seeing it become more popular with consumer brands.

Why? Because it’s giving audiences a peek behind the curtain. No longer do we have to pretend that a handkerchief-wearing tiger works for a cereal company, or that meerkats want me to buy insurance. We’ve finally broken the fourth wall in marketing; we’re starting to show the real people behind the brand.

As sad as it is that we’re not living in McDonaldland anymore, there are some great benefits to showing the people behind our brands. Firstly, who’s more passionate or knowledgeable about your business than the people working for it? They’re already experts and (hopefully) their love of the company will shine through in content. It drives metrics around authenticity, which should make your brand team happy.

EGC also helps with content production demands (which will keep your finance team happy, too). Social media has found itself in a difficult place for brands – audiences are more fragmented than ever; channels are proliferating; and ever-more algorithms demand daily frequency. You could easily spend your full marketing budget just on social content production. Using your existing employees in content helps to keep the need to outsource at a minimum.

Lastly, it can help keep your HR team happy – EGC is a great way to show off your workplace culture to prospective talent alongside showing current employees that they’re valued.

Who’s doing EGC well?

Royalty at this is lifestyle publication SheerLuxe. Did I need to know what their staff’s payday treats would be? No, but I’m fully invested. They’re great at jumping on timely trends, creating content that nods to what they do, and showcasing their company culture.

Some retailers are also excelling at EGC – just look at Boots, M&S, Superdrug and Waitrose. These brands use their employees to showcase new products and take part in trends. They’re eve, increasingly, setting up local retailer pages – so you might even bump into Gabby from the Leeds store on your lunch break.

Boots employee Lynn, has even set up a spin off TikTok account with over 30k followers after the success of her ‘Lunch with Lynn’ series on the brand account. You can’t get more authentic than that.

Where does EGC go next?

In the short term, EGC is likely to become more strategically intentional than spontaneous efforts from employees (sadly, no marketeer will ever be able to claim Lunch with Lynn as their brainchild). We’ll start to see EGC become more of a content pillar within strategies. To support that we’ll likely need more structured approaches around employee ambassador programs, even considering people’s online presence as part of the recruitment process.

In the long term? Perhaps we’ll start to see more employees find social media fame like Lynn. That would be an appropriately meta evolution – employees becoming the celebrities.