Medallia reignites employee advocacy and sees exponential growth with Sprout

Providing exceptional experiences across every touch point in the customer journey is mission-critical for any modern business. But mastering it is far from easy, especially without the right technology. That’s why companies across diverse industries—from hospitality to healthcare to financial services—rely on Medallia, Inc.’s market-leading enterprise experience platform.

Medallia Experience Cloud uses artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to track and analyze customer “signals.” Those signals can include direct and indirect feedback from surveys, reviews, contact center interactions, comments on social media, and digital behaviors on websites and apps—across the customer journey. From the insights gained, organizations can understand their audiences better and develop more engaging, personalized experiences faster.

Medallia’s technology is powerful. But until recently, the company’s efforts to use content to build brand awareness and inform and inspire audiences around the globe about the platform weren’t reaching their full potential, including on social media. One factor: The company struggled to speak to all its target audiences and verticals from one brand account, unable to offer tailored content they’d find relevant and compelling.

When Justin Herrick, Senior Manager, Content Marketing, was tapped to lead Medallia’s content strategy in early 2022, he was more than ready for the challenge. And he knew Sprout Social would be a key tool for helping them increase the impact of their content, uplevel their social media management, and amplify employee advocacy. “It was like getting the keys to the car,” Herrick said.

Sprout quickly clarifies what content resonates with Medallia’s customers—and doesn’t

After analyzing the historical performance of Medallia’s content and creating benchmarks to measure the impact of future efforts, Herrick and the Communications & Content team got to work using Sprout to execute their new strategy. They leveraged features like Tagging to track content performance and Premium Analytics for accelerating data collection and focusing on relevant metrics to prove the return on investment (ROI).

We’re heavy users of Premium Analytics. Getting to build custom reports and distributing them uniquely to specific stakeholders is important because not everyone needs to know everything — instead, we want to give stakeholders what they’re likely to find useful.

Justin Herrick
Senior Manager, Content Marketing

These features, along with Sprout’s enterprise-ready social listening solution, are helping Herrick and the team learn how to use content more effectively to engage with Medallia’s customers in different industries and across the five key “horizontals” where the company operates—customer experience, employee experience, contact center, digital experience and market research.

The platform has also helped them gain a clear understanding of what and how often Medallia should be posting content on social, particularly on LinkedIn, where the company has more than 100,000 followers.
“We were posting way too often,” said Herrick. “Now we only post twice a day, at most.

They also learned that call-to-action (CTA) links on LinkedIn don’t deliver high-impact results when used regularly. Essentially, they’re a wasted effort without a diverse mix of other content types being shared. What does grab the eyeballs of Medallia’s customers on social media, according to Herrick, is content featuring video and imagery, which they learned by using Sprout.

Since Medallia has focused on using video and imagery more often, and more strategically, it’s seen some impressive results. That includes a year-over-year increase in video views of 174%, a nearly 50% boost in engagements, and a 39.5% uptick in engagement rate on LinkedIn. And video views on X have skyrocketed—up nearly 1,884%, year over year.

“With the insights we get from Sprout, we can say with confidence to our stakeholders, ‘If we use links, we can expect only this average number of impressions with a clear ceiling. But if we use video and imagery, we can almost guarantee X amount of impressions.’

Sprout empowers Medallia employees to post meaningful content for their connections

Employee advocacy is also helping Medallia to improve content performance and drive customer engagement in its markets worldwide. In 2022, it completely revamped its employee advocacy program, with guidance from Sprout’s professional services team. And after relaunching the program in August, Medallia increased its employee advocacy user base by nearly 45% in just two weeks.

As part of the relaunch, Medallia also re-introduced the weekly email digest that it uses to alert employees to relevant, localized content they can easily share. It didn’t have to wait long to see results. “Employee shares of content essentially doubled starting on day one,” said Herrick.

Herrick attributes this growth to the Sprout platform increasing his team’s ability to deliver more relevant content to employees in both US and international markets, and to automate the distribution of content. And he said he’s feeling confident about future growth: “This year, we’re even more focused on mobilizing our people to use their connections to get the right content in front of the right audiences. Nearly two dozen posts are shared from Advocacy by our employees each weekday on average, and we’re trying to increase that by getting more of our employees active through gamifying Advocacy with the leaderboard.”

Using Sprout to improve our employee advocacy efforts has been a game-changer because we’re now satisfying the content needs of so many groups at Medallia. Sprout also provides our regional teams with a distribution mechanism to mobilize our salespeople all around the world.

Justin Herrick
Senior Manager, Content Marketing

Working faster with Sprout Social

Herrick said he doesn’t know what his lean team would do without the timesaving features in Sprout, like Sprout’s Smart Inbox to manage messaging and identify new engagement opportunities. They’re also using Sprout to schedule and publish reports automatically in a highly readable PDF format.

We don’t have a dedicated social media manager at Medallia—and everyone on our content team needs to be a five-tool player. We need the Sprout platform to help us do more with less, from analyzing data to automating tasks like scheduling and publishing our social media content.

Justin Herrick
Senior Manager, Content Marketing

Learn how Sprout Social can help your organization understand what content will resonate best with your users—and how you can maximize employee advocacy. Request your free demo today.