Work anniversaries and marketing
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by Rick Joi Rick Joi is the founder of The Workiversary Group and author of the award‑winning book, Inspiring Work Anniversaries. |
The marketing team promoting work anniversaries externally doesn’t make sense for every organization, and perhaps doesn’t make sense for most organizations.
But, for the organizations where it does make sense, it can be very powerful.
Who is this valuable for?
These four counterintuitive and overlapping questions will help you identify if the marketing team should start getting involved in work anniversaries.
Does experience or longevity reflect well on your brand identity? Does your product have a long time horizon, like insurance or retirement planning? Do your employees directly deliver a highly technical service directly to customers and need to inspire confidence? Or, do you have uniquely low turnover in a high-turnover industry, which reflects well on why you’re better than your competitors? If the answers to any of these questions are yes, then reminding customers and informing prospects of work anniversaries (particularly the longer ones) will enhance your message.
Do your customers have “relationships” with your employees? Do your customers interact directly with individual employees? If yes, and your employees have uniforms or name tags, then simply finding a way to communicate long-tenured employees’ number of years of service (through custom name tags, pins, or patches) will reflect well on your brand. Or, if your employees interact digitally with your customers, using work anniversaries as an excuse to share personal interests or interesting facts can help deepen the bond between your customers and your organization.
Is advertising to your extended community valuable? Do you sell to people your employees are directly or indirectly connected to? Work anniversary posts on social media tend to draw in employee’s networks to cheer them on, which builds your extended network, which you can then cheer on. This generally makes most sense on LinkedIn for organizations where their employees regularly connect with customers and prospects over LinkedIn.
Do your employees do interestingly photogenic, dramatic, or dangerous things? Do you restore beautiful buildings? Do your employees work in beautiful natural surroundings? Is your product or equipment visibly used at big, well-publicized events? Do your employees work in situations that would scare ordinary people, such as in very high places? Finding ways to take photos of these situations, possibly with drones if necessary, can help your prospects and customers associate high value with your organization.
Tips on doing it well
Unless you work at a really big and/or well-known company, your posts with people will do better than your thought leadership posts. Here are a few simple tips:
Where to share
The most obvious place to share is of course your organization’s active social media channels, and the rest of this blog post will concentrate on doing those posts well.
But, if your organization puts out a newsletter to your customers and/or stakeholders, then you can repurpose the social media content into articles there.
Putting extra effort into external-facing roles
For human resources and managers, it is absolutely essential that they not show favoritism in how work anniversaries are celebrated.
The marketing team promoting work anniversaries externally is the only potential exception to the no-favoritism rule, and it can only be favoritism by clearly defined job roles, not individuals.
But, we bring this up, because the tips in the next couple sections require additional time and effort. If your goal is to build connections between your organization’s external-facing employees and your customers, it may make sense to focus on specific roles, like your customer service reps or your consultants or your sales reps.
If you can do posts for everyone, that’s better, but don’t let doing everyone get in the way of doing your external-facing employees well. And, if you do choose to just to specific roles, it’s helpful to communicate that choice to the organization and the thinking behind it.
Individualize your posts
There is a lot of value in the post feeling like the organization truly cares about the employee being celebrated.
There will always be pressure to streamline the process, but you really don’t want to get to the point where it’s clear to everyone that this is only being done because someone long ago said it should be done, and now it’s just another chore that needs to be checked off a list.
Here are some ideas on how to keep the post feeling personal and less chore-like:
Do an individual post for each employee. That is, don’t do a list of everyone celebrating work anniversaries in November, as that will be less compelling to any given employee’s network. If you just don’t have the resources to pull this off and need to do a single post for everyone celebrating in a particular week or month, that’s still better than not doing it, but be sure to post on the first of the month or on Monday so that people find out about the work anniversaries ahead of time instead of after the fact.
Do it on the exact day! If you can pull off posting for each employee, then the next thing you can do to optimize the value of the post is to do it on the exact day, preferably early in the day, which will give their network an opportunity to send congratulations on the actual day. And, while photos of employees receiving their gift on the day are best, if you’re using existing photos instead, then you can make this easier by scheduling the posts for the exact day.
Don’t schedule multiple work anniversary posts for the exact same time. Drip them out throughout the morning one by one with random amounts of time between, in order from smallest years of service to largest, giving the impression you’re actually working on them in between.
Include a photo. This is so important, there’s a whole subsection on this below. If you have to include multiple people in a single post, include multiple photos.
Tag everyone in the photo. This will make it more likely their connections will be exposed and engage with the post. Tag the person celebrating the work anniversary first.
Include a quote. It can be from the employee reflecting on their time there. It can be from a leader or other employee complimenting them. Or, for customer-facing employees, it can be positive feedback from a customer.
Include a photo in your posts
This might be obvious, but not everyone does it.
There are many options, which vary in how compelling they are and how much effort they take. Unfortunately, it is as simple as more effort makes for more compelling images. You’ll want to choose the most compelling option that you’ll be able to reliably do for every work anniversary.
Here’s the list of options in order from best to worst.
A photo of them receiving a gift that morning (logistically challenging, but amazing!)
A photo of them that includes some of their work personality (like their desk, or them doing their job: driving the truck, in front of the camera, on the ladder, in the hospital hallway, etc.)
A photo at a recent fun event (ax throwing? rage room? bowling?)
A group photo (ideally with an arrow added pointing at them)
A simple headshot photo of them
Any photo of them
A happy work anniversary graphic with their name and number of years of service
A generic happy work anniversary graphic
No image (boo! ☹️)
Also, don’t devote a lot of pixels to boilerplate company content. The work anniversary is about the employee, so make their photo big!
Also, to boost exposure, it’s important to tag all of the people in the photo. If there are multiple people in the photo, tag the employee having the work anniversary first, but tag everyone, because the other people are probably in the photo because they’re close to the work anniversary employee.
Optimize your posts
These are small tips that help increase the value of your posts:
Include the hashtag #thankyou. This is very endearing. You can think of it as the opposite of the harmful practice of including a call to action.
Include your organization’s purpose or tagline as a hashtag. This is also very endearing, and it’s a small way of showing your organization views work anniversaries as a celebration of working together towards a common purpose rather than just time passing.
Encourage employees to repost and interact. Consider reaching out via Slack or email (or however your company communicates) to employees close to the work anniversary employee to let them know the post is live.
Send posts out early in the day. This gives everyone more time to respond “happy workiversary” that day.
Thoughts on monetizing
Don’t include a call to action, such as “we’re hiring” or “buy from us”. That comes off as really inauthentic and like your organization doesn’t care about employees other than to try to squeeze more money out of them.
So, if there’s no call to action, then what’s the value?
Brand building. The posts should give prospects a positive impression of your organization.
Employee-customer connection. They should help prospects trust their sales person and help customers have a deeper understanding of their support rep or consultant.
Network building. Posts about people generally attract more engagement. If you are advertising driven, then use the work anniversary posts to grow your followers, and then figure out what advertisements make sense for your followers and their followers, and run targeted separate ads at your bigger network.
If the above bullet points aren’t compelling enough for your organization’s situation, then it’s better to not post about work anniversaries than it is to post about them with a call-to-action payload.
Beyond work anniversaries
Also, this is a little out of the scope of this blog, but if work anniversaries make sense, then doing other employee posts will make sense, too. Some additional ideas include:
Employee promotions
New hires
Sales meeting with clients (tag the clients, too)
Trade shows or other industry events (with photos of tagged employees!)
The company holiday party, summer picnic, or any other internal company events
If your company supports volunteering with time off, then photos of the employees volunteering on company time
Remember, tag the people! (we repeat that so much because it’s really important!)
Examples
For examples of some of the better posts, check out the retweets from the @workiversary Twitter account (or follow the account). If you want a broader view of both good and less good posts, then check out the liked tweets from the @workiversary Twitter account.
Good luck! ☘️