"There are 100 million tools that allow you to schedule social media posts for company pages, but not so many tools allow you to do this for 50 employees. That's a unique strength we just can't replace."

- Ludo Thörig, Brand Marketing Manager at Contentoo.

About Contentoo

Contentoo is Europe's go-to platform for content marketing talent, designed to help companies grow by deploying high-quality content.

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Contentoo provides a global network of pre-screened freelance writers, localization experts, designers, strategists, and other creative professionals. They also offer advanced tools to improve the quality of content creation.

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Challenge 

Contentoo is a fast-growing content marketing company with its marketing team under construction. When they started Apostle in early 2022, the challenge around social media was clear: how can you achieve a lot of social media output and be visible with a small team? There were occasional ad hoc posts on the company pages, but no fundamental strategy or planning behind them. The main goal for Contentoo's Brand Marketing Manager, Ludo Thörig, was to expand their LinkedIn channel to take significant short-term steps and grow their online visibility by having a structural presence on LinkedIn. 

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And they succeeded! "Apostle gave me a lot of power and strength at once. I can just put out the content I was already creating and managing anyway through 50 people all at once," said Ludo.

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Approach 

The start-up was realized together with Apostle's Customer Success Manager. The first groups of ambassadors were activated through a kick-off to learn how to share messages via Apostle's mobile app. This took little time, as Contentoo employees were quickly up and running and active. After this, Ludo was able to onboard new brand ambassadors himself. "The zip file with all the resources I needed to onboard new brand ambassadors was really nice. The sign-up page on the new platform was even better. As a result, onboarding new brand ambassadors takes me less time, which is always a treat. Especially with a fast-growing company like ours, it could happen that ten new brand ambassadors suddenly joined," Ludo explains.

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Contentoo's brand ambassadors were divided into seven different groups on the platform, and various posts were scheduled for each group. "You accomplish this easily through the Apostle platform. Each team could share a different post every week. I also like how the tool works. It saves me a lot of time as a marketer. The reach is also significantly higher than scheduling posts through company pages. You mentioned that in your sales pitch, but it turned out to be true," Ludo emphasizes. "In addition, the support is swift and with clear answers."

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Activation of brand ambassadors through award shows

Every quarter, an internal award show took place to keep Contentoo's brand ambassadors active in sharing posts. During the award show, they briefly discussed the results and purpose of Apostle and highlighted the best posts. But the most fun part of the afternoon was rewarding the most active brand ambassadors and jokingly acknowledging the least active ones. "Our head of sales wasn't very active sharing for a quarter, so he received a chocolate turd for his efforts. That was very funny. Of course, I consider who can take the joke," Ludo says with a wink. They awarded their most active group of brand ambassadors who shared the most posts that quarter.

“During the last award show, we sent a whole team to the Efteling to show our appreciation. You can see that because of Apostle, employees are more committed to promoting our company on LinkedIn.”

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Results

In 2022, Contentoo’s brand ambassadors shared over 800 posts, creating 606,000+ reach, and increasing brand awareness. "That's a great result, but our C-level managers also want to know what else it delivers." In one year, Contentoo realized 300 leads and 25 MQLs directly attributable to the posts shared through Apostle*. Additionally, there was a doubling in the number of followers of the corporate LinkedIn page: from 2,000 to 4,000 followers. This is partly due to the use of Apostle. "I planned all corporate posts through Apostle, and we also tag our corporate page in the posts of our brand ambassadors, which drives traffic to our LinkedIn page. This definitely did a lot for recognition," Ludo said.

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Apostle gives Ludo much power to spread and promote messages through many personal channels. "With Apostle, you can notify everyone of a social media post at once. If three-quarters of the brand ambassadors actually share the post, as in our case, you can assume that many customers, stakeholders, and interested parties have seen the post."

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Contentoo's brand ambassadors are also happy with Apostle. They can effortlessly share quality content on their social channels. "Normally, you might spend 2 or 3 hours to find an idea and create a post yourself. Now our ambassadors can post in their tone-of-voice within a few minutes." This is especially helpful for people who find it important to express their personal brand on LinkedIn.

“There just isn't really another tool that does this in the Netherlands. That might also be the biggest catch, so we didn't switch to another tool. There are 100 million tools that allow you to schedule social media posts for company pages, but there aren't that many tools that allow you to do so for 50+ employees. That represents a unique strength we just can't replace,” Ludo concludes the interview.

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*In this case, a lead is someone who has downloaded content, and an MQL is someone who has gone through multiple marketing efforts from Contentoo.