Hibob

How HiBob built its social media marketing presence with the help of Inspired Marketing

Background

HiBob was founded to modernize HR tech. HiBob’s intuitive and data-driven platform, bob, was built for the way people work today: globally, remotely, and collaboratively.

Since its launch in late 2015, Bob has achieved consecutive triple-digit year-over-year growth, and become the HRIS of choice for more than 1,000 modern, midsize and multinational companies who understand that a powerful, agile HR tech suite is mission critical and a key driver of organizational success.

Fast-growing companies across the globe such as Monzo, Happy Socks, Gong, Fiverr, and VaynerMedia rely on bob to help HR and managers connect, engage, develop, and retain top talent.

Challenges

When the global pandemic hit in March 2020, it put the HR function and teams in the spotlight. Almost overnight, HR teams became most instrumental in helping companies pivot to remote and hybrid work.

In order to proactively and productively manage the impact of the pandemic on the workplace, HR teams turned to HR tech and HiBob’s employee engagement and management platform – bob became even more mission critical than it was before. HR leaders were expected to rise up to the challenge in this new world of work and were given the opportunity to play a strategic role among the c-suite. Using the data and insights from the bob platform, they could report who was healthy, who was working from home, who was in quarantine, which office capsules had been created, and much more. Never before did HR teams have so much visibility on a daily basis. Every management meeting now began with the CHRO or CPO updating how everyone was doing in their company, and this presented an incredible opportunity for HiBob.

With the goal of leveraging this opportunity, and with an understanding that HR professionals are active and engaged on social media channels for their work, HiBob needed to create a strong presence on social media with the right messaging and tone-of-voice to reach this target audience globally. The company also recognized that social media was a good channel to engage directly with its current community of customers and celebrate their accomplishments.

In parallel, there was a growing expectation that HiBob would share its knowledge about the evolving role of HR, as well as insights on how to overcome the pandemic challenges in the workplace, these insights were gained from the HR professionals with whom the company interacts on a daily basis customers and prospects alike.

Goals

HiBob’s main goals were to:

Grow all of its channels’ followers and engagement by 50% by the end of 2020
Significantly boost its engagement rate to prove the shared messaging resonates
Drive more organic social traffic to its website
Increase participation in webinars and events with leading innovative HR experts from around the world
Enhance its employee advocacy program
Increase employee engagement
Boost content sharing, active members, and reach on social media

Once this was accurately defined, the company aimed to focus on driving sales, first by increasing engagement with prospects and generating high-quality leads, then by nurturing these leads through the sales funnel, and finally by converting these leads into customers and brand enthusiasts and optimizing these conversion rates.

The Process

1. Research and social strategy

Inspired marketing had no time for a traditional onboarding process as HiBob and Inspired marketing joined hands just as COVID-19 was shutting down businesses and turning offices into remote teams overnight. So Inspired Marketing put the onboarding and research stages into hyperdrive and together with HiBob’s marketing team, helped identify the company’s social brand voice, audience, top hashtags, and topics of interest right away so they could hit the ground running. HiBob’s customer community and potential customers were at the forefront of the change brought to the workplace because of the pandemic, they had no time to prepare and neither did we.

Next, the two teams created a social media plan that was fully integrated with HiBob’s other marketing activities like content marketing, SEO, and paid marketing campaigns.

2. Defining and reporting on strategic KPIs

To make sure we were on track to reach our goals, we defined strategic KPIs related to social media metrics such as engagement, reach, followers, mentions, tags, and shares. These metrics help us understand HiBob’s audience and continuously monitor, analyze, optimize and report back on all of HiBob’s campaigns. We also used our analytics to laser focus on the best-performing content and create insights for new blogs, guides, and webinars. Since social media algorithms and capabilities are constantly evolving, we make sure to stay up to date to deliver the best results for Hibob over time.

3. Ongoing process including weekly sync and content plans

Since the beginning of our work with HiBob, we have worked with the company’s content and design team to define schedules, set up a social media management tool to automate scheduling where possible, and create a weekly content plan that is reviewed by the team at HiBob before it is scheduled.

That said, in such a fast-paced digital space, responsiveness and capitalizing on time-sensitive opportunities is also important. To this end, we supported HiBob in getting the word out about its B funding announcement ($70M USD) and also helped with their announcement about being named a Soonicorn in January, 2021, which required a fast turnaround to make the most of the opportunity.

4. Complementary activities including employee advocacy

Finally, we complement our ongoing social media activities with support for HiBob’s employee advocacy program and LinkedIn profile optimization, and also created an avatar to strengthen the company’s tone, voice, and connection with its HR audience. HiBob’s customer-facing employees are happy to become advocates for HiBob’s content and messaging and Inspired helped build the advocacy board to support all advocacy efforts including product announcements, HiBob media mentions, top tier 3-rd party research and insights and more.

5. Knowledge sharing

As part of our process, we built a strong relationship with the team at HiBob with a focus on setting up feedback channels and sharing knowledge across the teams in order to continuously improve and optimize results. Inspired marketing team has continuously suggested new ideas and directions based on our in depth knowledge of the social media platforms.

6. Agility and responsiveness

Inspired marketing is a b2b tech marketing agency and our team works with our clients with the tools they need us to connect with them. Ongoing social media work needs to be responsive and quick at times, we have set up a SLACK channel for updates and urgent news, we work with the team on their project management tool Asana to make sure all news are tracked and posted, we created an employee advocacy channel on slack and all KPIs are tracked and recorded using shared documents on google drives. In addition, we will adjust to the social media management tool or advocacy tool that integrates with the company’s marketing automation tech stack.

The Results

Through full collaboration and transparency with the team at HiBob, and using our unique methodology with a focus on quarterly strategy and achievable goals, we were able to help HiBob achieve the following:

3X Linkedin following and engagement rate within a year
10.37% growth in Twitter followers
240% growth in Twitter engagements after 12 months
221% increase in Facebook reach
60.77% growth in social organic website sessions grew by 60.77%Double the number of active employee advocates and number of shared posts
14.62% increase in advocacy engagement

These incredible results weren’t achieved by chance. They were made possible through the strong relationship, knowledge sharing, tech savviness and close collaboration developed between Inspired Marketing and HiBob, and by the proven, repeatable methods that we use with all our clients.

Our platform bob has proven to be mission critical for companies that had to overnight change and adjust to remote and now hybrid work. HiBob’s platform bob has the potential to bring out the best in employees, especially in challenging times like the past year. When the pandemic started we knew that we had to reach out to the market place and share how bob can help companies overcome the new HR challenges. Social media and marketing on digital channels were critical to help make an impact. This is where Inspired Marketing really made a difference. With their help, we were able to significantly expand our social media reach and engagement, and connect with more HR professionals, customers clients and prospect- this, when it mattered the most! Inspired marketing’s team was a genuine part of our team and helped us succeed and grow.

Zohar (Zoe) Haimovitch VP of Content Experience at Hibob

Hibob

Background

Challenges

Goals