Nina Humphrey: “Don’t stay comfortable, push yourself to learn new skills”

An interview with the winner of the Industry Trailblazers Under 30 award!

In December 2023, we held our Engage B2B Awards Ceremony, celebrating the organisations and individuals who have implemented outstanding engagement strategies. Now, we are thrilled to share an interview with the winner of the Industry Trailblazers Under 30 award, Nina Humphrey.

CONGRATULATIONS ON WINNING THE INDUSTRY TRAILBLAZER UNDER 30 AWARD! PLEASE INTRODUCE YOURSELF AND YOUR ROLE AT HYMANS ROBERTSON.

Thank you! I’m a Digital Marketing Executive and have been with Hymans Robertson for nearly 3 years. I work as part of a small digital team and my role is to look after the firm’s social media strategy and implementation. I work across the whole firm to help our consultants raise their profiles and use social media well.

WHAT IS THE EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY PROGRAMME AND WHAT DID IT SET OUT TO ACHIEVE?

We realised we had a great untapped network of contacts on LinkedIn, via our people. We wanted to reach broader audiences, increase website visits, engage people, and raise the profiles of our own people.

By having our people promote the business, via the employee advocacy, we could distribute relevant content to their LinkedIn networks. This allowed a more personal and meaningful connection with clients and prospects as well as enabling our consultants to build their profiles and shape them as thought leaders in the industry.

Recognising the time constraints on our consultants, we sought to alleviate their burden by launching an Employee Advocacy pilot in September 2021. The six-month pilot involved 20 key spokespeople and demonstrated significant benefits, with 277 shared posts and over 2k link clicks.

Participants accessed a tool which had curated content, prepared by me, utilising our tone of voice and personalised, where possible. As posts were pre-written and approved, we saved huge amounts of time for our advocates, enabling them to dedicate a small bit of time getting important and relevant content to their connections on LinkedIn.

The programme proved incredibly popular, and feedback was great from the get-go. The next stage was upscaling it; I now have 133 advocates and am continuing to grow the programme. In 2023, we saw a 24% increase in website referrals from LinkedIn, a 243% increase in our advocates’ posts engagement and a 77% increase in link clicks.

HOW DID YOU ELEVATE HYMANS ROBERTSON’S ONLINE PRESENCE?

We’ve seen a lot of success from this programme – it has increased traffic to our website traffic from LinkedIn, raised the profile of over 130 of our people and helped us build engagement with our corporate brand. I can see which content performs best and pivot our strategy as required. Lately we’ve been focusing on video content, extending the lifetime of our campaigns through repurposing content in a variety of ways.

The advocacy has enabled us to build our corporate brand, but also the brand of our people. By tapping into our people’s networks and developing our advocates online presence through consistent quality posts. I support the advocates through online training sessions, best practices, and regular updates on industry trends, ensuring they maximise LinkedIn’s potential.

Sustaining advocate engagement was pivotal for ongoing success. To motivate advocates, I introduced a gamification element – a monthly leaderboard, awarding donations to charity for those who did well and generally keeping up morale via regular round-ups.

Elevating our online presence wasn’t limited to advocates, I wanted to enhance all our people’s social media skills and confidence. I achieved this by creating LinkedIn best practice training videos on our learning platform, Aspire. I run curated social media training sessions for various business units and produce a weekly email round-up, which shares popular posts, jobs and firmwide news so all our people can engage and share content.

All of this has helped elevate our online presence.

YOU INCREASED ENGAGEMENT WITH HYMANS ROBERTSON VIA THEIR PEOPLE, RATHER THAN THE BRAND ITSELF. WHY DID YOU FOCUS ON THE EMPLOYEES?

People want to engage with people, not brands. You can reach 10 times more people through your employees than you can on a corporate account and get seven times more conversions from employee-generated leads than marketing-generated leads. We were missing a trick by not harnessing our people’s networks. Additionally building our people’s profiles was a key priority for the firm; if they aren’t being seen or heard online it can make it harder to win business, if they aren’t connecting to people in their market, they could lose out on someone who does. Our people are our greatest asset and therefore focusing on them simply made sense.

FINALLY, WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO YOUNG MARKETERS IN 2024?

Don’t stay comfortable, push yourself to learn new skills. The marketing industry is a fast-paced place but let that excite you instead of overwhelm you. I always make time for self-development, whether it be reading social media reports, marketing trends or watching webinars to discover if there’s anything new we can do at Hymans; there’s an endless amount of resources online to immerse yourself in. Finding a workplace that’ll listen to your ideas and let you pursue them is also incredibly valuable, it has allowed me to develop my skills and achieve this award.

Learn more about the Engage Awards here.