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How Antalis Leads Its Industry on Social with Employee Ambassadors

Antalis is Europe’s leading B2B distributor of paper, packaging solutions, and visual communication products, with offices in 39 countries and global sales of €2.1 billion

  • 300%
    increase in share of web traffic to campaign site from social media
  • 87%
    adoption rate for employee ambassador programme
  • 3 wks
    job recruitment cut by an average of 3 weeks

The paper, packaging and visual communication distributor uses a social-first strategy to unify communications, streamline recruiting, and drive growth

With 4,700 employees in 39 countries and global sales of €2.1 billion, Antalis is Europe’s leading distributor of paper, packaging solutions, and visual communication products for professionals. When Franck Chenet joined Antalis as Digital Transformation and Marketing Services Director, he saw an immediate opportunity for the organization to become a social leader in an industry that has been slow to adapt to the new digital landscape.

Envisioning a social strategy that would unify internal and external communications, build Antalis’s employer brand, and use social-first campaigns to drive rapid growth, Chenet and the marketing team set about looking for a technology and strategy partner to make the plan a reality—and quickly turned to Hootsuite.

Objectives

At the outset, Antalis did not have a specific digital marketing strategy and was using social media in a decentralized way with little coordination between regions. Chenet knew that the marketing team needed a partner that could provide the platform, training, and support needed for a global overhaul of Antalis’s social media strategy and programmes.

Working with Hootsuite, Antalis set out to achieve the following objectives:

  • Make social media an integral part of Antalis’s internal and external communications strategy

  • Consolidate social accounts and unify content across regions with a distinctive brand voice

  • Support recruiting and increase lead generation with social-first campaigns amplified through an employee ambassador programme

  • Establish Antalis as a social-first and digital-first leader in the B2B paper and packaging industry

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Products used in this study

Hootsuite Enterprise
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Hootsuite Amplify
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Partnered with social experts to rapidly build expertise and capabilities

The next phase of Antalis’s digital transformation entailed designing and rolling out an employee ambassador programme using Hootsuite Amplify. Goals and scope for the programme were broad and ambitious, including improvements to internal communications, support for recruiting and employer branding efforts, as well as social-first campaigns to drive lead generation and growth.

To guide strategic planning and ensure an effective programme rollout, the team leaned on Hootsuite for expertise. As part of training and development, Hootsuite invited two of its other B2B customers who were already using Amplify to share guidance, best practices, and third-party feedback on their experiences rolling out their own ambassador programmes with Hootsuite.

Using Hootsuite Amplify, Antalis can now share approved content beyond its social teams, enabling employees across the business to find and share relevant and engaging posts to their social networks. This capability is key in boosting the company’s employer brand to support more effective recruiting, and also in driving social-first campaigns to support increased lead generation for the business.

Rolled out a world-class ambassador programme that’s built to last

To ensure that the ambassador programme would achieve high adoption among employees and provide relevant and engaging content, the team rolled it out in a phased and highly consultative approach.

For the first phase, the team recruited employees with existing LinkedIn accounts, brought in a professional photographer to update their profile pictures, and then began a collaborative process to ensure that content available for ambassadors struck the right balance of corporate and personal content. Throughout the initial rollout, the team supported ambassadors through touch-base sessions, Q&As, and even gamification to drive adoption and ensure ambassadors would want to share updates on social media.

To prepare for broader programme rollout, the team created more contextualized content to suit different ambassadors and their audiences. By paying close attention to participant feedback, trends, and audience personas, they succeeded in creating an appealing suite of content that sounded less like old-fashioned B2B product marketing and more like natural, relevant conversations.

With an impressively low drop-off rate of less than 10% over the four years since initial launch, the advocacy programme has become a vital pillar for Antalis’s employer brand initiatives and broader marketing campaigns.

Strengthened employer brand and streamlined recruitment with social

With a strong commitment to social responsibility across the areas of corporate governance, natural resources, human resources, and its product offerings, Antalis is well positioned to appeal to prospective employees as a progressive and responsible employer.

By creating engaging content that highlights its commitment to sourcing sustainable products, supporting community causes, and celebrating creative professionals, the company can then leverage the reach of its employees’ social networks to connect with a broader pool of quality candidates for open positions.

Antalis’s systematic use of social media in the hiring process has streamlined hiring workflows and cut hiring times by an average of three weeks, in some cases allowing job roles to be filled in as few as 15 days with candidates sourced from ambassadors’ LinkedIn Pages.

Generated new leads via social-first campaigns

With a strong ambassador programme established, Antalis was ready to begin ramping up its customer marketing with social-first campaigns to drive new leads and growth.

As a way to highlight the extensive and often highly innovative use of its products by architectural firms, printers, and interior design professionals and agencies, the marketing team decided to launch the Antalis Interior Design Award—a competition showcasing creative design in home interiors, offices, retail and hospitality spaces, public premises, and 3D projects.

The first edition of the award saw 341 projects submitted, generated significant engagement on social, and showcased innovative uses of Antalis’s products to a global audience. When the team ran a subsequent edition two years later, project submissions grew to 535 projects—and the share of traffic generated by social media grew from 5% for the first edition to over 20% for the second edition.

What's next

After four years of using Hootsuite, the partnership continues to pay dividends, with Chenet and team looking forward to continuing to work with Hootsuite. And with an 87% adoption rate and more than 2,400 shares of Amplify content last year, the ambassador programme continues to be a strong foundation for the company’s social and digital initiatives.

As Antalis continues to drive the programme forward, the next focus will be on training its ambassadors on social selling via Amplify and LinkedIn, working with them to refine selling techniques and provide relevant and effective sales enablement content. The company also aims to continue bridging its social and web performance data to measure and optimize its return on investment in social.

From the results to date, it’s clear that Antalis has taken a huge leap forward in its digital transformation journey—paving the way for even greater reach for this global distributor.

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Having Hootsuite is like having access to a toolbox on how to do social right. Hootsuite helped us with benchmarking, training, and implementation, and they take on our feedback too. That’s the definition of a good partner: one that optimises the partnership.
Franck Chenet
Digital Transformation & Marketing Services Director
Antalis