The brief
A Chinese power-cable and fibre-optic manufacturer. Exports to 45 countries. The sales team lived entirely on WeChat. Distributors and project engineers across Africa, Southeast Asia and South America were searching for the company on LinkedIn and finding almost nothing. A page with a blurry logo, a two-line description and a last post from eight months earlier.
The deeper issue was buried under that. The company had technical staff in the field all over the world. Engineers who install cable systems, sit through project meetings, visit client sites every week. They had stories that would land with buyers. They just weren't telling them anywhere a global audience could see.
Our strategy
We didn't start with the company page. We started in a training room.
Two workshops, two days apart. The first covered the basics. What a good LinkedIn profile looks like. How the algorithm decides what gets shown. Why commenting on other people's posts matters as much as publishing your own. The second was hands-on, with everyone drafting their first post in the room. Some were rough. One engineer wrote three sentences about a transformer installation. Honestly excellent. We barely touched it.
Forty people across five countries enrolled in the advocacy programme. A weekly content kit: two or three pre-written posts they could personalise, a relevant industry article, and a prompt like "share a photo from your last site visit and write two sentences about what you saw."
A leaderboard tracked participation. Nothing fancy. No prizes. Just names on a board. People respond to that more than you'd expect.
The company page ran bilingual content, English and Mandarin. Project installations, product certifications, engineering milestones. The page gave the advocates something to point back to when people checked out the company after seeing their posts.
The result
Advocacy participation hit 58% in the first month. Solid, not spectacular. We'd hoped for higher, honestly. It picked up in month two, once people saw colleagues getting engagement on their posts.
Combined reach from the 40 participants: 160,000 impressions in 60 days. The company page climbed from 200 to 1,400 followers.
The story we keep coming back to. A field engineer in Nigeria posted a photo of a cable installation at a power substation. Short caption, no polish at all. A regional distributor saw it, clicked through to the company page and sent an enquiry the same day. One post. One photo. One lead. That's employee advocacy when it actually works.
The marketing team took the programme over after our engagement ended. They've since rolled it out to a second group.