AVATR Employee Advocacy/Marketing Platform
Engage every employee in high-quality marketing effortlessly and cost-effectively
ROLE
Strategist Leader
TIMELINE
May 2021 -August, 2021
TEAMMATES
Phoebe (PM), Jingwen Tan(UX), Peipei Wang (UX)，and a engineering team of 8 members.
PRACTICES
User interview, Brainstorming, Competitive analysis, Secondary research, Prototype design, Figma
Team &
Overview
During my 5-year work experience as a marketing strategist at Wiseway Branding, a top PR agency in China, I got to work on a variety of digital media campaigns. One successful case was with AVATR, a Chinese EV manufacturer.
The task assigned to my team was to ponder over a new marketing method by engaging all employees with the minimal costs possible. From May 2021, I led the digital media team in setting up a SaaS-driven platform, AVATR Ambassadors.
AVATR Ambassadors is a mobile mini program integrated on the WeChat app that enables all AVATR employees to post quality branding content through their own social media channels in the easier ever way to amplify the influence of every marketing campaign, without marketing cost.
I worked as the project manager navigating the entire process. It took my team three months from initial proposal to official launch during May to August 2021.
Discover, Define, Design, and Deliver
The Process
From the pain point-driven research to strategy ideation, to design, here is the entire strategy design process my team followed. After mapping out AVATR Ambassadors, we subcontracted the app design work to a third party and had been leading its operation for half a year. The platform is now running smoothly and is expanding as scheduled.
Problem Discovery
Why We Do It
AVATR’s sales headwinds forced its PR team to cut budgets on marketing campaigns whilst without compromising brand reach.
In the digital marketing era dominated by UGC, KOL marketing is increasingly costly. However, employees are a long-ignored asset that has the full potential to transform traditional marketing strategy from purchase to self-generation.
Research & Identify Pain Points
Employee advocacy is not a new practice. However, its communication impact has been insignificant. We conducted an employee research and identified the pain points as follows:
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Employees are not well-informed about what AVATR is marketing about, lack high-quality marketing materials to post, or have no ideas about how to use marketing tactics to promote products effectively.
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The employee operation is too complex to follow and always leads to complaints.
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The undifferentiated reposts by employees is, in fact, nothing else but spamming the screen without effective exposure.
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The employee communication results cannot be monitored or measured.
Problem Statement
How might we make employee advocacy as easy as a one-tap repost on social media without compromising authenticity with minimal cost?
Envision a mobile solution that empowers all AVATR employees with the ability to repost marketing content leveraging PR team’s existing quality resources through personal social media in an easier way to improve brand visibility with least expenditure compared with traditional marketing.
Ideation
Based on the results of user research, we pinpointed each pain point from the following aspects and tried to work out a marketing strategy
Brainstorming
We begin by asking ourselves: How to maximize visibility with minimal lost? What incentives to engage more users? what tasks? how to make it easier? how to measure the results? and more. These principles help navigate our creative process and ensure our strategies can align with user expectation whilst meeting the branding needs.
Strategy Blueprint
From the above brainstorming discussed, we concluded six core marketing strategies that helps navigate AVATR’s employee advocacy pipeline.
Timeline
Design
Visual Design
After confirming the user flow, we subcontracted a SaaS service provider in charge of the design, development, and maintenance of AVATR Ambassadors.
We have designed a detailed and user-friendly onboarding process and guideline page for our users.Users can find a description of each important process.
We designed detailed answers for frequently asked questions. At the same time, this page also serves as an entry point for collecting new questions from users
With a few simple clicks, users can quickly claim tasks and view their tasks in the personal center.
Users don't need to go through the trouble of conceptualizing what to promote, they just need to long press the screen and paste what they have already copied.
Impacts
AVATR Ambassadors was launched in June 2021 after four months of preparation from strategy planning to platform development.
In the first six months running, more than 1000 employees signed up on AVATR Ambassadors and 3000+ social media accounts were collected for the developer to monitor marketing performance.