How Dynatrace Built an Employee Advocacy Program with Over 2X ROI

By: John Rocker, Social Media Director, Dynatrace

Social media is everywhere, but many folks still don’t know what to do with it. Where is the best place to post? What do you say? Is it better to share existing content or create something new?

And who has time to do it all, anyway?

The questions multiply at the professional level, where rules and best practices for sharing content tend to complicate the situation. But suppose a company makes it easy for people to share content on social media and see the positive impact of that activity. In that case, people become more engaged, which can generate significant revenue, pipeline, and ROI.

I’m a believer in social media. I joined Dynatrace as social media manager in 2017 and became the social media director in 2022. Dynatrace is an AI-powered data and analytics platform that simplifies cloud operations, helping organizations do more with less. When I became social media director, I was excited to hire a social media manager, Kerry Monahan, and expand our one-person team to two.

We are a global company with thousands of employees, so it was a big relief when Kerry began to help manage our social channels. That allows me to focus on the big-picture, strategic aspects of training, evangelizing social media among leadership teams, and introducing and scaling new programs. Together, Kerry and I touch everything related to organic social media, which we use to generate brand awareness and new business for Dynatrace.

Wanted: A Straightforward Platform Focused on Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy has long been part of Dynatrace’s organic social strategy. Effective communication is an important skill, whether to sell a product or a personal brand. By sharing content, employees can extend the reach of Dynatrace and become thought leaders in their areas of expertise—realizing benefits for both the business and the individual.

Despite these benefits, people aren’t always clear on what an active social presence can do for their company and career. Before I joined Dynatrace, our previous employee advocacy program didn’t do anything to change that. It didn’t provide much content, and what was there wasn’t always relevant. Employees didn’t see the results of their advocacy, so there wasn’t much enthusiasm around it. Dynatrace also attempted grassroots efforts through emailed content, but emails fall off the radar fast, and those efforts didn’t address why some users hesitate to post.

When I came on board, I brought on LinkedIn Elevate, which was much better received. Many employees already used LinkedIn, so that lowered the barrier to adoption. After a successful few years, though, LinkedIn sunset the platform, which started me looking for another employee advocacy platform.

I wanted an easy-to-use platform that would allow for a seamless transition from Elevate. I reviewed four or five different options, and PostBeyond stood out. Unlike other platforms, PostBeyond didn’t try to do too much—it didn’t add a bunch of bells and whistles that I knew would confuse our teams. PostBeyond is straightforward, solely focuses on employee advocacy, and has a good mobile and web experience. Speaking with the PostBeyond team left me with a good feeling that we could form a solid partnership, too, so we moved ahead with adoption.

Creating engagement on the new platform was pretty organic. I found our 50 most active users from Elevate and gave them early access to PostBeyond to get them using it. Power users are often the best evangelists, so I wanted to ensure they had a great experience. Once they started sharing content, their colleagues and team members began seeking invitations to the platform, and engagement took off. Within 30 days, we had a 73% adoption rate, a social reach of over 1.1 million, and 560 new website visitors.

For Best Results, Understand the Content That Compels Employees and Their Communities

Employee advocacy has become a significant part of our overall marketing strategy. It starts with offering a rich and varied content library so they can find plenty of content that resonates with them. We update that library constantly, and only about 35–40% of this content is Dynatrace-centric. We are in the B2B space and focus on areas like Kubernetes, DevOps, and AI, so we need content relevant to these subjects—especially as it helps salespeople speak to customer pain points.

But we can’t neglect other areas of the business, which is why we also publish more evergreen, thought-leadership content. Everyone wants to know how to build better teams, be better leaders, and further their careers. The one-two combination of branded content and evergreen thought leadership extends our reach and brings new opportunities.

The way Kerry and I see it, we are fantastic at our jobs, but material from our branded social channels doesn’t have the same impact as something shared by an individual. We know that most people are somewhat skeptical of brand channels. If content comes from someone they know, they’ll be more willing to engage with that and share it with others. Content shared by an individual has a lot longer life than branded social feeds.

One of our most eye-popping results is that 75% of traffic to the Dynatrace website, from employee shares through PostBeyond, are new users. The number of new leads coming in from PostBeyond is well into the hundreds every year. Leads turn into pipeline sourced, which I see as the most accurate metric of PostBeyond’s value because over time, some of that sourced pipeline becomes revenue. PostBeyond paid for itself quickly, and ROI continues to be 2-3X across the board.

Training Ensures Those Who Pick Up PostBeyond Never Put It Down

The onboarding process at Dynatrace is bursting with information, and for specialized teams like sales or product engineering, social is often the last thing on their mind. Many of our salespeople participate in a boot camp, a weeklong intensive introduction to Dynatrace. PostBeyond is part of that introduction, but it’s low on their list of priorities.

To ensure PostBeyond is more than just an item on the onboarding checklist, Kerry and I developed live training sessions throughout the year. When people log in and use the platform with us, it makes the activity much less daunting. They can then go on to build PostBeyond into their schedule, maybe starting their week by exploring content, and scheduling their posts—with just 15 minutes a week, people can realize the value of employee advocacy.

Our earlier program was unsuccessful partly because people didn’t see the impact. We make it a point to demonstrate the results of employee advocacy during our training sessions. The earned media value is at the top of our dashboard, showing the spend in paid advertising for the same engagement. Our dashboard also shows pipeline and potential revenue generated from PostBeyond activity. For a new salesperson worried about making quota, we emphasize PostBeyond as a way to create new leads. We help them connect the dots and see how social content can lead to new business, even if their two weekly posts might not get 100 likes and 50 comments.

The biggest thing I want employees to know is that Kerry and I are here for them, especially if there’s anything they want to amplify to a broader audience. As an employee advocacy program, we want to provide content they care about.

It’s a Win-Win-Win

The social media team views PostBeyond as a valuable outlet to push out more content. We are fortunate to have an overabundance of content, but this content is constantly vying for top priority on our main branded channels. Aside from that, Dynatrace is a global company, and some content is specific to a particular location or language. With PostBeyond, a post in Japanese, for example, has a place and an audience. Similarly, a great post on a niche subject will have legs.

PostBeyond offers everyone at Dynatrace a wealth of curated content they can feel safe about posting. Dynatrace went public in 2019, and some of our employees are uncertain about sharing the wrong thing in the wrong place. PostBeyond removes that fear. All the content has already been vetted, we have filters for certain words, and we check spelling. We’ve educated employees about how social can improve sales and further their careers. PostBeyond makes it all easy.

For Dynatrace as a company, PostBeyond is a great driver of brand awareness and talent acquisition without investing a lot of money in advertising. We’re getting our name out there to audiences we might not have reached before. I have no doubt that people who get to know Dynatrace through our employee advocates check out our job postings. What better way to learn about a company than through someone who can vouch for the culture and activity? We get great applicants from these networks that we might not have gotten otherwise.

Making Those Marketing Budgets Go Much Further

In times of uncertainty, marketing departments are always the first to feel changes. They have to be shifty and thrifty with spend, and having an employee advocacy program like PostBeyond can help stretch those budgets. We know how much gets spent on social advertising across different platforms, but that new traffic that comes to our website from employee shares through PostBeyond? It’s basically free advertising.

If we had used another platform for employee advocacy, I don’t think it would have had the same impact or encouraged as much adoption as PostBeyond. PostBeyond is in that sweet spot: it has everything we need, is easy to onboard, and continues to grow and evolve to meet our expanding needs. It’s a perfect fit for us.

Kerry and I might be a small social media department, but we’re all about having fun with social, using it to make life easier for our colleagues and help the business grow. We’re passionate about it because we see its value. PostBeyond is an integral part of our marketing program, and if others keep it at the forefront of their strategy, they’ll experience success, too.