Are you missing the most important marketing channel?

First published in Pharma Industry 3/2018, September 2018. Republished in full, translated from the Swedish original.

Editor's note, 2026

The argument was that the most important marketing channel a pharmaceutical company owns is the one it never books, the private networks of its own employees, and the article works from three scenarios towards a practical design for an ambassador program. It repeats industry figures whose primary source it does not give, among them the seven times higher conversion attributed to the IBM program and the estimated marketing value put on it; the Edelman Trust Barometer it names as the 2017 edition is linked in its own reference list as the 2016 one, and the counts of internet users, blogs and Facebook accounts are all 2018 snapshots. One figure is handled differently and a reader should know it: the article states that a recommendation from a close friend makes a purchase up to fifty times more likely, raises the objection itself that this may sound too good to be true, and then answers the objection by testing the number against the author's own behavior on social media and against the recognition point above it. That figure is not one of the four advantages the article lists, it is a data point inside the third of them, Engagement, and between the paragraph that defends it and the practical program design stand the Jonah Berger paragraph and the whole fourth advantage, Conversion, with its IBM numbers. In the manuscript this translation works from, the printed article's inline reference markers survive at one point only, so a reader cannot see which entry in the reference list is meant to support which figure, and the closing section stands on the same kind of ground on a smaller scale, offering the author's own LinkedIn reach, tens of likes and several thousand views on a single post, as the evidence that the power of social media is now visible. The article treats what an employee or an influencer may post as a question of internal guidelines, voice and tone, and promotion of medicines through private accounts is covered by the industry codes on top of those guidelines, so a program of this kind belongs in front of your own regulatory and compliance function before the first post, not after it. The incentive structure in the section on social stars assumes that employees will post company material from their private accounts and that results will be measured per person, and the piece was written months after GDPR began to apply without mentioning it once, so have your legal and data protection functions establish what you may ask of an employee and what you may record about them. The KPI list ends with a service level agreement, time to answer per platform, questions resolved and customer satisfaction, and the advantage about employee networks points the channel at the general public with content about OTC products and disease-related initiatives, so what is being described is a two-way channel about a pharmaceutical company's products with a promised response time; the article says nothing about where a report of a side effect or a product complaint goes once it arrives, and that route belongs with your own pharmacovigilance, medical information and regulatory functions before the channel is opened, not after. Twitter, which appears in the same KPI list as retweets, has since been renamed X, every platform named in the text is the field as it stood in 2018, and one thing the article could not take into account is that its case rests on employee posts being authentic because a person wrote them, while generative text tools became widely available in 2023.

In today's multichannel marketing, many companies aim to be active in as many channels as possible, to broaden their marketing mix and reach their customers from as many directions as possible. That contact happens almost exclusively in traditional and digital channels that have in the main been paid for in one form or another. Yet the most important resource is almost entirely forgotten, the employees' own megaphone. In this article, digital strategist Fredrik Holmboe shows how you as a company can use that resource through social media. The article contains a large number of links to references, which you can most easily reach in digital form at www.pharma-industry.se.

One of the genuinely large trends in digital marketing today is the so-called influencer marketing model, where companies hire well-known people to market their products. In the study State of Influencer Marketing 2018, 86 percent of all marketers had used influencers in their marketing at least once, and a little over 9 out of 10 found the strategy effective. A full 39 percent intended to increase their budget for initiatives of that kind during 2018, and only 5 percent intended to cut it.

So what do these figures tell us?

They tell us that we get further proof that we are becoming more and more skeptical of branded marketing, that very few people want to be sold to, and that the great majority of us want to experience something authentic and feel a connection as we find our way around the world and make decisions.

Honesty, credibility and vulnerability

In an article in Forbes, Ashley Deibert, VP of Marketing at iQ Media, writes that "people are emotionally driven and seek the security of knowing there is an underlying foundation of mutual respect, honesty and trust between them and the establishment they associate themselves with".

She goes on to say that the companies that put effort into conveying characteristics such as honesty, credibility and also vulnerability win out over companies that have not adopted those words in their communication.

And Ashley is not the only one saying it, there are many who say the same thing.

Wherever you search on the subject, creating the conditions for earning the customer's trust through a few clear building blocks is described as the only durable and dependable strategy for a company that wants to thrive in today's hard and shifting market climate.

That is true in B2B and B2C, and it is definitely true in the selling and marketing of prescription medicines and OTC products.

In recent years I have been at companies that have hired influencers and also, in clever ways, used their existing customers, working together with them to create the conditions for those individuals to act as brand ambassadors.

What I have not seen, though, at almost every company, is a successful internal project that gets a collaboration going with the employees, aimed at reaching out on social media, where every employee is an influencer in their own way. More on how and why later in the article.

Done well, the psychology in that kind of communication from the employee is roughly the same as in proper influencer marketing. That is because of the credibility that comes from an authentic glimpse of the personal, the absence of an all-too-obvious brand strategy mixed with a touch of pride in one's own, and above all a close relationship between the publisher and the recipient.

But before we get to that part of the article, I want to give the subject some context through three different scenarios.

Scenario 1: the blog boom

Today there is more content than any human being can consume, and you can find more or less anything explained in text, images or sound. Everyone has the chance to be seen, heard and read by the just over 54 percent of the world's population who have access to the internet.

It has not always been that way. Looking at it historically, the power to steer and to influence lay largely in the hands of those who could read and write, then moved to those who could print, and then ended up with those who had influence over the press, radio and television.

Then something happened. In 1994 a student named Justin Hall started a website where he wrote about his life in an open and personal way, a website that is still active today. Justin's website is considered to have been the first of its kind and the starting shot for personal blogging.

The concept of writing to tell the story of your life openly on a website developed, and slowly more people picked up the idea. You had to be able to write HTML code to run a website, though, and progress was relatively slow.

Then Blogger.com was launched, a website built to make blogging available to everyone. At the launch of Blogger in 1999 it was estimated that there were 23 active blogs globally as we define them today, a number that grew exponentially through better and more manageable tools to around 50 million active blogs in 2006.

The blog boom had arrived, and at that point every person with a computer and an internet connection could create a blog of their own.

But of course it did not stop there.

Towards the end of 2010 the number of active blogs was estimated at around 152 million, a number that has kept growing. Today there are estimated to be more than 440 million blogs on the cloud services Tumblr, Squarespace and Wordpress alone.

The point of this look back is to show that in a very short time, tools were developed that made simple content production and distribution possible, written content to begin with, for an enormous number of people.

And the result is a completely inconceivable production of content, for better and for worse, where the challenge today is no longer to find information but to find good information.

Scenario 2: the disruptive force of social media

Without doubt the internet is one of the very greatest advances in modern history, with an incredible power to affect the world around us.

A couple of examples worth mentioning are the Arab Spring, which started in 2010 and in a short time, mainly through a powerful impact on social media, removed presidents, brought down governments and cleared the way for democracy in dictator-led countries in North Africa and on the Arabian peninsula.

Another example closer to home is the #metoo movement, which took off on 15 October 2017 when the actress Alyssa Milano used a post on Twitter to call on all women around the world who had been sexually harassed to write about it and use the hashtag MeToo. We all know that this movement on social media created a storm of disclosures, dismissals, prosecutions and in many cases some form of justice after far too many years.

What I want to show with these two examples is how powerful it becomes when personal fates and injustices (vulnerability), honestly retold (honesty) by the individuals in the situation (credibility), come together in what is said on social media.

It becomes genuine in a way that we as recipients can relate to and, for some recipients in some settings, a sense arises of a one-to-one relationship where you are seen, perhaps understood and above all not alone.

Humanizing your brand, showing what happens behind the curtain with a vulnerability where not everything goes entirely right on the way towards a clear mission and vision, becomes more and more necessary and creates that authentic quality we as consumers ask for, along with an understanding in the market that reaches inside your brand.

Scenario 3: we value what is authentic

90 percent of all the data that exists online today was created in the last two years.

If you think about that for a second and try to grasp the scale of what it means every day and every minute, where do you land? Rather thought-provoking.

Now, all data is not the same thing as content, but it is still a thought-provoking and fundamental indicator of how fast certain developments happen online. We as individuals contribute a great deal of the data stored online, and many of us also create content specifically for storage online, among other things with the help of platforms such as Blogger and through our accounts on social media.

Given that we generally value, and are moved by, content that is honest, credible and carries a certain measure of vulnerability, there is one more dimension to what we appreciate on social media, which is:

• Information
• Entertainment
• Connection

Do you know the name Candace Payne?

I had to look up her real name again myself in connection with this article. But if anyone had asked me whether I had seen "Chewbacca mom" on YouTube a couple of years ago, I would have remembered immediately who that was. It is probably one of the funniest examples of something that has gone extremely viral in recent years, and with around 140 million viewers in the first three (!) days, the chances are you have seen the clip. If you have not seen it and want a warm feeling in your stomach and a laugh, you will find a link to the clip among the references. [13]

What was it that made the film with "Chewbacca mom" go so viral? My thought is that over a good four minutes we get to see something that contains all three components (honesty, credibility and a certain measure of vulnerability) while it also serves up a solid helping of feel-good (entertainment) with an enormous amount of fellow feeling (connection).

We get to see Candace, who has just sat down in her car after buying a Chewbacca mask, tell her phone camera how she bought the mask for herself, not for her children, even though they are of course allowed to borrow it (she is not a bad mother after all), and we get to see and hear how, completely overjoyed, she tears off her glasses, puts on the mask and roars with laughter until the tears run while she plays with it and with the sound it makes when she opens her mouth. It is obvious that Candace genuinely loves her mask. And she does it with no sponsor behind her. She does it with no thought of personal gain. She does it purely because she is entirely and completely overjoyed at having bought a Chewbacca mask. And it is so genuine that the clip got just over 1,600 new views on average per second, every second, during the first three days.

The kind of authenticity we see in the "Chewbacca mom" example, that glimpse into a private sphere that entertains, is what has created a whole generation of new influencers with thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands or millions, of followers who want to look into the lives of their idols. In my view it is exactly that sort of heartfelt, open closeness that lays the ground for a deep connection that can last for years. Is it possible to get some of those parts into your brand or company communication?

The upshot

So what is the upshot of these three scenarios? It is that:

• It is far too easy to be swept along by the rush to publish content because everyone else is doing it. Content produced in haste far too often ends up focused on what we as marketers and salespeople want to say and not so much on what the recipient wants to consume. That happens because we have not stopped and created proper buyer personas (a defined recipient of our content) and content created on the basis of the buyer journey your persona is moving along.
• It is far too easy to overlook the building blocks that make up communication that resonates with the recipient. If the communication stops at an inside-out product or service message, it becomes extremely hard to bring in the deeper values discussed above, and also your why, which describes why your organization exists and which people can relate to on an emotional level.
• It is on social media that we most often share what we find informative or entertaining, or what creates a connection. "Chewbacca mom" became a viral success because it was authentically entertaining. Influencer marketing is on an upward trend because influencers are authentic, often entertaining, sometimes informative and above all professionals at creating a connection with their fans.

You and every colleague you have are authentic in your own networks. And in all likelihood you, your colleagues and your organization are working on one or more projects that you would share with your networks with pride. Most of all if there were a structure set up by the company that made it easy to share.

Employees as the company's ambassadors

The company's employees know the business in depth, they know your products and are almost always directly or indirectly involved in many of the initiatives and projects being run. Each one is a potential ambassador, with the following advantages.

Recognition. Consumers, that is people like you and me, trust their peers and people they can recognize and relate to. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2017 found that employees are three times as credible a source of company information as the company's CEO. Not only because they work there, but also because consumers can in many cases relate better to them than to the CEO.

Employees have their own networks. The chances are that these networks touch many different people and demographics from one employee to the next, above all on Facebook with its 2 billion users, where you often only make contacts with people from your private sphere. The more employees who share branded content (in the selling of OTC products) in a way that is valuable to the recipient, for example a good solution for hay fever sufferers in pollen season, or alternatively patient-related or disease-related initiatives "Beyond the Pill", the more exposure those parts of your business get in each of those networks. From a sender the recipient recognizes and can relate to.

Engagement. In my article focused on email marketing and KPIs, published in Pharma Industry, I describe how the open rate for an email campaign from an employee is two to three times higher than if the same campaign had come from the company's official sender. The phenomenon is the same when messages are shared in social channels by people we know. In that case, though, with up to fifty times greater chance of a purchase if the recommendation comes from a close and trusted friend.

Fifty times greater chance of a purchase may sound a little too good to be true. But looking at your own behavior on social media, and at the point above about recognition, it becomes more plausible. Consumers pay far more attention to content shared by their friends and acquaintances than to content shared by a company.

If the post then gives us a chance to feel intelligent, cool, funny, or to be seen as engaged in important questions, factors that Jonah Berger sets out in his book Contagious: Why things catch on, the chance is greater that we choose to share the post one step further.

Conversion. In 2011 IBM started an ambassador program for its employees, where among other things they found that a potential customer who had approached the company through social channels, having first interacted with an employee, was seven times more likely to become a paying customer. IBM's initiative, whose overall statistics are set out here, consisted of 200 IBM employees who created content that generated a total of 603,000+ clicks with an estimated marketing value of somewhere between $300,000 and $1,200,000.

Parts of their ambassador program are described in a webinar on the BrightTalk website.

Creating the right conditions

So now to the core question: how do you create these ambassadors? The answer lies in the process, where as always it is important to look at the result and work backwards through the steps needed to get from the situation we have today. As help along the way, here are a few things to think about.

The design of the initiative. First the right conditions need to be in place for the initiative, and here are some questions to ask and boxes to check:

• Is the initiative firmly anchored in the management team?
• What does the budget for the initiative look like and which trade-offs need to be made?
• Which business needs are to be addressed through the initiative?
• Which KPIs are relevant for you?
• Establish how the company's Voice and Tone should be perceived
• What are the incentives for those who get involved in the initiative and how are they evaluated?
• Who are the company's existing stars on social media (every company has them)?
• Put together a pilot group of the stars above
• Run a workshop where needs, opportunities and a possible way forward are discussed
• Compile the output from the workshop and put together guidelines for the initiative
• Provide the group with tools that make their work easier (see the list of services)
• Set a plan for how you handle different networks in different ways (post length, format and so on)
• Notice, celebrate and reward successes
• Bring more employees into the initiative
• When is it appropriate for the group to meet to refuel and share experiences?
• How do you handle the situation if something goes wrong?
• Report results back to the management team, including lessons learned, both good and bad.

Budget and related trade-offs

Every project needs a budget, and an ambassador program is no exception.

• What type of content needs to be created (film, sound, images, graphics, text)?
• Is there a need for external help from an agency?
• Does organic reach need to be supplemented with paid advertising?
• What do the tools and services needed for a relevant impact cost?

Calls to action as an answer to identified business needs

Sometimes the purpose of a post on social media is to inform, to create awareness, but the post is almost always published with the purpose of drawing visitors onward, driving traffic to an article, an offer or a registration page. When the purpose is to drive traffic, a well-formulated call to action (CTA) becomes extremely important, together with an almost equally important explanation of the value to the reader if they act on the CTA and click through.

Whether the purpose of the posts you publish is to inform or to drive traffic, there should be a link to an identified business need. "Why do these posts move a reader closer to a deal that is good for both us and them?" is a good question to ask, and if the answer is that there is no link to the business, or worse still that there is no clear value for the reader, you should reconsider the initiative. As established under the heading The upshot above, there is quite simply far too much content absolutely everywhere for you to get anything back from what you publish.

When formulating the CTA that is to drive traffic, it is important to use active language such as "download", "like", "buy", "register", "sign up", "donate", "share", "comment", "watch", combined with a defined time frame such as "closes at midnight", "today only", "the next 24 hours", "until 27 September". Try to find ways to make the CTA stand out, either as text or visually, so that the most important element stands apart from the rest of the content with greater visual weight, since that increases the likelihood of a higher conversion rate.

Which KPIs are relevant?

Every company has its own goals with an ambassador program. Here are a few suggestions for KPIs to look more closely at:

• Reach
• Number of followers
• Views
• Mentions
• Engagement
• Likes or favorites
• Comments
• Shares and retweets
• Ratings and reviews
• Inbound links from other websites
• Return on investment (ROI)
• Direct sales initiated through a set CTA
• Lead (potential customer) conversion for follow-up
• Cost of handling support cases
• Service level agreement (SLA)
• Time to answer per platform
• Questions resolved
• Customer satisfaction

How should the company's Voice and Tone be perceived?

Many companies already have detailed instructions and a defined picture of how they want to be perceived through their communication, linked to stated values. But an initiative of this kind, with internal ambassadors active on social media, is probably something new for the organization, and a review should be carried out to make sure the intended Tone is the right one. The company's Voice should be stable and convey the underlying personality and style of your company, while the company's Tone is something that can be adjusted depending on things like content, channel, situation and recipient. What do those two aspects of communication look like at your company?

Incentives and social stars

My experience tells me that it is often easier to get people in an organization to move in a particular direction if it is noticed first of all, but also if there is some form of incentive to act. The digital stars you have in your organization are probably stars because they have a strong personal interest, and are probably driven more by public recognition (leaderboards, praise, attention at the summer conference and so on) than by making money from their engagement.

That is not to say that there should not be some form of bonus program attached to a project like this, but it is often better to celebrate success publicly, properly and with real enjoyment, than to pay money into a salary account.

Feedback and risk management

Letting your own staff loose with the company's marketing can feel extremely challenging for many. Where is the control, and is it really appropriate?

I hope that with this article I manage to convey why it is appropriate, not to say extremely important, that you as a company invest in a proper ambassador program. And as for the control, it is said that the most important thing is no longer to get everything right, but to make mistakes fast, learn from what happened and keep getting better.

Because things will go wrong, and then it is important to have a worked-through crisis communication plan in place. Summed up, in a situation like that it is important to be available and to address what has happened as soon as possible, to communicate even if you have no real information to give. In that case, state when you think you will have that information, and come back. When you have a solution or an answer regarding what happened, base the communication on your values, show empathy for what happened and a clear resolve that conveys that what happened will not happen again.

Finally, on internal feedback to the management team and the rest of the organization, it is important to have a clear plan for what it should look like and at what intervals it should happen. With that anchored in the KPIs mentioned above, you should have a good basis for it.

A few closing words

In this article I have listed a number of references for further reading and as sources for your own future presentation. You can most easily reach them in digital, clickable form at www.pharma-industry.se. The subject of digital communication and strategy is close to my heart and I often share related material, above all through my profile on LinkedIn, where as an individual I have my largest social network online. Tens of likes, comments and several thousand views of a single post are not unusual, and I have never personally seen the power of social media as clearly as now. My hope is that this article, with some context, reasons why and hands-on advice, helps you on the way to a similar experience with your organization's communication on social media.

See you online, or in the next issue of Pharma Industry.

Fredrik Holmboe

Digital strategist

References

1. http://www.linqia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Linqia-The-State-of-Influencer-Marketing-2018.pdf
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2017/05/26/why-authenticity-in-marketing-matters-now-more-than-ever/#3d607ee07982
3. https://marketingland.com/brands-strive-for-authenticity-as-audiences-turn-a-skeptical-eye-toward-ads-236295
4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2018/04/17/why-authenticity-is-driving-a-content-marketing-revolution/#2330a35e7dad
5. https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-be-authentic-in-marketing-709f02f2f6c3
6. https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
7. http://www.links.net/vita/
8. https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/03/a-brief-history-of-blogging/
9. http://mediakix.com/2017/09/how-many-blogs-are-there-in-the-world/#gs.O1_bV9Y
10. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabiska_v%C3%A5ren
11. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metoo
12. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130522085217.htm
13. https://www.facebook.com/candaceSpayne/videos/10209653193067040/
14. https://www.edelman.com/2016-edelman-trust-barometer
15. http://www.pharma-industry.se/flerkanalsmarknadsforing/
16. https://www.referralcandy.com/referral-marketing-guide/2/how-powerful-is-word-of-mouth-exactly
17. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15801967-contagious
18. https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/12091/133309

The Swedish original is on the publisher's site: Missar ni den viktigaste kanalen för marknadsföring?. Turning the people who already know the business into a channel that publishes regularly, with the review that pharma requires, is the work the Content Engine Sprint does.