With Sprout Social’s Bambu, West Monroe Watches Web Traffic Grow

Operating in the competitive world of business and technology consulting, Chicago-based West Monroe Partners knew that to stand out it had to effectively reach and nurture current and potential customers. Instead of relying on traditional marketing channels, the consultancy turned to a more immediate source: the social networks of its own employees.

Using employee advocacy platform Bambu by Sprout Social, the organization increased its footprint on social media while encouraging its employees to customize and share West Monroe’s content on their own social networks, establishing themselves as thought leaders in the industry.

Pre-Bambu, the firm’s social sharing process was clunky, prone to errors, and put limits on employees’ creativity. “Historically, the marketing team would create the content, we would post it to the website, we would craft tweets and LinkedIn posts, and we would send emails out and people would inevitably copy and paste something incorrectly,” says Casey Foss, director of marketing at West Monroe Partners. “Through the tool and the platform, we also give people the opportunity to edit these posts, so while we craft them and make suggestions, it’s very easy for people to slightly customize them and make them feel a bit more personal, so our people don’t feel like robots on the internet.”

As employees use the platform to share West Monroe content on their networks, they simultaneously grow more comfortable on social media and more confident in their expertise, Foss says. “It helps them see the value of social media by seeing people engaging with them, responding, liking Tweets or LinkedIn posts, and commenting on things that they have written. It helps people get more confident as thought leaders, become more engagement-oriented versus just social sharing, which I think has led to better brand engagement, and as a result, higher web traffic.”

The numbers bear this out. West Monroe has seen a 123 percent increase in website traffic from social media year over year, with 53 percent of leads through social media coming from Bambu. Furthermore, the company rolled out the program in January 2017 and saw more 20,000 shares as of December 2017.

“Our traffic driven from Bambu are also very engaged with our brand,” Foss says. “They tend to spend more time on our website, they tend to visit more pages and learn more about West Monroe, which I think is a good barometer for the fact that we’re driving the right people through this channel.”

Laura Older, senior digital marketing specialist at West Monroe Partners, agrees. “With every Bambu share, we are able to track the amount of traffic and the visitors that come to our website. We see that these people are staying longer on our site…and they’re more likely to convert. Whether it’s to download a whitepaper, contact us for more information, or sign up for a webinar, these people that come to our website from a Bambu share are more engaged with our brand.”

And a crucial side benefit of the platform is that it has enabled company leadership to more clearly see new opportunities. “Our leaders weren’t reading all of the content that we were creating [before] because we weren’t serving it up to them in a single channel where they could very easily click through it,” Foss says. “So one of the secondary benefits of the Bambu tool is that now our executive team, our office leaders, and our director of community are reading all of the content we create and identifying new opportunities for current clients and future clients. These opportunities are for skills they didn’t know we had because in the past they weren’t reading all of our thought leadership.”

The Payoff

Since implementing Sprout Social's Bambu employee advocacy platform, West Monroe Partners has seen the following results:

• a 123 percent increase in website traffic from social media year over year;
• 53 percent of leads through social media coming from the Bambu platform; and
• more than 20,000 social media shares.