Nilfisk

The challenge

Historically, the social media landscape at Nilfisk has been very decentralized and dominated by many separate channels locally. This has resulted in each market having their own social media accounts and content creation processes.  

In many markets, the organization has one marketing specialist per market. In addition to organic content and paid social efforts, the company’s HR department and corporate communications teams regularly produce content for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.  

Initially, all social media activity was funneled through a small team, creating bottlenecks in the organization’s social media operations and limiting the company’s ability to produce and manage content efficiently.  

Additionally, having teams spread across various regions and departments made it difficult to maintain consistent content creation, approval workflows, and effectively track performance. 

Rolling out Brandwatch to local markets 

To address these challenges, Cathrine and Christian led the full rollout of Brandwatch Social Media Management across Nilfisk’s numerous entities. This initiative enabled more than 40 users across various teams to independently manage social media for their local markets while remaining aligned with the organization’s global goals and maintaining a consistent brand identity.  

Through this rollout, the team: 

• Centralized social media strategy, providing local teams with content, guidance, and on-brand assets.  
• Empowered local teams to create content in local languages while ensuring consistent brand messaging across all social media channels 
• Removed silos by consolidating many social accounts and encouraging teams to share content, learnings, and performance data with each other.  
• Improved brand consistency by establishing a unified process and cohesive messaging across all social media channels. 

Getting buy-in from stakeholders 

Securing buy-in from local teams was crucial to ensuring they fully adopted the platform and leveraged its capabilities.

The team had to convince the markets to give up control and merge their channels into a global framework under Brandwatch. 

Cathrine and Christian began tracking and sharing performance data and insights from individual teams, helping colleagues across the organization to create content that not only met brand guidelines but also performed well on social.  

Gathering performance data enabled Cathrine and Christian to make compelling arguments for specific social media initiatives and strategies, highlighting the approaches that were most effective – helping reduce off-brand content posting. 

Centralizing and streamlining social media efforts 

In our conversation, Christian explained that when 20 to 40 marketers juggle multiple tasks like multiregional launches, trade shows, print catalog releases, and general social media management duties, staying on top of online comments and engagement can be challenging. 

By channeling all social media activity through Brandwatch, the Nilfisk team created a hub that enables over 40 users to be more active and efficient. This process helped Nilfisk to standardize content publishing across global and local markets and remove regional communicational silos.  

As a result, the Nilfisk team significantly improved social media responsiveness and efficiency, strengthening the brand image and building a cohesive identity across all channels. 

Using labels to organize content  

Cathrine shared that one feature in particular – labels in the Publish module in Social Media Management – helped the team centralize and organize their content.  

Nilfisk’s Brandwatch users can now organize content by market and campaign, providing a better overview of all initiatives across the organization and allowing their teams to get inspiration from other departments. The admins also control and restrict the label options various stakeholders can choose from, making it much easier to look at the performance tracking.  

Cathrine now personally onboards all team members who need to use Brandwatch for publishing, teaching them how to effectively use labels and the existing labels setup to organize content, track performance, and share insights across departments. 

Since Nilfisk markets share both local and global posts on the same channels, labels make it easier for the teams to track and distinguish performance between the two.  

Each market has its own market label, and every campaign is tagged with a unique campaign label. This setup allows for multilayer tracking: local versus global content and content-specific performance. Marketers can now filter metrics to focus exclusively on the performance of global content, for example.

This way, they can gain insights into how that content performs across different channels, offering valuable data to inform Nilfisk’s marketing strategy. 

Performance reporting and global content strategy 

Before using Brandwatch, Nilfisk's content creation process relied on past experiences and ideas instead of performance analysis of their content.  

Tracking metrics like reach, impressions, video clicks, and engagement using the Measure module has helped Nilfisk improve content quality and impact. For example, while doing their regular reporting, Cathrine and Christian discovered that animations and still images generated lower levels of engagement online.

Their audience preferred images and videos featuring real people instead. Empowered by these insights, the Nilfisk marketing team now create high-quality content depicting real people – a major change from their approach just one or two years ago.  

Nilfisk also discussed their ongoing experimentation with Brandwatch. The team now regularly test different tactics like using emojis, varying post lengths, and including links in the first comment. They added that these tests are now easier to plan and execute using Brandwatch compared to having to build everything from scratch each time.