Leboncoin: Strengthening Brand Advocacy and Employee Engagement Across Teams

In France, Leboncoin has long been a household name, and the place to go to post and seek out classified ads. But company leadership knew there was untapped potential in the realm of B2B and talent acquisition, and that an Employee Advocacy campaign could be just the thing to spread positive awareness. Together with Poppulo, they were able to use harness the enthusiasm of their own employees to get the word out and make a splash.

Even the Biggest Names Still Have Room to Grow.

The Challenges: Boosting Awareness in the B2B & Talent Acquisition Realms.

With 70% of the population having already browsed their site, and with 30 million unique visitors each month, Leboncoin was already well-known in France as the place to put something up for sale, or to find sometime for sale. It’s the go-to online classified ad solution. However, when it came to the business-to-business world, there was still room to enhance brand perception. And when it came to talent acquisition, an awareness of the company as a great place to work certainly wouldn’t hurt either. More specifically, the challenges included:

• Emphasize Leboncoin more in the Business-to-Business space.
• Involve employees to educate audience and boost awareness.
• Drive ‘paid media’ substitution campaigns to save costs.
• Increase reach on other platforms like LinkedIn and X.

Sometimes the Best Ambassadors are In-House.

The Solutions: Using the Employee Advocacy & Engagement Features of Poppulo to Help Employees Spread the Word.

Leboncoin understood that brand awareness and positive advocacy on the part of employees could provide the best way of achieving their goals. Essentially, the ambassadors they were looking for were already in-house, in the form of their own workforce. Who better to spread brand awareness across social media, and portray the company in a positive light? And to achieve this, they partnered with Poppulo, with the aim of taking their employer branding one step further. The solutions employed to accomplish this included:

• Creation of different channels on their Poppulo platform to easily navigate the information, i.e. when a new feature has been introduced, various industries’ stats, insights into their platform, etc.
• Incorporate gamification and campaigns, keeping it fun and vibrant for their employees.
• Promoting campaigns like “Christmas Challenge” demonstrating through its simple DNA that the brand promotes giving life to a second-hand product.
• Implementation of tags, like “must-share” to let employees know what needs to be shared as a priority.

The Results? When Employees Spread the Word, Awareness was Raised and Money Was Saved.

By incorporating employees into promotion efforts for events and features, Leboncoin was able to spread awareness and also save media euros that normally would have been spent on campaigns, including job postings and talent acquisition projects.

Specific Results:

• In just the first 5 months, about 3,000 posts were shared by their employees on their personal social networks.
• Their posts all together reached over 2.6 million people.
• Their employees helped them save over 27,000 euros in paid media.

For Leboncoin, teaming up with Poppulo to power its advocacy campaign proved to be a smashing success. But it’s worth noting that every brand can benefit from Employee Advocacy, and not every fast-growing company necessarily has a high awareness level in every market. Employee Advocacy is not a “nice-to-have” but a must-have for building a solid awareness level within your region, or in new markets.

Alicia Cosme, Manager of Press Relations and Corporate Social Networks at Leboncoin, had this to say about their initiative:

Using Employee Advocacy and Social Selling techniques has a double advantage: on the one hand, employees have access to relevant information regarding their market, their sector, and their company, and they can share it in just a few clicks across their networks.

On the other hand, the company helps enhance its own e-reputation by amplifying its communication, generating traffic on its sites, and creating new points of contact.

Poppulo contributes greatly to the success of our project at Leboncoin, and the employees are delighted!

If you’d like to learn more about the power of employee advocacy for helping rapidly growing businesses, feel free to download our white paper. And if you’d like to learn more about how Poppulo can take your company’s employee communication to the next level, just sign up for a free, personalized demo. We’ve already helped industry leaders around the globe, including brands like Coca-Cola CCEP, Primark, and L’Occitane en Provence, and we’d love to discuss ways we can help your business, too.