Trelleborg is a century-old international industrial group specializing in high-performance polymer solutions. Founded in 1905 in Sweden, it now employs 8,500 people across 40 countries, with over 15 R&D centers and 35 production sites. Its solutions protect critical applications in aerospace, medical, and industrial sectors, environments where technical requirements are at their highest. But how can such cutting-edge expertise be heard beyond corporate publications? How can employees themselves be empowered to speak up in a sector often seen as technical and complex?

Let’s explore how the group made Poppulo a strategic lever to turn this vision into a global employee advocacy program.

Clear Ambitions, Real Challenges

At Trelleborg, the idea of giving more visibility to internal expertise had been around for several years. In a company where technical excellence prevails and sales cycles are long, supporting social selling became a strategic necessity. Practically speaking, that meant helping sales engineers and customer-facing teams to engage their networks by sharing high-value content.

An initial pilot project on Sales Navigator was conducted in the U.S. While the tool showed promising commercial potential, it also revealed a major limitation: employees lacked ready-to-share content. Many wondered what they were actually allowed to post, lacked time to write, or simply faced the dreaded blank page.

The headquarters team in Stuttgart took the lead: “We knew that to mobilize our employees, we had to provide them with a centralized, clear, and multichannel content library,” adds Camilla.

Three key strategic objectives quickly emerged:

• Support social selling by equipping customer-facing profiles with relevant content.
• Increase the visibility of Trelleborg’s expertise by amplifying events, innovations, and achievements through personal networks.
• Develop a collective voice to complement corporate communications, embodied directly by employees.

Finally, the team needed to strike a balance: keeping the intranet for internal communication, and making Poppulo the central hub for external employee advocacy.

Poppulo: a Global Hub for Employee Advocacy

Trelleborg officially launched its Poppulo platform on January 1, 2024, for ambassadors worldwide.
“What made the difference is that Poppulo truly covers the full spectrum of our needs: it’s multichannel, easy to use, and entirely dedicated to advocacy. It allows us to keep our intranet for internal communication and use Poppulo for external visibility,”
highlights Camilla.

The platform was structured around Trelleborg’s three main divisions:

• Sealing Solutions, historically the most engaged.
• Medical Solutions, operational since 2025.
• Aerospace, newly integrated, with strong community engagement.

A Strategy of Targeted and Motivated Ambassadors

Today, the platform includes hundreds of active ambassadors worldwide, mainly from Sealing Solutions but also from Medical and Aerospace. Even executive committee members are involved in the program, reinforcing its credibility among employees.

Ambassadors are not chosen at random, they are selected from customer- and prospect-facing profiles. Motivation is fueled by several levers:

• Engaging, gamified campaigns with tangible rewards (gifts, or trees planted through the integrated Poppulo Trees feature).
• Business-area-specific newsletters sent weekly or biweekly.
• Training sessions on LinkedIn updates and Poppulo features.
• A win-win positioning: employees enhance their personal visibility while promoting their company.

“We want our employees to see advocacy as an opportunity for their career and network, not just a marketing task,” says Camilla.

An Editorial Strategy Adapted to Market Diversity

To keep ambassadors engaged daily, Trelleborg relies on an editorial line structured around five pillars:

• Expertise and applications: evergreen content and use cases.
• Events and trade shows: presentations, behind-the-scenes moments, testimonials.
• Employer branding: team stories and human portraits.
• CSR: social and environmental initiatives.
• Innovation and R&D: simplified technical content.

These pillars are activated by “triggers” (such as the creation of a new business area, a project milestone, a product launch, or local news) that serve as catalysts for regular, authentic communication.

Content that highlights people consistently generates the most engagement. Team photos create instant emotional connection, while immersive videos (for example, shot inside airplanes for Aerospace dpt. or cars for Automotive dpt.) strongly capture attention.

In Medical Solutions, simplified technical posts resonate particularly well, making complex topics more accessible. Employer branding also plays a key role, with some employees becoming genuine “internal influencers” thanks to their posts.

The Game-Changing Role of AI

Poppulo’s built-in AI feature, Ask AI, has become an indispensable tool, with hundreds of uses by employees. Its purpose? To remove writing barriers.

“That’s really what changed things for many of our engineers. They’re not always comfortable writing, and Ask AI helps them rephrase, translate, or simplify their messages in seconds,”
Camilla Di Donato, Project Manager & Content Development at Trelleborg

Concrete benefits:

• Time savings.
• Improved expression quality, especially for non-native speakers.
• More authentic, personalized posts compared to simple reshares.

Fast and Measurable Results

Within the first year, the results spoke for themselves:

• 76% of ambassadors active on a regular basis.
• 2,599 pieces of content shared in one year (an average of 651 per month).
• 91,922 impressions and 2,183 external clicks, including 1,530 on X.
• An estimated €19,600 saved in paid media since launch.

Beyond the numbers, qualitative impacts were equally strong:

• Externally, prospects and clients are exposed to Trelleborg through employee posts, which are often more engaging than corporate ones.
• Internally, the program strengthened team belonging and created a sense of community through gamification and collective recognition.

A Program with a Promising Future

Trelleborg proves that a highly technical industrial group can successfully turn its employees into credible, visible ambassadors, thanks to a clear strategy and the right tools.

Camilla Di Donato’s advices:

Start now. Results take time, but they will come. You need to persevere, train, and support employees, and above all, show that it’s a collective effort, not just a communication initiative.

Trelleborg’s experience shows that employee advocacy is a powerful lever to support social selling and boost the company’s international visibility. Success depends on careful ambassador selection, ongoing support, and concrete motivational levers such as training, gamification, newsletters, and rewards. Finally, the integration of generative AI through Ask AI has proven decisive in breaking writing barriers and making communication accessible to all.

Trelleborg now plans to expand its UGC (User-Generated Content) campaigns, especially to highlight local sites and plants, a new step toward more authentic, human, and global communication.

Would you also like to give your employees a voice, increase the visibility of your expertise, and support your social selling efforts?
Contact Poppulo and discover how to transform your teams into credible, engaging ambassadors capable of generating lasting impact for your business.