Interesting post. Thanks for the tips.

Regards,

Matthew Keddy
Editor
http://www.3Ceco.com

Use employees as your social marketers

The tax system in Australia, through the Fringe Benefits Tax or FBT regulations currently allows you to make irregular and unexpected rewards to staff up to the value of $300 per person per year without incurring any liability.

Employee engagement has been high on everyone’s agenda for a number of years, more recently the debate has shifted and the idea of engaged employees being the new marketers is now becoming more commonplace.

Imagine you run a business employing one hundred people. That’s $30,000 that you can spend encouraging your employees to talk positively about your brand, products and service; acknowledging and engaging them in the process.

Let’s take a look at that this in a bit more detail. Assume you decide that $100 is a pretty good amount for each reward. Your $30,000 tax free allowance buys you 300 rewards, an average of three for each member of staff every year.

Each reward gets talked about. Every time you reward an employee you create a conversation; at the pub, at a BBQ, in the queue at the supermarket, over coffee, at the school gates.

Let’s assume that each reward gets talked about three times, that’s 900 conversations.

$33 for a good conversation, a potential new customer and someone likely to tell someone else a positive story about your business. Try asking your marketing experts whether they think that’s good value for money. Word of mouth, social networking, whatever you want to call it, can’t be bought they’ll tell you, well they are wrong!

Depending on how you structure your rewards program you can buy yourself even more conversations. An accumulative, points based program, allows you to make smaller more regular rewards. Let’s say you run with an average reward value of $25. That’s 1200 rewards a year and 3600 conversations.

We talk about our experiences even more than we do our possessions and cash.
RedBalloon Days uses experiences and unique gifts as extraordinary rewards through Gift Certificates and it’s points platform; we work with hundreds of businesses to engage employees and create powerful conversations for their brands.

From shark diving, to Sri Lankan cookery classes, flying lessons to spa treatments, sleepovers at the zoo to luxury weekends away there is something for everyone in the range of over 2500 experiences across Australia and New Zealand.

At RedBalloon for Corporate we help business get the most of out the marketing and rewards budgets. I start most of my presentations with a simple question, who has experienced RedBalloon Days before. I can pretty much guarantee that at least one person in the room will have been given, purchased one of our gifts or experienced our brand in the last seven years. People are always keen to share their story with the group; ‘my husband got one through his work’, ‘I bought one for my son’, ‘my friend took me with her on hers’…gossip gossip gossip….sometimes I don’t even have to speak to get the business on board - it’s the power of conversation. How many conversations is your business having?