Case Study: How Aviva Investors Built Trust at Scale with Yext Social

Aviva Investors is a global asset manager, managing more than £253 billion in assets on behalf of clients worldwide. Drawing on Aviva's wider heritage of more than 325 years in business, the firm's approach centers on connecting the right investment capabilities to each client's individual needs — guided by collaboration, responsible action, and long-term commitment.

That reality shaped how Aviva Investors approached social media. Rather than relying only on its corporate channels, the firm built a distributed employee advocacy program with Yext Social, giving portfolio managers, client teams, and senior leaders a compliant way to share their expertise directly. Today, nearly 200 employees participate.

Aviva Investors recognized that social media had become an increasingly important channel for building trust, sharing expertise, and engaging clients and prospects beyond traditional touchpoints. The opportunity was clear, but in a highly regulated asset management environment, participation needed to be supported by the right compliant framework. Without the infrastructure for record-keeping, supervision, and approval, the firm could only enable employee engagement in a limited way.

The firm's leadership also had to shift how the organization thought about its own reach.

Partnering with Yext, Aviva Investors built employee advocacy as a shared responsibility from day one, pairing digital marketing with compliance and legal rather than treating it as a marketing-only initiative. Yext Social gave compliance the approval workflows, record keeping, archiving, and supervisory controls needed to sign off with confidence, including lexicon checks that flag high-risk language or themes automatically.

With that framework in place, the firm launched a focused pilot with 20 to 30 employees who had shown interest in social media, using hands-on coaching to build confidence, consistency, and compliant behaviors before a wider rollout.

Employee advocacy is now embedded in how Aviva Investors shows up on social media. "We are currently in a place where we do not have to sell the program at all," Panariello said. "Individuals from across the business reach out consistently to join." The active involvement of the firm's CEO and executive committee has helped set the tone from the top, reinforcing advocacy as a credible, business-wide capability rather than a standalone marketing initiative.

Personalization is central to the strategy. Employees are encouraged to adapt shared content in their own voice rather than repost it verbatim. "People follow you because they want your unique perspective," Panariello said. "Social advocacy works best when employees add the personal context and credibility that help content resonate with their own networks."

To help employees at every stage of their journey, Aviva Investors worked with Yext's dedicated Value Consulting Team to build a tailored maturity model that groups participants by behavior, from top influencers to newer adopters, and matches each group with the right kind of support, from best-practice sharing to one-on-one coaching. In addition, regular performance reporting from the team pointed the way to optimized user behavior and increased platform value. Aviva Investors was also among the first Yext Social customers to pilot generative AI functionality on the platform, focused initially on content ideation and productivity.

In a relationship-led industry like asset management, decisions are rarely made in a single moment. Social media's role is therefore to build familiarity, credibility, and trust over time, helping ensure Aviva Investors is visible and relevant well before a formal sale even begins.

With Yext Social, Aviva Investors saw:

• Over £500,000 in earned media value generated by advocates over the past 12 months, showing how employee advocacy can extend reach and impact beyond paid media

• Website traffic quality from employee social posts well above industry averages with 59% lower bounce rate, 52% higher engagement*, and 10% longer sessions on average**

• A regional brand campaign in APAC, amplified through local employee advocacy, helped the firm break into the top 50 asset managers for brand awareness in Singapore for the first time.***

When Aviva employees customize corporate content instead of posting it as-is, engagement nearly triples. Modified posts drive almost 3x the engagement per post compared to unmodified content, and fully original posts drive 1.7x. Yext's platform doesn't just scale distributed publishing, it empowers the local relevance that actually drives results.

For Aviva Investors, the value of employee advocacy isn't measured in reach alone. It's measured in the quality of who's paying attention. "I would rather see a portfolio manager engage meaningfully with a smaller group of relevant prospects than generate thousands of low-intent impressions," Panariello said.

Compliance, in her view, was never the obstacle; it became the foundation. "It's never about controlling," Panariello said. "It's about enabling that participation to happen safely and confidently." With that foundation in place, Aviva Investors has turned individual employees, not just its brand, into some of its most credible advocates.