What if every worker in your company turned into an enthusiastic brand ambassador, sharing their knowledge, enthusiasm, and experiences to increase your online visibility?
Employee advocacy is more than just a trendy term; it’s a potent tactic that harnesses the real voices of your staff to reach a wider audience, establish connections with new audiences, promote social concerns, and advance your larger corporate objectives.
This blog will discuss the main advantages of employee advocacy for businesses and their teams, show you how to set up a successful program, and highlight industry best practices from top brands.
Are you prepared to turn your staff into your most powerful marketing tool? Let’s get started.
We’ll explore the following questions:
- What is employee advocacy?
- What are the benefits of employee advocacy for a company?
- What are the benefits of employee advocacy for employees?
- How does employee advocacy work?
- How can companies encourage employee advocacy?
- What are good examples of successful employee advocacy campaigns?
What is employee advocacy?
When workers actively promote their firm, whether via personal social media accounts, word-of-mouth, or other professional networks, this is known as employee advocacy.
Organisations have a clear chance to take advantage of this genuine, spontaneous reach, as almost 50% of workers already share content about their job.
According to Neal Schaffer, over 30% of high-growth businesses have already implemented official employee advocacy programs.
Complexity is not necessary for these programs. Resharing company material, endorsing goods or services, or writing original postings that promote the brand are all examples of advocacy.
What are the benefits of employee advocacy for a company?
Businesses may profit greatly from employee advocacy, which makes it an efficient and affordable way to increase employee engagement, brand visibility, and credibility. Here’s how:
- It humanises your brand: Employees give the brand a relatable, human face when they share personal success stories or emphasise how their employer helps them grow. Audiences respond more strongly to this type of genuine storytelling, which also supports a favourable brand image.
- It increases awareness and reach: Staff members may greatly increase the visibility of company material by like, commenting on, and sharing it. LinkedIn reports that brand recognition increased for 65% of businesses that started employee advocacy initiatives.
- It increases legitimacy and trust: Individually posted content frequently has greater sway than messages from business accounts. “People are more likely to click on content shared from a personal profile than a company page,” according to marketing expert Luan Wise.
- It’s economical: Employee advocacy is a low-cost marketing strategy that yields significant results by utilising your current personnel to spread the word.
- It improves employee engagement: Motivating staff members to act as brand ambassadors can boost spirits and deepen their bond with the business. Employee engagement can result in a 40% decrease in absenteeism and a nearly 60% decrease in turnover, according to Gallup.
- It helps with hiring: since around 80% of job searchers use social media, employee-shared content can greatly improve your employer brand. “When team members share positive workplace experiences, it makes the company more appealing to top talent,” as Órla Stack puts it.
- It can boost sales: In the end, better customer interactions and higher sales can result from greater brand recognition and credibility.
What are the benefits of employee advocacy for employees?
In addition to helping businesses, employee advocacy initiatives provide significant benefits to people by fostering their development, professional visibility, and engagement at work. Here are some advantages for employees:
Development of skills: Training in subjects like content production, social media strategy, and personal branding is frequently included in participation; these are important abilities in the modern digital environment.
Improved industry insight: 76% of workers think social sharing keeps them up to date on the newest trends in their sector, according to the Hinge Research Institute.
Career exposure and advancement: Workers can establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry and gain notoriety by aggressively promoting their company.
Enhanced professional network: Websites such as LinkedIn provide an organic setting for networking. According to Hinge, over 85% of workers say that employee advocacy has aided in the development of their professional networks.
Growth of personal brand: Employees can create a powerful, reputable personal brand that supports their professional objectives by exchanging ideas, participating in debates, and reading industry content.
Credibility and influence: Regular participation positions staff members as reliable experts in their field, fostering authority and sway among colleagues and the industry at large.
Enhanced drive and a sense of community: Advocacy initiatives can help people feel more a part of the organisation. When workers have a platform to express their opinions and stand for the culture and values of their organisation, they feel more engaged and appreciated.
How does employee advocacy work?
Companies must offer the proper resources, such as clear training, social media policies, easily shareable content, and inspiring rewards, if they want to genuinely enable staff members to act as brand ambassadors. Employees are more inclined to genuinely advocate for the brand in their networks when they feel empowered and secure.
“You have to do more than just pitch it to them,” says social media guru Luan Wise. After that, you must empower them and demonstrate the proper way to accomplish it.
It doesn’t have to be difficult to involve your team. Take these easy steps to get started modest and gain momentum:
- Motivate staff members to like a company post.
- Ask them to post a business message on their personal networks.
- To begin interacting with the content, ask them to leave a remark on a post.
- Ask them to contribute their own ideas or viewpoint to a post.
- Use a company post as a conversation starter by asking a question or soliciting audience response to promote deeper engagement.
Although each step takes a little more work, you can gamify the process to make it enjoyable and rewarding. To maintain high engagement, use leaderboards, shoutouts, or friendly competitions.
Pro tip: Make time for advocacy activities on a regular basis during the workweek. Finding a rhythm that is pleasurable, steady, and practical is crucial.
How can companies encourage employee advocacy?
Companies cannot rely on a group of passionate staff champions to bear the entire program’s burden. The organisation must offer a solid basis for campaigning to be truly successful.
Here are some essential pointers to help your program succeed:
1. Provide training
Giving staff members the appropriate resources and training is crucial to the success of an advocacy campaign. Give instruction on brand representation and social media best practices, as well as precise instructions on how to distribute material efficiently. This can include suggested posting frequency, tone, and content kinds that complement the voice and values of your brand. Additionally, sharing can be made simpler and more uniform with the use of templates and examples.
2. Create content worth sharing
Make content that piques curiosity and promotes dialogue. Make sure the content you share is timely, pertinent to your sector, and actually helpful to your audience. Examples of this could be thought leadership articles, company news, staff spotlights, or industry insights.
To increase interaction and make your material more shareable, include visuals like as pictures, videos, infographics, and other eye-catching formats.
Encourage employee advocacy by making sharing as simple as you can. Provide staff with branded visuals, layouts, pre-written captions, and ready-to-use content so they can post it quickly.
Pro tip: Maintain a busy publishing schedule on your own channels to keep your audience interested and provide your staff with new material to share.
3. Nurture an advocacy culture
Establishing a welcoming and encouraging workplace where staff members feel empowered to represent the business is the first step in developing an advocacy culture. Emphasize the importance of advocacy for staff members’ professional development as well as for the organization.
Employees that are happy and engaged are inherently more likely to talk about their experiences. Make an effort to create a welcoming environment where everyone is encouraged to talk proudly about their work and feels heard and valued.
Team members should be encouraged to share their career achievements, project highlights, and personal tales. Their posts become more relatable, impactful, and authentic when they incorporate their personal voice and viewpoint into company content.
4. Set an example
The success of every organizational endeavor, including employee advocacy, depends on the support of the leadership. A strong message is conveyed when program leaders actively support and engage with the initiative.
Urge senior team members and executives to have candid conversations about the importance of employee advocacy and how it helps the business and its employees. Their participation sets the example and encourages others to follow suit.
Encourage executives to stay active on LinkedIn by posting relevant content, responding to staff posts, and setting a good example. Remember to make sure their profiles are optimized to represent the company’s messaging and brand; this will increase visibility and trust on the network.
5. Reward participation
Rewarding and recognizing employees is a terrific strategy to increase their advocacy activity. Honor individuals who participate actively by praising them in internal newsletters, praising them on social media, or bestowing medals for exceptional work.
The experience can be made even more interesting by including a gamified component. To encourage healthy competition and maintain the momentum, think about providing rewards like gift cards, additional vacation time, bonuses, or entertaining challenges and competitions.
6. Use LinkedIn as your employee advocacy platform
In addition to offering insightful data on the effectiveness of your program, using LinkedIn for employee advocacy can greatly increase brand awareness and engagement.
The following are some essential tactics to maximize LinkedIn’s potential:
Optimize your Company Page: Ensure that your LinkedIn company page is completely updated with attention-grabbing images, new material, and an engaging description. Encourage staff members to like, comment on, and share posts on a regular basis, as well as to follow the page. Make use of the platform to publish real team tales and highlight employee accomplishments.
Assist staff in creating compelling profiles: Supervisors are essential in encouraging advocacy. Provide employees with direction and training to help them make the most of their LinkedIn accounts, particularly their summaries and headlines, so they can successfully represent your business and themselves.
Utilize LinkedIn’s analytics tools to keep tabs on important metrics like reach, engagement, and share counts in order to monitor and gauge progress. Review performance statistics and staff input on a regular basis to improve your lobbying strategy and continue to see better outcomes.
What are good examples of successful employee advocacy campaigns?
Dell
In order to launch its employee advocacy program, Dell created a structured social media campaign that required four hours of focused training from participants. Dell chose EveryoneSocial, a platform renowned for its capacity to customize information that aligns with employees’ personal interests in addition to company updates, to enable the program.
Authenticity and value were at the heart of their approach. Only 20% of the content shared by employees was company-specific; the remaining 80% was interesting, educational, and related to their own interests. This strategy increased involvement, fostered trust, and made advocacy seem more organic than coerced.
Results
More over 10,000 Dell employees actively use EveryoneSocial to share information, demonstrating the program’s excellent outcomes. It reached over 1.2 million people in a year, garnered over 150,000 shares, and led to 45,000 hits on Dell’s website. Interestingly, program participants routinely outperformed non-participating employees, demonstrating the powerful influence of a well-run employee advocacy campaign.
Lessons learned
The success of a human-centered strategy—one that gives priority to content that employees truly care about—was highlighted by Dell’s employee advocacy journey. Through the use of a specialized platform, Dell enabled its staff to disseminate more pertinent and significant content, strengthening their ties to the company’s mission and fostering a tighter relationship with customers.
The initiative was successful in improving corporate results and staff engagement. In order to maximize user experience and promote continual growth, Dell also understood the value of continuing training and preserving a solid working relationship with the platform’s customer success team.
Starbucks
Starbucks started an employee advocacy program to increase brand awareness by converting staff members into passionate brand advocates. Recognizing the value of employee involvement, the business established a culture that promoted genuine advocacy through specific social media channels like Starbucks Stories and the hashtag #ToBeAPartner, as well as explicit social media policies. These resources enabled participants to express their talents and experiences on the internet. Starbucks has conducted interactive initiatives, such as the “White Cup Contest,” to increase interaction. This campaign asked both staff and customers to submit user-generated content and highlight their relationship with the company.
Results
Starbucks greatly improved its social media presence and brand awareness by leveraging employees’ personal networks and fostering a strong culture of engagement. Brand consistency and reputation protection were aided by well-defined social media policies and a carefully selected collection of shareable material. Social media competitions and partnerships with key team members enhanced employee-generated content, which increased engagement and improved brand perception. In order to guarantee the program’s long-term effectiveness, Starbucks additionally tracked and evaluated performance statistics.
Lessons learned
Any firm can learn a lot from Starbucks’ strategy for employee advocacy. First and foremost, creating a culture that encourages employees to genuinely love the brand is crucial because when people enjoy their jobs, they will inevitably become brand ambassadors. Second, allowing employees to share genuine, personal material while maintaining company consistency is achieved by providing clear social media standards and user-friendly resources. Third, interactive campaigns and contests increase participation and encourage staff and customers to work together, which broadens the brand’s audience.
By using these tactics, businesses may develop effective employee advocacy initiatives that boost expansion and improve their reputation as a brand.
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