Leveraging Employee Advocacy Programs To Amplify Your Brand
With social media playing an increasingly important role in how customers discover and interact with brands, many companies are looking for new ways to authentically engage audiences at scale. One emerging strategy that is gaining traction is employee advocacy, which leverages the personal networks and authentic voices of employees to spread branded content. By empowering employees to share relevant company updates and stories with their own friends and followers, brands can amplify their reach in an organic and credible way. In this article, we will explore how companies are using employee advocacy programs and tools to supercharge their marketing efforts.
What are Employee Advocacy Programs?
Employee advocacy programs, sometimes also called internal social sharing or internal influencer programs, provide employees with branded content and assets that they can easily share through their social networks. The goal is to harness the combined networks of an entire workforce to spread positive messages about the company and its offerings. Typically, employee advocacy solutions include a central hub or dashboard where employees can find curated articles, photos, videos, and other sharable assets. Employees then share these through their LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other personal accounts. Some programs even offer incentives or gamification elements to encourage participation.
Benefits of Employee Advocacy Programs
There are several key benefits that companies gain by empowering their employees to advocate for the brand on social media:
Increased Reach and Impressions - By tapping into employee networks, often numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands collectively, companies can significantly multiply their total audience and exposure. This expanded reach allows content to spread organically in new communities.
Trust and Credibility - Content shared by employees comes across as more authentic recommendations since it is coming from trusted peers rather than from the company directly. Personal networks are more likely to engage with employee posts versus typical corporate or branded messaging.
Always-On Marketing - Advocacy programs create an army of micro-influencers who can continuously share and engage, resulting in near constant branded messages circulating organically. This provides always-on marketing power rather than relying on scheduled campaigns.
Data and Insights - Many advocacy platforms integrate with social listening and analytics tools to provide companies with data on top performing content, most engaged employees, locations of employee networks, and more helpful insights.
Employee Engagement and Morale - Getting employees involved in advocacy programs fosters greater enthusiasm for the company mission. Employees enjoy feeling like brand ambassadors and having an impact. This can boost employee morale, engagement, and retention.
Choosing the Right Advocacy Tool
With the popularity of employee advocacy growing, there are now many software solutions on the market designed specifically for powering these types of programs. However, not all solutions are equal, and selecting the right tool is important for success. Key criteria to consider includes:
Ease of Use - Look for a platform designed with intuitive interfaces and simple workflows so it's frictionless for employees to find and share content. Dropdown menus, auto-populated text, and one-click sharing are ideal.
Content Curation - The ability to curate tailored collections of content types employees can choose from, such as articles, images, videos, GIFs, is important. Advanced filtering and personalization options are beneficial.
Social Integrations - Deep integrations that allow single sign-on and auto-sharing to major social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter are necessary for broad reach.
Reporting and Analytics - Robust usage metrics, employee and content performance analytics, and social listening capabilities help quantify impact and inform optimization.
Gamification - Leaderboards, rewards, points systems, and other gamified elements can boost participation by motivating competition among peer groups.
Brand Control - Admin tools allowing granular management of published content, employee permissions, and customization of the advocacy experience are important for oversight.
Measuring the Impact of Employee Advocacy Programs
To truly understand if an employee advocacy investment is paying off, it's important to establish clear key performance indicators (KPIs) and track results over time. Some of the most important metrics to analyze include:
Engagement Rates - Track things like content shares, reactions, comments, and profile visits generated from employee shared content.
Reach and Impressions - Collect data on the total number of people content reached, including number of unique users and total impressions made.
Leads and Website Traffic - Correlate content performance with spikes in leads, demo requests, website traffic, and other goal completions to attribute value.
Employee Participation - Track how many employees are actively participating in the program through usage and engagement rates to understand scale.
Social Media Growth - Analyze changes in follower counts and engagements on owned company social profiles before and after launching advocacy efforts.
Qualitative Feedback - Conduct surveys, focus groups, and interviews to understand employee sentiment towards advocacy programs.
Proper measurement allows showing clear ROI to justify continued investment and scaling of employee advocacy initiatives over time as impact is proven.
As consumer trust in branded messaging continues declining, employee advocacy programs offer an effective strategy for companies to authentically spread their messages. By empowering workforces as influencers through advocacy tools, brands gain an army of micro-influencers who can spread content at massive scale across the world. With careful tool selection and defined measurement, these programs have significant potential to amplify any brand's marketing reach and impact. As advocacy adoption grows, it's becoming an essential component of modern 360-degree marketing strategies.
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