by Employee advocacy has become a key marketing strategy for many companies in today’s digital era. With social media platforms allowing anyone to become a publisher and influencer, businesses are leveraging their employees to help promote brand messages and engage customers.
What is Employee Advocacy?
Employee advocacy refers to marketing activities conducted voluntarily by employees on behalf of their employer. This typically involves employees sharing and endorsing company content such as blog posts, articles, products, services or events on their personal social media networks. The goal is to leverage the trust employees have built with their own connections to help spread brand awareness and messages.
Many companies today provide their employees access to advocacy tools and platforms that make it easy for them to find and share relevant company content with just a few clicks. These tools often integrate directly with an employee’s social profiles, allowing one-stop engagement. They also offer analytics to help companies track the impact and reach of employee sharing.
Why is it Effective?
There are a few key reasons why employee advocacy is a powerful marketing strategy:
Trust and Authenticity – People tend to trust recommendations from friends and family over traditional paid advertising. When employees share company content within their own social circles, it comes across as a more genuine endorsement vs a hard sales pitch.
Expanded Reach – The combined networks of all employees is much larger than a company’s owned pages and profiles. By mobilizing employees, brand messages can potentially reach millions of new potential customers.
Engagement Rates – Content shared by friends/followers on social media receives much higher engagement rates in the form of likes, comments, shares etc. versus a brand or company page directly posting. This helps content perform better and reach more people organically.
Personal branding – Advocacy platforms allow employees to curate personalized profiles to showcase their job roles and expertise. This helps boost their individual professional brands while promoting their employer positively.
Setting Up an Effective Program
To maximize the benefits of Employee Advocacy, companies need to structure programs carefully with strategic guidelines:
– Clearly Define Goals – Is the objective brand awareness, customer engagement, lead generation etc. Goals will dictate the type of content shared.
– Training and Resources – Educate employees on proper advocacy best practices through webinars or FAQs. Provide a centralized content calendar and library they can easily tap into.
– Incentivization – Recognize top performing advocates through rewards or gamification to encourage ongoing participation.
– Governance and Compliance – Establish social media policies and content approval workflows to ensure regulatory guidelines are followed.
– Measurement – Define KPIs and track metrics like impressions, engagements and conversions from employee sharing over time.
– Ongoing Support – Maintain two-way communication channels for feedback and new feature requests from advocates.
Setting up the right structure leads to motivated employees becoming brand ambassadors and amplifying marketing initiatives successfully.
Choosing the Right Advocacy Platform
With various vendor options emerging, selecting the right advocacy tool is important based on company size, budget and integrations required:
– Bambu – Free basic plan good for small businesses. Paid options with robust features for enterprises.
– DrumUp – All-in-one platform for content discovery, curation and sharing. Advanced analytics and reporting.
– EveryoneSocial – Easy to use interface. Integrates employee profiles within company career pages and profiles.
– Hootsuite – Known for social media management. Advocacy add-on offers employee campaigns and insights.
– LinkedIn Creator Studio – For companies wanting to harness employee influence on LinkedIn specifically.
– PostBeyond – Automated publishing and measurement tools. Supports sharing across major professional and social networks.
Choosing the solution that best fits unique business requirements is key to a successful employee advocacy program.
In today’s digital workplace, employee advocacy has grown into a cost effective yet highly influential marketing channel. By empowering their people to become organic brand ambassadors, companies can maximize the reach and engagement of their content across wide-spanning connections. With thoughtful program setup backed by the right advocacy tools, brands today can amplify awareness, differentiate customer experience, and accelerate growth through employees.
*Note:
1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research
2. We have leveraged AI tools to mine information and compile it
