Inbound marketing is one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to drive sales for your business.
However, you could be wasting money on ineffective campaigns without a solid strategy – or worse, turning potential customers off with spammy tactics.
At Talent Prospect, our core value is to help your business get the best talents while also getting your brand noticed and drive sales.
We have spent a lot of time understanding the employee advocacy landscape to get the best strategies that will help your business drive sales and how to create an advocacy program that works.
We hope you’ll find our in-depth research useful as you learn more about employee advocacy and start to create one for your organization.
What is Employee Advocacy?
The trust in branded content is decreasing, while trust in people keeps increasing.
Even with this, many organizations are yet to realize that one of their most powerful trust facilitators and sales tools is sitting in their offices every day; employees.
People tend to trust people, more reason influencer marketing has become very popular and why you should invest in employee advocacy.
Employee advocacy refers to the promotion of your organization by your employees.
It motivates employees to become advocates by engaging them to create a credible narrative that is beyond product promotion.
Your employees understand your company’s values, they’re the professionals behind every day, and if they’re motivated and engaged enough to post about it, you’re doing something right.
When your employees share positive information about your company, consumers are more likely to perceive your brand as a trusted solution to their problems.
And so, employee advocacy, when done right, is a powerful way to improve your brand reputation into a position of leadership and influence, attract the best talents to your organization and also drive sales.
Now let’s take a deeper look into why employee advocacy works and how to do it correctly.
Why Employee Advocacy is Effective
As employee advocacy becomes more popular, the old question pops up, “is it adding any tangible benefit?” Well, yes, it is.
According to a survey, leads developed through an employee advocacy program convert 7x more frequently than other leads. And why is this?
- There is no marketing like word-of-mouth marketing
It has always been around, and its popularity has never decreased whether you do it by looking at reviews, speaking to a friend, or requesting recommendations on social networks.
Following a recent survey, 84% of consumers trust product or service recommendations from family and friends above other modes of advertising.
Also, 77% of consumers are more likely to buy a product or service if it’s coming from people they know.
Employee advocates already have audiences who know and trust them, so they receive higher engagement rates than brand pages.
So, employee advocacy is the perfect channel to get your branded content out there and influence the buyer journey through people other than advertisements, who, for the most part, are referred to as the corporate mouthpiece.
Even before employee advocacy became known and recognized, it existed. If your workforce understands and believes in your mission, they will talk about it.
Having an organized employee advocacy program adds some structure while also helping your workforce succeed in their efforts and be recognized.
- Introduction of the employee-led buyer journey
It is now more crucial than ever to focus extra time and attention on the initial stages of the buyer journey so potential consumers won’t be lost further down the funnel.
With most markets being quite saturated (and more touchpoints before and after a purchase), brands need to ensure they stand out from the competition.
Having employee advocates along the funnel only increases the strength of the brand, which for the most part, is decreasing.
The power within the market has moved away from brands and shifted towards consumers (both in controlling the buyer journey and content).
Social media has induced the democratization of information and content, so while techniques like advertising remain excellent for brand awareness, they’re no longer enough to get a customer to buy.
People are now looking to other people and the internet for reviews and experiences before committing.
Employees are professionals in their relative fields. With about 85% of consumers looking for trusted, expert content when considering a purchase, they’re more likely to ask advice from people working within the industry they’re after.
By controlling the buyer journey and turning it into an employee-led buyer journey, there is familiarity and trust from the start, making it less likely for your business to be forgotten or replaced by your competition.
- Integrating influencer marketing and employee advocacy
Though employee advocacy and influencer marketing are approached and operationalized as two different marketing techniques, we can get much more benefits if we integrate the two.
The amazing thing about combining influencer marketing with employee advocacy is that it makes your business much easier to scale.
If it’s only your marketing team building relationships with your company influencers, you’re limited by your marketing team’s size. Along the line, building genuine relationships will be a timely thing.
In addition, while your marketing team is professionals at marketing, they may not be professionals at what you’re selling, whereas your employees are.
So engaging your employees with influencers will enable you to build more relationships much more efficiently.
Every one of your employees is an expert and passionate about something within their job role.
If you can efficiently map and understand your employees’ expertise and passions, you can link them with influencers specializing in that field.
Then your employees can start sharing and engaging content with them, building external relationships, and generating organic influencer engagement.
From this, you will see your employees growing their audiences and sometimes becoming influencers in their own space while simultaneously noticing influencers transition into brand advocates.
This will help boost brand awareness and credibility, help you stay current with trends to optimize your content strategy, improve content amplification, and increase sales and shorten sales cycles.
5 Ways To Create An Employee Advocacy Program That Works
- Develop a company culture that your employees will follow
Company culture plays an important role in the success of your brand. It impacts nearly all aspects of your organization.
From recruiting the best talents to improving employee satisfaction, company culture is the pillar of a happy workforce.
Without a positive workplace culture, most of your employees will find it difficult to understand the real value of what they do, leading to a decline in performance.
Today’s employees have high expectations of their employers, and this goes far beyond paychecks.
Your employees need to know if they are making a significant difference within the company and society.
It is developing a credible company culture that makes your employees proud and sets a strong foundation for employee advocacy.
- Create your framework: Goals and Strategy
The first aspect of your employee advocacy strategy involves brainstorming the program’s specific goals and KPIs (key performance indicators).
Some of the common goals of advocacy campaigns include; improving organic reach, optimizing marketing costs, increasing relevant traffic from social media, and driving sales.
Your employee advocacy campaign can also help increase social shares of your content and improve your company’s reputation.
Once you’ve created the goals, you must determine which metrics to measure to know if your advocacy program is effective.
Key metrics include top contributors, organic reach, traffic, overall engagements, and brand sentiment.
These KPIs will assist you in determining how your program is faring and whether adjustments are needed or not.
Your strategy will be to determine which of your employees will participate in the program. Consumer-facing roles such as customer service, marketing, and sales should be given priority.
This way, your employee advocacy program will get to a relevant audience, increasing its chances of success.
- Choose your techniques and set guidelines
The emergence of the internet and social media has entirely changed the way companies leverage employee advocacy.
Although older techniques like incentivizing and giveaways still work in a digital format, the reality is that brands must now integrate social media into the equation.
Your target audience often spends most of their leisure time on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. Because of this, social media is the best place for your brand to get in front of these consumers.
Regardless of which social media platform you select, your employee advocates need to know the kind of message they are supposed to communicate and the best way of communicating it.
Specify the frequency of posting, the language they should use, and how they should respond to different reactions from their target customers.
- The 3M’s – maintain, measure, modify
The prior excitement of starting a credible employee advocacy program will not be there forever.
Eventually, your employees will begin to share your brand message less frequently on social media and may even stop keeping your target audience engaged.
To reduce drop-offs, your advocacy program needs employee liaisons whose duty will be to be proactive in keeping the program.
Whether you wish to use an internal messaging system like Slack or prefer an email, it’s essential to consistently remind your advocacy team about the program’s objectives and keep them updated on the right content to share.
Similar to all other marketing efforts and programs, it’s important to regularly measure the performance of your brand’s employee advocacy program.
Tracking the right KPIs will help you assess if the program is worth the resources and efforts you’re investing in it.
Analysis will also show you ways you can improve its performance. Don’t be scared to modify the program depending on your findings, and do more of what works best.
- Avoid these mistakes
To run an employee advocacy program successfully, you’ll need to identify and avoid these common pitfalls that could render the entire program ineffective. These include:
- Failure to create content:
There are chances that your employees are constantly overwhelmed with emails, calls, texts, social media posts, and other messages.
This will make it challenging for them to find time to curate content that resonates with your company.
Because of this, it’s up to you to give out content guidelines and cultivate #hashtags that will help them create content that resonates with your target audience.
- Over-reliance on incentives:
It can be tempting to gamify your brand’s advocacy program to encourage employee participation.
Although this can offer some initial motivation, it is not recommended to put incentives at the forefront of your advocacy program efforts.
Since it can become very expensive in the long run.
- Not supporting the employee advocacy program:
The modern notion of “if you create it, they will come” doesn’t apply in employee advocacy programs.
Many organizations do a great job promoting the advocacy program during its launch; however, they fail to keep it running.
Remember that your employees’ attention is divided among different tasks, so it’s easy to forget about the advocacy program if it’s not a priority of leadership.
Overall…
Indeed, employee advocacy programs can help drive sales in several ways; in fact, brands with high employee engagement levels have higher earnings per share than those in the same industry with lower engagement levels.
When all employees work in a connected way, it keeps the company front of mind and reduces drop-offs.
If the employee advocacy program is well-managed and you have a strong strategy, you can easily develop more opportunities for business success.
Are you ready to introduce an employee advocacy campaign into your organization? Talent Prospect will help you and other recruitment problems.
With our well-structured employee advocacy program, you can be sure to retain and attract the best talents to your company while also building a reputable online brand and increasing your revenue.
Get in touch with us today through email at info@talentprospect.co.uk or drop a message online at talentprospect.co.uk!
