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In 2024, every business is trying to establish a stronger online presence, especially on social media.
Easier said than done, right?
If you’re wondering how to:
– Increase your online presence on social media and gain great organic reach and engagement
– Build trust and credibility for your brand
– Develop a consistent yet dynamic online presence
– Boost employee engagement and develop a great company culture
– Attract top talent to your company
– Increase qualified leads, conversions, and sales
– Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty
The answer is an employee advocacy program! And it is much easier and less risky than you think.
In this guide, we’re covering everything you need to know to develop and run a successful employee advocacy program, from start to perpetual benefits.
Employee advocacy is the promotion of a company by the individuals who work for it. This can be in person or online, especially on social media.
A formalized employee advocacy program is all about equipping your employees with the tools and content to use their social media presence to increase the company’s brand visibility and position the brand in a positive light.
An effective employee advocacy program provides employees with:
– Curated content to share that is relevant, interesting, and promotes the image of the brand. This can be internal and external content in the form of images, blogs, articles, information about events and current affairs in the industry, promotional material about the company, and anything else that promotes the brand’s reputation.
– A way to easily access the content provided so that it takes minimal effort to share it.
– Incentives to participate. This includes education and training around how the program benefits them and the company, how to make the most of the program to further their professional aspirations, and competitions and incentives to participate enthusiastically. An instruction to participate might make them do it, but it won’t make them do it with the engagement and enthusiasm that make it authentic and effective.
– A way to see their progress, the fruits of their labor, and where they stand in relation to other participants. This goes hand in hand with the incentives mentioned above but often a simple leaderboard, even without any incentive or reward, will be enough to keep employees engaged and actively participating.
Employee Advocacy yields great benefits for marketing, sales, and the organization as a whole.
These include:
– Greater social media reach and higher levels of engagement
– Increased brand awareness and a larger online presence
– More leads, higher conversion rates, increased sales and better customer retention
– Improved employee-company engagement, stronger company culture and increased productivity
– Employee empowerment and personal benefits for their careers
– Attracting and retaining top talent
– Ability to develop a strategic and controlled and measurable program
The benefits of employee advocacy encompass the whole organization and touch on almost every aspect of your business.
Check our guide about the benefits of employee advocacy program
Just as every organization is unique, every employee advocacy program is a little different.
However, the basic principles for success remain the same.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel and companies like Starbucks, Dell, Adobe and Reebok demonstrate the key practices you can use to create your successful program.
So, what are some of the key takeaways we can learn from them?
– Set Clear Goals and Track Progress
– Develop a Strong Content Strategy
– Focus on Developing Employee Engagement and Company Culture
– Provide Incentives but Focus on Involving Employees in the Process
– Make it Easy to Participate
– Provide Clear Guidelines and Policies
We’ve covered the to 6 employee advocacy programs. This includes a full review of each program, including the results they produced within a short time.
When it comes to internal communication with your employees, a great deal of information misses the mark. Employee marketing is how you maximize the impact of internal communication.
By combining traditional internal communication with the right marketing tactics, you can promote your brand’s core values, vision and mission, goals, and culture to your employees.
This allows you to create an emotional connection between your employees and the company, which leads to enthusiasm and improved employee engagement.
Engaged employees do their jobs better and they’re more in tune with the company’s objectives and values. They’re able to bring that awareness and passion into their interactions with customers, colleagues, and partners.
To be successful in employee marketing, here are some of the marketing principles you should incorporate into your internal communication:
– Audience Targeting and Segmentation
– Personalization to ensure individual relevance
– Feedback, measurement, and adjustment of communication methods
– Establishing a good team with diverse talents as you would for customer marketing
Check the full guide to employee marketing
Employee advocacy platforms are software solutions that enable you to implement and execute your employee advocacy program.
A good employee advocacy platform will streamline the whole process, making it much easier to assemble and distribute content to your advocates, while allowing you to manage and control the program and offering you excellent analytics and reports.
Look for solutions that provide the following:
– Integration with the social media platforms best suited to your business
– Tracking, analytics, and reporting
– An easy way for employees to access and share content
– Control over some content
– Allow employees to submit their own content for review and approval
– Gamification and incentives
– Scalable
There are many great options to choose from, based on your company’s unique needs and the size of your workforce.
Take a peek at the complete feature review of the best employee advocacy platforms.
Employee advocacy programs have been tried and tested and their undeniable success can be seen in the numbers:
– 561% greater reach when messages are shared by employees rather than by the brand’s official social media channels.
– 800% more engagement on posts shared by employees, when compared to the same posts shared by official brand accounts.
– 700% greater conversion frequency when leads are developed through employee social media.
– 84% of consumers value recommendations from friends and family above formal advertising and 76% say that they’re more likely to trust content shared people over content shared by a brand.
– 91% of B2B buyers are active on social media and 75% use social media to support purchase decisions.
– Customers referred by advocates have a 37% higher retention rate.Companies with a successful employee advocacy program are 58% more likely to attract, and 20% more likely to retain top talent.
Learn about the 21 mindblowing employee advocacy stats
Developing and implementing a great employee advocacy program is no small task but, in this guide, we have set out the important aspects to consider, the key principles to incorporate into your program, and the right tools to use.
With the information, we have outlined here and in-depth articles for more detail, you have what you need to start your own successful program today!
An Employee Advocacy Program encourages your employees to promote your business in return for certain rewards. The program allows you to create guidelines, resources, and rewards for employees who post about your brand and makes it easier for them to do so. You can track the performance of your Employee Advocacy Program by looking at some important metrics such as the percentage of employees sharing content and the subsequent engagement rate of that content. A simple example to understand the concept of employee advocacy would be that of employees testifying for a good work environment at their workplace. This would encourage new applicants to apply for the company. Yes, it is! According to the latest research, leads generated through Employee social marketing are 7 times more likely to convert than leads from other channels. Employee Advocacy Programs help boost employee engagement and morale. Employees who are active in promoting the brand and feel involved within the larger organization tend to be happier, more engaged and productive.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an Employee Advocacy Program?
How to measure the success of an Employee Advocacy Program?
What is a simple example of employee advocacy?
Is Employee Advocacy even effective?
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