Are you looking to connect with your audience in a meaningful way? Consider employee advocacy as a part of your marketing strategy.
You can showcase your products and services authentically with the influence of your employees’ social media accounts. Employee advocacy earns more brand recognition, trust, and credibility with potential customers.
Whether you’re starting out or looking to dig deeper into employee advocacy, let’s consider how you can achieve your goals.
What is employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy turns your employees into storytellers. When your employees share company content on their personal social media accounts, it expands your brand’s network and visibility. This content could be blog posts, infographics, videos, and more.
This strategy brings a personal touch to the messages, which makes the content more authentic and credible. According to Forbes, 76% of people consider content from individuals to be more honest than that from brands.
You’ll need to motivate your employees to share your content. You can do this with updates on shareable content, training and support, and clearly-defined goals and objectives. Be sure to make it easy to share content and provide incentives for their participation.
Some common employee advocacy program goals include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Building brand reputation
- Improving customer engagement
- Driving sales
Tips for launching a high-impact employee advocacy program
Empower your employees to be your biggest brand champions. Some strategies for establishing clearly-defined goals, share-worthy content, expert employee training, a winning content distribution strategy, and ongoing monitoring for maximum results.
Define clear goals and objectives
The first step in launching an employee advocacy program is to clearly define your goals and objectives. What do you hope to achieve through employee advocacy? Are you looking to increase brand visibility, drive traffic to your website or improve customer engagement? By defining your goals and objectives, you can ensure that your employee advocacy program is aligned with your overall marketing strategy.
Choose the right content
Once you’ve defined your goals and objectives, start thinking about content creation and distribution. You’ll need to create a content strategy that aligns with your marketing goals while providing employees with the content they need to share your message. Types of content to share include company news, educational top-of-the-funnel content (like blog posts), and case studies.
Train employees
Encouraging your employees to share your message is crucial for any employee advocacy program. This means providing employees with the tools and resources they need to share your content effectively. This might include training on social media best practices, access to a social media tool, or even a library of pre-approved, pre-written content. Advocacy shouldn’t be a drain on your employees. By making the process as straightforward and simple as possible, you give employees the support they need to amplify your message quickly and easily.
Create a content distribution plan
Once your company has selected the right content, the next step is to then create a content distribution plan that outlines how this content will be shared with employees, when it will be shared, and how.
Encourage employee participation
Encouraging employee participation is critical to the success of employee advocacy marketing. There are various strategies that can be used to encourage participation, including gamification, incentives, and recognizing employee contributions.
Monitor and measure results
You’ll also want to monitor the results of your employee advocacy strategy to see what’s working and what’s not. Analytics tools can be used to track website traffic, engagement rates, and other metrics to understand the program’s impact.
Continuously evaluate and refine your strategy
Finally, it’s important to continuously evaluate and refine your strategy. You can maximize the success of your employee advocacy program by tweaking your approach. This means staying informed on industry trends and making changes as needed to ensure your program remains relevant.
Empower your employees and elevate your marketing success with employee advocacy
In today’s highly competitive business landscape, companies are constantly looking for new ways to stand out and reach their target audiences. Start maximizing the impact of your brand promotion with the help of your employees.
Employee advocacy empowers employees to become brand ambassadors and share company content and messages on their personal social media accounts. When done right, this can provide a wealth of benefits, including increased brand visibility, greater reach and higher engagement with your target audience.
Implementing an employee advocacy program can be a highly effective way for your company to reach a wider audience and achieve your marketing goals. You can also effectively increase your brand’s credibility and impact by leveraging your employees’ reach and influence. By establishing the core components discussed in this article, you can set your company up for a successful employee advocacy program that drives results and helps skyrocket your marketing efforts.
However, employee advocacy is just one part of an effective content marketing strategy. From freelance writers to editors and more, ClearVoice can provide the content you need to amplify your message across your workforce—find out how.
