Here’s the thing, people believe people — they don’t want to hear from your corporate accounts. They want to hear from your people — customers, partners, and others.
Your employees are a powerful asset: if your company strategy is centered around them, you can turn them from potential to active assets and start seeing results pretty soon. The opposite would be a huge detriment to your business. With your employees' help, you can easily spread your brand’s story and vision on social media sites.
Build your brand with advocacy and make sure that your employees are your biggest cheerleaders.
If the benefits of encouraging and managing an internal advocacy program aren’t enough for you to realize how pressing this is, maybe the dangers of failing to do so will. Here’s what you’re risking if you delegate employee advocacy to the sidelines:
Why not go after the low-hanging fruit as well?
Your employees have a big incentive to be your advocates — your company is their place of work, and what benefits you, benefits them as well. Most of the time, employee advocacy is already happening in companies, regardless of whether it’s being managed or not:
Innovative advocacy platforms allow you to harness the potential of both groups and use their powerful synergy to reach even more potential customers with unique and trustworthy messages that will convince them to choose you.
Your employees are an existing resource that can be further utilized to bring benefit your company. The cost of starting and managing an employee advocacy program is significantly lower than the cost of launching an advocacy program with customers.
However, it still delivers impressive results:
The thing is, getting employees to participate in an advocacy program shouldn’t be too difficult. Their main incentive is that if the company does well, they do too — and we're talking potential pay increase, job security and stability, and advancement opportunities.
Top management, on the other hand, might prove to be a tougher nut to crack. It will all come to the bottom line here, so you have to have the numbers to prove future growth as a direct consequence of employee advocacy.
That shouldn’t be too difficult to calculate but you’ve got to come prepared. Ideally, leadership will be involved in this project from the start — this will make your life easier when it comes to budgets and getting employees on board.
You want as many employees participating in your advocacy program as possible. Of course, you will never be able to motivate everyone, but as the involvement grows, so will your reach and your revenue.
Most companies choose to start small, ironing out the kinks before rolling out the employee advocacy program company-wide.
Once you get the leadership to sign off on everything, it’s time to start preparing. Get people who use social media in their day-to-day job to join the program first — marketing, communications, sales, social media managers, and talent acquisition (HR), and form a team that will create an advocacy plan.
When you’re ready to roll out, assign someone (one person or a group of people) who will be responsible for managing the program. They will coordinate with others and set up campaign goals, measure success, reward employee advocates for participation, onboard others to the program, and answer employee advocacy-related questions.
When setting up goals and KPIs for your employee advocacy program, ask yourself one question: what do I want to accomplish? It’s important that advocacy goals are aligned with the goals of the specific departments it aims to help.
Get specific and quantify every goal. Once you assign a number to something, that makes it that much easier to achieve.
A good employee advocacy platform allows you to create targeted campaigns that will help you reach your goals — social media sharing, content creation, review actions, online reputation, and so on, the more specific, the better.
In order to achieve most of these goals, you will have to provide your advocates with powerful, informational, and creative content. Some of that content can be done by the company but don’t miss out on the opportunity to capitalize on user-generated content. With just a few simple instructions, you can turn your employees into a veritable content mill.
Remember though — employee advocacy is not only about boosting your social media visibility and (potentially) sales.
Employees participating in these programs often feel a tighter connection with the company, and that can result in increased productivity and morale.
In the end, your bottom line benefits no matter how you choose to look at it.
Managing small details of an employee advocacy program is done with the help of an advocacy platform. Your best bet is platforms that can be used for both employee and customer advocacy because they are easier to manage and reduce your overhead cost.
Keeping the momentum going can prove a bit harder for some. In the beginning, your advocacy efforts will be seen as something new and shiny, so employees will want to participate. After a while, there’s a possibility that the novelty will wear off.
Here’s how you combat that and keep your employees engaged:
The last step of your employee advocacy program is ensuring quality measurements. Keeping track of important metrics will let you know which campaigns are working and which are not, and you can use that to make decisions about where you’re going to focus your efforts the most.
To make things easier, choose an advocacy platform that gives you a clear overview of what’s been done and what are the projected benefits.
In addition to the measurement part being crucial to keeping you on the right track, it’s also important when it comes to rewarding your employee advocates. When you know exactly what they’ve done and when they’ve done it, you can start rewarding them appropriately.
When it comes to rewards, it’s important not to overdo it — you don’t want to ‘pay’ your employees for their advocacy actions. Recognition often works better, and it’s completely free!
However, even though your employees will be getting some benefits just by participating, setting up a small reward pool is still a good idea. Things that don’t cost much but come with bragging rights include branded merchandise, a longer break, extra lunch choices, and so on.
You can throw in some big-ticket items in there, such as letting the best performing department choose a conference they want to attend but remember to use those sporadically and for big achievements.
A handful of good employee advocates can do wonders for your company. Once you start growing their numbers and managing their efforts, they can supercharge your marketing efforts and contribute tremendously to your bottom line.
All it takes is a little effort and coordination coupled with a lot of vision and drive to tap into your biggest resource — the human resource.