Create a task force of your most trusted brand ambassadors to generate qualified leads by implementing an employee advocacy program in your organization.
What is employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy is the method of making your employees your brand ambassadors by encouraging them to share about the company, brand name, professional interest, and job on social media. In short, it is equipping employees as a digital influencer.
This also helps to brand reputation, reach a wider audience, and new talent attraction.
As per the research of nelson and McKinsey & Company, there are some facts revealed like-
- 92% of people trust recommendations from people they know
- 50% of all buying decisions are influenced by word of mouth
- Recommendations generate 2X the sales as paid advertising
Benefits of employee advocacy?
- Employee Engagement.
- Increase in brand visibility and awareness.
- Wider reach of the brand and helps in amplification of marketing efforts.
- Increased credibility helps employer branding for recruitment.
- Significant increase in collaboration and communication between colleagues.
- Helps in strengthening connections between peers and coworkers.
How to built and launch an employee advocacy program?
1) Set a goal and expectations– Set a clear idea about your goal for the short term and long term.
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Decide what’s your target for page view count and lead generation and set a target benchmark for what do you want your social media numbers to look like in one month, three months, and six months after launching your activation initiative?
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Growth in revenue, customer retention, up-selling numbers – Your expectation about these metrics to improve after a few months, a year, and more.
2) Activate Your Employee: It is a very important stage of employee advocacy where employees need to feel proud about their brand. Motivate your team to promote their brand. It can be done by the following processes.
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Incentives: Monetary or non-monetary incentives.
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Pride: Creating a feeling of pride in the brand
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Communicating the importance of social media
3) Set Social media etiquette and guidelines: It is very important to set social media guidelines about what to share on social media. But make sure it should not be so stringent that employees will feel fear of sharing wrong things. So clearly communicate things with your employees.
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Share proper dos and don’ts list
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Conduct training and knowledge sharing about employee advocacy
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Brand value needs to communicate with the employee to keep them align with the goal of advocacy.
4) Monitoring and motivations: Allocate one resource as an employee advocacy representative who can interact and keep the momentum going. Also, share tools or content with your employee to equip them for creating content.
5) Performance analysis: It is very important to make a leader board and analyze the performance of an individual employee and incentivize them according to their performance.
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Conduct Monthly or quarterly Review
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Recognize top performers
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Motivate them with examples
Social Media platforms for an employee advocacy program.
Social media platforms can be selected on the basis of your target client group.
B2B Customer base: If your client group is a company or business people then Social media priority should be as follows
B2C Customer base: To get the best visibility for B2C audience selection of social media platform should be as follows:
- Tiktok etc.
Employee advocacy success measures.
After launching an employee advocacy program it needs to be verified the success or failure of the program. To analyze the success or failure of the program we need to visit our goals set before launching. It can be analyzed in the following ways:
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Number of shares
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Number of Likes
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Number of Comment
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Number of leads generated
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Number of retweets
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Number of registration
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Amount of Revenue generated etc.
Summary
Digital communication is the best solution for creating buzz about the brand and it is proved that people trust on the face more than a logo. So recommendations always generate more quality business than random advertising.
Some firms are also worried about the downsides of employee advocacy, but it is having tremendous potential if utilized properly by setting proper guidelines.