Employee Advocacy: A Guide to Boosting Your Business Through Employees

Most companies spend millions of dollars on advertising agencies or hire social media influencers to distinguish their brand from other businesses. However, according to surveys, only 4% of consumers rely on brand-sponsored content. In that case, employee advocacy is the best bet for business owners, helping them win the client’s trust through their employees.

Because when your employees step in to endorse your brand, it comes off as more authentic and trustworthy for the consumers, resulting in a global reach with boosting customer loyalty, enhanced brand image, and more revenue. So, join us as we discuss the strategies you need to implement in your employee advocacy program!

What is Employee Advocacy?

Put simply, employee advocacy is a marketing tactic where employees represent your brand as a spokesperson and use their social media platforms to promote your business.

The purpose of employee advocacy can vary for different companies, while most of the time, it constitutes:

• Promoting products or services
• Attracting potential employees
• Generating more leads for the company
• Paving the way for a positive public perception
• Increasing engagement on social media platforms

Top Benefits of Employee Advocacy

When a company employee personally advocates for your brand or business, it does not come without benefits. Let’s dive deep into the topic and explore how the horizon of well-placed employee advocacy benefits both companies and employees.

Benefits For the Company

Instead of relying on influencers, companies can level up the overall performance, public reputation, and revenue streams through their employees. Read below to understand how!

1. Increased Brand Awareness

A staggering 74% of digital marketing managers believe that employee advocacy is the most effective way of raising the level of brand awareness to 39% in the general public. As most employees have their own social media followers, more people become familiar with the brand after receiving positive reviews about the company’s work ethic from someone they know.

2. Chance to Generate More Leads

The brand’s social media advocacy through your workforce extends your company’s reach to more people in less time due to the rapid spread of information on digital platforms. According to the latest survey, this practice attracts one-fourth of potential clients or aspirants looking for a job to reach out to your brand in the future, leading to an enhanced engagement rate.

3. Organic Turnover

Promoting your brand through your employees fosters a sense of trust in the online community and appeals to most customers as they deem those remarks authentic. As a result, it draws potential clients toward your brand, paving the way for a loyal customer base. 31% of high-growth firms use this approach to impact the company’s sales and generate more revenue.

4. Opens Doors for New Talent

When employee advocates use social media platforms to highlight the bright sides of working with your brand, such as flexible work hours, market-competitive wages, or bonuses, it wins over the aspirants looking for jobs. Subsequently, they apply to the vacant positions as soon as your company announces the employment opportunities, adding a spark to your existing team.

5. Elevated Brand Image

Employee advocacy on social media reaps countless benefits, one being the high-perceived value of your brand. When you empower the employees through your platform, they are more likely to mention your brand in a positive light. These comments, when witnessed by people, build a sense of credibility for your brand’s name, resulting in a good public perception.

Benefits For the Employees

Employee advocacy is equally beneficial for the employees as it improves the chances of their personal and professional growth. So, let’s walk you through these benefits in detail!

1. Professional Growth

An employee who serves your company as an advocate will have endless opportunities to sharpen their skills. They develop expertise in several fields, such as social media management, public speaking, communication, and content curation. Regular demonstration of such skills nurtures their brain power, laying down the path for their future achievements.

2. Enhanced Performance

Knowing that their contributions and insights hold a valuable place for employers and that their efforts are leading to enhanced conversion rates for the company, the employees usually work with more enthusiasm as time passes. They feel a sense of purpose attached to the work that ultimately persuades them to give their best each day they step into the office.

3. Networking Exposure

The employees who engage in social media advocacy get 600% more views than others, which means sharing the company’s content on their feeds allows your employees to unlock new career prospects and interact with a diverse pool of professionals over the years. Not only will it prove beneficial for your brand in terms of collaboration, but will also assist your employees.

4. Rewards or Incentives

Most employees who contribute to promoting the brand through their social media profiles receive financial rewards, bonuses, or different incentives from the company. They may also get other offers as a treat for their efforts in the shape of movie vouchers, awards, membership programs, or travel adventures, culminating in a strong bond with their company.

5. Inspires Confidence

When employers designate any team member to a critical position that can make or break the company’s reputation, it strengthens their self-esteem, knowing that the authorities trust them with the significant tasks. This gesture infuses them with new energy and boosts their confidence, making it a source of well-being for them along with the company’s progress.

Employee Advocacy Best Practices – Tips and Tricks

Let’s sift through a few ways you can drive your employees to vouch for your company.

• Designing branded merch and parceling it to your employees’ doorstep is the most fun way to build a connection with your employees. As a result, it urges them to share the company’s culture with their digital community all across social media platforms.
• Incentivizing your best employees is another way of turning employees into natural advocates for your brand, so when the news of a supportive employer hits the market, it only ends up attracting more people toward the company.
• Educating your employees on the benefits of employee advocacy programs can also impact their choice of promoting your brand. You can arrange for seminars that inform them of these perks, such as skill building or exposure to other career prospects.

How to Develop an Employee Advocacy Strategy

We have assembled a step-by-step employee advocacy guide that will help you master the fundamentals of the program. Read below to understand!

1. Define Your Goals

Moving forward with clear objectives is the first step that lays the foundation of an effective employee advocacy program. Assess the goals you want your company to achieve through it and set the performance indicators to measure the progress. For instance, think about your primary goal or the purpose of the advocacy plan you want to launch.

Here are some questions to help define your goals:

• Do you want to generate more revenue?
• Do you want new leads to extend your team?
• Do you want to create hype around a specific product?
• Do you want more engagement on your brand website?

Once your goal is clear, the next step will be to set performance indicators to review your activities. You can fix how many followers your employees should draw in by a month or what should be the ratio of clients engaged on your social media platforms. These evaluators will lay a benchmark that will assist you in carrying out your plan with ease.

2. Take Your Team in the Loop

This one is crucial!

A survey by HR Cloud suggests that companies with highly engaged staff experience a 21% increase in revenue streams as a dynamic workspace causes employees to show up each day with vigor, passion, and energy. That reveals the vitality of taking your team in the loop, which becomes even more pressing when you aim to launch an employee advocacy program

A few ways to take your team in confidence are through:

• Holding team meetings and engaging in meaningful discussions
• Asking your team for suggestions to curate a better advocacy plan
• Conducting surveys to find the loopholes and make improvements

Having one-on-one conversations with your employees to know their expertise and gauge their potential for leading the advocacy program

Through these practices, your employees will gain trust in your brand, leading to an effortless endorsement of the company’s culture all across their social media platforms. Also, employees find it easy to take space at work without hesitation if employers maintain a friendly environment. It allows them to lend out constructive criticism without fearing any consequences.

3. Train Your Employees

In the next step, you should design a training program with the help of experts from within your team or outside to assist your employees in their roles and duties as employee advocates. We are now in an age of global connectivity where all it takes is a single viral post or a bad review to change the course of your company’s reputation.

That’s why employee training is an essential part of social media advocacy, as it mitigates the reputation risks and allows you to be in charge of the message your brand wants to put forward. We have listed a few points you shouldn't overlook while mapping the training program. Have a read!

• Arrange an orientation program to explain the concept and benefits of employee advocacy.
• Train your employees to maintain a neutral tone in response to criticism or compliments.
• Hire experts to teach them marketing strategies and content creation
• Educate your team about the company’s core purpose of launching the program
• Set boundaries on how and what to share about the company
• Make them feel comfortable and ask them to share their insights

4. Provide the Content to Employees

The curation of ample content can be monotonous for the employees, with increased chances of potential errors. Therefore, we recommend you provide them with well-crafted content that they can easily share with an added touch of personal sentiments or experiences. By doing this, you can maintain a smooth flow in executing the advocacy program throughout the year.

Make sure that the content you share with your clients:

• Reflects the company’s core values
• Creates a strong impression through sound ideas
• Aligns with the views of the general public
• Undergoes thorough reviewing before the upload

AI-powered tools such as FeedHive can also help you sketch the daily content for your clients based on your brand profile. Through its integration into your social media platforms, you can generate compelling content ideas and predict the potential engagement rate of a specific post.

By analyzing the activity patterns of your followers, the tool finds the peak time (when the audience is most active and likely to respond to your posts). On top of that, it allows you to generate the right hashtags for all types of content, which you can share with your employees to amplify the impact and enhance the overall reach.

Monitor the Progress

There are several ways to record the progress after incorporating an employee advocacy strategy into your marketing routine. According to the Marketing Advisory Network, employee advocacy results in a 700% conversion frequency. That means comparing your website traffic or conversion rates with the previous stats will give a rough idea about your company’s progress.

Another way of tracing the difference before and after the advocacy plan is to measure the engagement rate on your websites or social media platforms. Research by a leading industrial publication suggests that posts shared by employees receive 800% engagement compared to official brands. The catch here is to upgrade your plan in case of poor engagement metrics.

Moreover, with AI tools such as FeedHive, you can generate in-depth data analytics that help you chart and compare the engagement on your social media profiles.

The Bottom Line

This guide is the most savvy source for business owners and young entrepreneurs to learn all about employee advocacy, its benefits, and strategies, which they can later incorporate into their marketing plan to level up their businesses.

From creating a step-by-step plan of action for your company to simplifying the process with powerful AI tools such as FeedHive, this brief overview covers every nitty gritty detail to help you stay a step ahead of your competitors in the marketing game.