Employee Advocacy
We here at Start Digital are all about Culture, specifically digital culture but we’re aware of the importance of a positive, energetic and thriving culture inside all work spaces. It’s one of the things you try to show and brag about when hosting interviews for new recruits right? All organisations try hard to develop and maintain an enjoyable internal culture and it’s not hard to understand why, we do spend the majority of our time with our colleagues after all.
Apart from the mental health improvements having a good environment and culture brings to you and your team it can do so much more for your business if leveraged in the right way.
What is employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy is when you promote your brand or company through your team and their own socials or networks. It’s a brilliant way to reach a far wider audience than you normally would and often has the benefits of being authentic and genuinely engaging to those who viewed the endorsements.
How to start an employee advocacy program?
As with anything, before you go rushing out there and telling everyone to scream about how amazing the brand is, it pays dividends to stop and ensure that there is structure and guidance for how you want the message to be delivered.
- Set up branding guidelines/asset templates if you have not yet already done so. This is really helpful to have anyway since it can streamline the rest of the marketing requirements.
- Give your staff some training, mainly in social media and especially to any staff that might be less comfortable with digital or social media. Don’t worry if you need help with that we’ve got you covered. Just remember, training never stops and you will need to monitor and adjust what training they get as your needs develop.
- When your staff are all trained up and have access to your branding guidelines encourage some real authenticity from them. Give them some freedom to make any branded posts more personal and let them use their own voice in it. People are far more likely to engage and buy into something from an individual than a company, it’s why influencers are so good at what they do.
- Consider some form of incentive program for your team. Maybe run a reward system for whoever gets the most likes, comments or interactions across all of their endorsed posts for the month?
It benefits your employees
Your team will get a number of benefits not even counting the training and empowerment they’ll get from a program like this.
- Your team will develop more networking opportunities via their own personal channels that they otherwise wouldn’t, posting on social media especially when it’s interesting and valued content naturally brings in more interaction from others.
- When sharing and posting valued insightful content around a specific area or industry it can naturally help improve their personal branding, helping them to be seen as knowledgeable and as a thought leader which is huge for their own careers but equally adds authority and power to your brand.
Conclusion
Employee advocacy does wonders for your brand’s reputation by showing a real authentic version of the organisation, it also increases the visibility of your brand to far greater audiences when you consider the potential audience populations of your employee’s own platforms. All of this can help improve brand visibility and sales for your organisation which is something we’ve talked about and given tips on in the past.
If you want more support or guidance on internal culture, especially digital culture or help with security and increasing sales why not reach out and contact us, for more articles why not subscribe to our mailing list? You can do that here.
