What is Employee Advocacy?
Communication has become a priority for many companies. The latest digital revolution has played a very important role in these changes making companies to focus towards the same goal: improving online reputation.
In order to maximize profits, attract customers and recruit the best qualified talent, companies are allocating more budget and efforts to improve their employer brand strategy (Employer Branding).
In this strategy, the development of an ambassadors program (Employee Advocacy) plays a key role. In this article you will learn what Employee Advocacy is, why it is so important and how to develop a successful program.
What is Employee Advocacy?
Employee Advocacy is the promotion and publicity of a company by its employees. In other words, the company uses its employees as ambassadors to communicate and humanize its messages.
Employees have multiple ways of communicating and becoming an ambassador for the company. From using professional social media like LinkedIn to giving in-person talks. The feedback from and employee adds a human touch and more credibility to the message.
Likewise, these activities not only have to be related to sales. Employees have the opportunity to become experts in their field, which generates trust in customers. Another key activity would be sharing their experiences as employees, transmitting the values of the company, which will attract talent who wants to experience the same.
In short, these actions improve the reputation of the company and lead to attracting customers and talent.
Why is it important to have an Employee Advocacy program?
1. Personal profiles have more scope than company profiles
Social media algorithms benefit posts from personal accounts rather than company profiles. According to a LinkedIn study, on average, employees have 10 times more connections than a brand’s profile.
2. The content generated by a personal profile generates more sales (Social Selling)
Social media users pay more attention (and click) to content posted or recommended by a personal profile than content posted by a company. This concept is known as Social Selling – using social media to connect and engage with potential customers.
3. Improves the employer brand and attracts talent (Employer Branding)
Currently, companies are in a competition to attract the best qualified talent. One of the ways to attract them is by explaining and sharing the current employees experiences. According to the same LinkedIn study, job postings that were recommended by an employee received 30% more applications.
4. Improves brand positioning and generates leadership
Managers and C-levels that share their knowledge and experiences through social media or other activities have a more positive reputation, which generates trust with customers.
Create and develop an Employee Advocacy program
Here are the 5 steps to create and develop a successful ambassador program:
1. Adapt your Value Proposition as an Employer, if necessary
For an employee to speak well of the company where he/she works or feel comfortable being an ambassador, he/she has to like not only the job but also the company values and the work environment.
The ambassadors program does not consist of forcing employees to speak well of the company, but rather to develop values and dynamics that make them want to share their good experiences.
Therefore, before you want to plan any communication, you have to make sure that the good reputation you want to communicate it does exist. Talk to your employees and make decisions to adapt your Value Proposition as an Employer and the Employee Benefits Plan.
We recommend you to take our EMPLOYER BRANDING TEST to find out if your company needs a change in its employer brand strategy. It is free and it will not take you more than 4 minutes to complete it.
2. Establish objectives and performance indicators
Employees may already be actively communicating about their job on social media, but without an organized system and clearly defined goals, you won’t be able to know what results these activities are having.
Define your objectives well according to the needs of the company and order by priorities. The ideal is to have several campaigns and that these cover both the services you want to promote and more general issues such as business culture.
After setting the objectives, you need to know what communication channels your ambassadors will use. And after the decision of the channels, the metrics to which you will have to follow up to know if your program is having negative or positive results.
Some of the metrics that we recommend are:
- Interactions in your employees posts
- Web traffic generated by your employees posts
- Increased number of job applications
- Increase of followers in social media
- Leads through employees who are not part of the sales department
Some platforms, such as LinkedIn, are already making it much easier to obtain and analyze this data. LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Analytics provides administrators of a LinkedIn Page with the data to gauge trends in employee and member engagement with content recommended to employees on the My Company tab.
3. Share the program and identify its leaders
Once the bases and the strategy of the program are defined, you must pass it on to your employees. This part is very important since the knowledge of the existence of a program can motivate your employees to start communicating.
We have seen that on many occasions, employees do not use their professional social media due to lack of training or insecurity. Sharing the objectives of the program and the importance of the role of the ambassadors in the communication of the company generates motivation in the employees and reinforces the feeling of belonging.
On the other hand, for those employees who are already posting, it is important that they have guidelines that ensure that they follow the line of communication and the image of the company.
Finally, the person in charge of the program will be able to identify those employees who feel more comfortable communicating and who have the ability to do it well. The person in charge or coordinator can help these leaders to enhance their image and messages.
Possibly, not all employees will want to perform these communicative actions, nor will all of them have the ability to do it well. This must be respected and in no case oblige an employee to be an ambassador if he/she does not want to be.
4. Create and plan content with your ambassadors
Publishing quality content and creating a network of contacts is an activity that requires time and dedication. Even if many workers are motivated to do it, it will surely be difficult for them to make it a priority and spend time on it.
For this reason, we consider it very important that these actions are coordinated by a specialist in communication and employer branding, in order to be able to provide resources that encourage the ambassadors participation.
The best solution is for this coordinator to work with the employees on the planning and content. The general idea is that employees can thus develop their own professional brand (Personal Branding) and generate content created and developed by themselves.
Likewise, with the participation of a coordinator, the company will be able to have a general picture of what the employees are talking about and know if it is necessary to reinforce any of the objectives of the ambassadors program.
5. Offer benefits and awards to the best performing ambassadors
An effective way to motivate employees to become ambassadors is to offer them rewards and prizes. A gift card, bonuses, and even company merchandise are examples of possible rewards.
With these guidelines, you can develop an effective and collaborative ambassador program that helps improve your company’s work environment and its reputation.
Inlea offers as part of its Employer Branding services the creation, development and monitoring of an Employee Advocacy program. For more information contact us or send us an email: info@inlea.com.
