How to Start Building a Successful Employee Advocacy Program

The collective power of a cohesive workforce offers the potential to increase the appeal of a brand across various digital marketing channels to B2B customers. It’s hard to overestimate the value of having engaged, motivated employees working to ensure the success of your company. Employees feel pride in who they work for and have an emotional investment in the success of their company. Imagine focusing that emotion in a way that increases the organic reach of your brand?

What is an Employee Advocacy Program?

An employee advocacy program helps organisations reach new B2B audiences through the diversity of those following the social media accounts of staff members. Think about it, 98% of employees use their social networks, with another 50% already using them to talk up the benefits of working for their company.

Employees have the potential to directly contribute to your B2B digital marketing strategy. Employees can advocate for a company by:

• Social selling of various company products via their social networks

• Discussing the positives around upcoming company initiatives with their followers

• Becoming known as experts when it comes to products or services offered by a business

• Boosting the profile of a company internally and externally

Empowering the workforce in this way keeps staff invested in your company’s continued growth. An employee advocacy program should provide workers with resources and guidelines that help them maximise the potential benefits for themselves. Including a robust reward system encourages competition and spurs engagement within the program.

An employee advocacy program presents a prime opportunity to keep your workforce engaged. That kind of partnership can translate to higher retention of high-quality employees.

Let’s do a deeper dive into what companies could gain from an employee advocacy program, best practices in setting one up, and how to take advantage of the opportunities it presents.

Key Benefits of Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy programs allow companies and employees to:

• Expand an employee’s professional network and personal brand.

• Encourage more direct engagement between a company’s social media accounts and B2B buyers.

• Generate positive company feedback that encourages qualified applicants to apply for open positions.

• Boost a brand’s online visibility

• Increase sales by expanding the promotional reach of a brand to more diverse audiences

Genuine employee advocacy is one of the best ways for a company to build and improve their online reputation. Potential customers should view the efforts as natural and organically driven.

Employee Advocacy Statistics

When an employee shares something good about their company, it’s more effective than just about any other form of advertising. Eighty-four per cent of customers prefer seeing recommendations about a brand from people they know best. Seventy-seven per cent of customers are more likely to make a purchase based on a recommendation from a trustworthy source.

That kind of thinking extends to B2B customers, with 77% saying they do online research on a business before they even consider talking to a salesperson. That makes word of mouth from employees even more important. Overall, 21% of customers will like posts workers make about their companies, which vastly exceeds those generated from other social media campaigns.

Workers who promote content about their company are 24 times more likely to have it shared versus having it boosted by other brands. The content is also eight times more likely to provoke engagement among followers.

Types of Employee Advocacy

Before setting up an employee advocacy program, a company should first decide on their preferred outcome.

Attracting New Business

If the overall goal is attracting new business, then you want employee advocates in your program who already have an enthusiastic social media following. Program admins should offer suggestions on content workers can share among their different accounts.

The brand content promoted can include:

• Articles discussing best practices for B2B customers looking to incorporate a product or service

• E-Books and case studies that highlight the usefulness of a company’s offerings

• Problem-solving webinars or slide-shares

• Insights from employees and thought leadership

Attracting New Talent

The best way to attract new employees who would make your organisation stronger is by encouraging current employees to discuss their work experiences. Employee advocacy programs looking to expand their available tool should promote brand content that includes:

• Newsletters and articles discussing a company’s products and services

• Recaps of company events and seminars

• Open positions within a company

• In-depth interviews with workers in different positions

• Company news

Starting an Employee Advocacy Program

The first step in establishing your new program is to collect feedback from your workforce. Look for topics on which there is a broad consensus, like advocacy for the environment, the products or services they like most, or emphasising social justice. An Edelman Trust Barometer report showed that nearly two-thirds of employees wanted their employer to aim for a higher purpose in the world beyond making money.

1. Establish Clear, Achievable Goals

Create definable company objectives that translate the desires of the business and your employees into action items. Establish KPIs that tell you if your efforts are paying off, like:

• Drawing in more organic traffic through social media

• Decreasing marketing costs across the board

• Seeing more social sharing of brand content like blog posts

• More active participation among company employees

• Conversion increases tied to the promotion of specific products

Having solid goals in place keeps your program focused. Vague objectives confuse employees and executives looking to see a return on their investment.

2. Get Buy-In From All Stakeholders

Establishing successful employee engagement starts with the company culture. Bring in company leaders at all levels and show them how the program complements current and upcoming business initiatives. Senior executives should enthusiastically participate in pitching the benefits of the program throughout the organisation.

Some workers may hesitate about joining the program. Look for ways to establish trust between your business and your workforce. If you commit to changing specific practices at your company, follow through in a way that makes your efforts felt throughout the enterprise. The more employees see your efforts as sincere, the more likely they are to engage with the program.

Showcase the Potential Benefits — You should also ask your workers what they are looking for from the program, like establishing themselves as an industry thought leader or product expert. Always go back to the well for ideas, so employees continue to feel valued.

Don’t Force Participation — The attitude of admins overseeing an employee advocacy program should be that of a facilitator. Focus on sharing ideas and offering guidance for participants. Encourage employees rather than making them feel forced to generate content they don’t believe in, lending more authenticity to their efforts.

Use Gamification Features — Offering incentives like badges and prizes for top advocates on a leaderboard makes participation fun for your staff. Seeing high achievers rewarded can encourage other workers to push harder to move up in the rankings.

3. Build Your Team

Once you’ve gotten the buy-in you need, it’s time to start putting your program together. Start by selecting a program advocate 100% committed to helping advocates achieve success. Having a face attached to your employee advocacy program makes it more personal and less generic to workers.

A program advocate should:

• Talk up the program before, during, and after launch

• Keep an eye out for relevant content

• Answer any questions or concerns from advocates

• Look for ways to make the program better

Establish your content curators from staff who appear to be natural influencers. Talk to them about the employee advocacy program and the platform they would have at their disposal. Listen to their feedback and incorporate it into your guide strategy, including advice on using different tools and resources they feel would generate a positive response from their followers.

4. Start Training Employees

Make sure your workforce has access to easily understood guidelines around the company’s program. Employees should understand the system and how your business will be tracking results. Provide supplemental written materials for advocates to turn to when they have questions.

Think about offering specific trainings to help workers understand the ins and outs of the employee advocacy tools available to them. The more confidence they have in their knowledge, the more likely they are to continue their participation. The same kind of training should be offered for different social media platforms, allowing everyone in the program to work from an even playing field.

Establish best practices through your guidelines so your workers understand how the brand should and shouldn't be used, including the voice and tone they should use when representing the company. Employees should know what topics are off-limits while still having the freedom to send out relevant content that sounds authentic.

5. Make Everything Easy

Avoid making your advocates jump through hoops to accomplish their set goals. One way of achieving that is by making everything within the employee advocacy program transparent. There shouldn’t be any surprises once an employee decides to join.

Settle on employee advocacy software that lets you incorporate an internal communication channel like Slack, Microsoft Teams or other software. Give advocates a space to talk and share notes on different social media promotional tactics or other aspects of the program.

Look into integrating existing company systems and social media channels, making it easier for workers to pull content ideas. Your integrations should also include feeds streaming new content from third-party applications and content curation from your marketing team. Help your employees to help you but putting all the inspiration they need in one place.

6. Communicate Regularly With Employee Advocates

You want to keep the excitement going beyond the initial launch of your advocacy program. Make new converts feel welcome and excited about their new journey. Show continuous appreciation for established advocates for the value they add to the program with their experience.

Remember, these are your employees who have other critical priorities. Encourage their ongoing participation in the program by setting up reminders, ideally each week, that encourage them to share company content and remain active. Schedule regular releases of the results achieved each month from the program for employees and executives.

7. Optimise Your Content

Give your advocates the power to navigate different trends and offer suggestions on sharing company content. Trust their voice when they bring something to your attention they believe would appeal to their audience. Forcing them to fit content into a specific box can lower the kind of organic engagement you’re seeking.

Evaluate the interests of participants and make sure they align with the appropriate social media channels and content strategy. Some employees may excel at creating videos, while others may have a knack for crafting interesting blog posts. Let advocates have the freedom to play to their strengths, which only benefits your program in the long run.

Measuring the Success of Your Program

Here are some examples of metrics your employee advocacy program should consider when evaluating its merits:

• Metrics achieved by your top contributors

• Expansion of your brand’s organic reach

• Engagement of postings on social networks

• Traffic generated to the company website

• Sales revenue increase from employee advocacy efforts

• Audience growth

• Participation rate of employees with the program

• Employee conversion

Supplement your tracking efforts with tools like Google Analytics or our marketing automation platform, to see how well employee advocates help when it comes to hitting target KPIs.

Examples of Successful Employee Advocacy Programs

Electronic Arts (EA)

EA, one of the top video game publishing companies in the world, launched an employee advocacy program in 2014. Almost immediately, employees started offering feedback stating how much more connected they felt to coworkers.

The company offered new members perks like official certificates and stickers upon joining the program. They used gamification features like contests to inspire friendly competition. The EA program currently has a network of over 1.1M, with tens of thousands of social shares going out each month.

Kelly Services

Kelly Services helps people looking for a job connect with employers looking for someone with their skills. The company decided they needed to take a fresh approach when it came to social media marketing.

The company quickly realised that their best promotional resource was its employees. They created an employee advocacy program by pulling in recruiters already heavily engaged on social networks. Their efforts included contacting prospects in spaces like LinkedIn and letting them know about various job opportunities.

Tapping into the vast networks of their staff allowed Kelly Services to push engagement up to 10x the rate of their corporate marketing channels. The company also managed to pump up website traffic by over 1,150%.

Hopefully, these examples inspire you to push forward with an employee advocacy program in your business. Imagine the heights to which you could take your brand with an enthusiastic, engaged workforce functioning as one of your essential promotional engines?

Make Your Company The Best It Can Be

Employee advocates have the potential to become your brand’s most potent weapon in driving awareness online and offline. Find out more about building a successful employee advocacy program and other effective marketing strategies by setting up a demo with 1827 Marketing.