Optimising Your Employee Advocacy Programme

Like any major change, the launch part of your employee advocacy program is the easiest part. (Even though it doesn’t feel so at the time!) It’s what happens when the initial buzz dies down that determines whether your program will be a success.  

It’s all too easy to purchase the tool, fill it with content, give everyone a training session to set them off and then sit back and wait for the benefits. At the start, when people are excited to try something new, there will usually be high employee engagement rates - and even some initial business impact. After that, engagement levels often tail off and social media impact declines or plateaus.  

It doesn’t mean that your program is doomed to failure or that you’ve failed in its implementation. In fact, you’re in a great position – you have months of data that can be mined to help you optimise your employee advocacy program.  

If you know where to look...or have the time, when juggling the many different hats required day-to-day!  

Most of our employee advocacy requests come from those who need to turn around their program results fast, so we’ve answered the common questions we get regarding our employee advocacy optimisation study. 

At-A-Glance: What Is Our Employee Advocacy Optimisation Study? 

Our employee advocacy optimisation study is designed for organisations that have already invested in the tools (and sometimes training) but they’re not quite seeing the results they want or the want to take the success to the next level.  

We take a deep dive into the data from LinkedIn, Twitter, your advocacy platform and our partner, Onalytica, to provide a detailed report of actionable insights and recommendations that will help you improve your advocacy impact and ROI and help you scale.  

What You’ll Discover 

• Your top-performing employee advocates – by markets, thought leadership topics and specific goals such as demand generation or building brand awareness 
• Which employees are potentially damaging your brand e.g. social spammers 
• Which employee experts are critical for your success  
• Your benchmark performance: discover how well your program is doing compared to other organisations 
• The ideal number of advocacy licences for your organisation. Do you really need all the advocacy tool licences you have? Or could you redirect that budget to training your top-performing and promising performers? 
• what training to provide to which employees and when  - based on the behaviours they’ve shown within the platform.
• Any team structure and culture changes you should make to scale your program.  
• How to scale and structure your program to achieve your goals.

How Long Does It Take? 

The whole employee advocacy study takes just one month from the initial discovery call through to the report.  

How Much Input Do You Require? 

Our employee advocacy optimisation study doesn’t require much input from you. We would only require an export of data from your employee advocacy platform. This would show us how your employees are engaging with your tool. 

What’s The Cost Of Our Employee Advocacy Optimisation Study? (I’ve Already Maxed Out My Budget.) 

Employee advocacy optimisation costs £15,000 per study but it will usually save you money immediately. It helps you identify where to cut costly advocacy licences and which employees to invest your budget in - those that can drive better results with the right training and therefore become champions for change.  

When we work with our clients, we help them cut a few of their licences, which lead to cost savings. Usually, for Enterprise organisations we can cut licenses by quite a high percentage.  

Compare this to the real cost of continuing as normal 

Often, when employee advocacy tools licences are coming up for renewal, there can be difficult questions and choices to make if it’s not performed as expected.  It can be tempting to throw more good money at bad and assume that more licences will drive better results and momentum.  

The reality is very different. It’s the classic Pareto principle (but simply with slightly different numbers):  

• 44% of employees account for 75% of shares to social media. However, 25% of these shares are done by just 8% of employees. Source: Sociuu’s Employee Advocacy Benchmarking Report, October 2020 shows. 

• Top 50 users saw 92.17% more interactions overall and 33.81% more interactions per post. Source: What makes an influential employee advocate? Post Beyond, May 2020 

Wasted employee advocacy tool licences can not only kill the ROI of your investment but prevent you from gaining the right traction to achieve long-term success. 

We often see companies launch an employee advocacy tool and not a program, which is the biggest mistake we see as they don’t form a community around the programme. 

When your employee advocacy program starts to falter, it’s not a failure. It’s all very common. If you need to turn your results around fast with a company that has done so for global advocacy programs. Then you can find out more about our employee advocacy optimisation study here – or why not take a look at our case studies and see the impact we could help you achieve?  

And if you want to chat to us about your needs, then why not email our Tribal Chief, Sarah Goodall, at sarah@tribalimpact.com?