What is Employee Advocacy? It’s often defined as ‘the promotion of an organisation by its staff members.’ But it goes a lot further than this and offers many tangible benefits for an organisation that embeds advocacy into its culture.
At Tribal Impact, we believe that Employee Advocacy is about transforming your engaged workforce and creating a credible narrative that’s about so much more than just promotion and sales. It elevates your internal Subject Matter Experts’ social reputations into a position of thought leadership and influence.
Adopting a culture of Employee Advocacy can speed up the growth of businesses. Why? Because employees have an average of ten times as many social media connections as a standard brand account. Which means ten times the sales opportunities. Companies with more engaged employees are also 23% more profitable. But only 23% of employees feel engaged at work. (Source: Gallup)
Employee advocacy also creates a more credible brand: 88% of people trust recommendations from people they know. (Source: Neilson)
The fact that social media is part of everyone’s life nowadays means you can harness employee voices in a more effective way. 81% of millennials share information about their job (Source: Marketing Advisory Network). This has the potential to be a powerful resource, especially if those employees become brand advocates and regularly share that goodwill with their audience.
When you consider the statistics related to Employee Advocacy, the question of investment changes from ‘why’ to ‘why not’.
Employees who practice advocacy are better engaged, more productive and more likely to recommend their business for products and employment. In addition, a good advocacy culture will impact sales, customer retention and brand exposure.
Employee Advocacy is a low-cost marketing resource with8x more social media reach than sharing to only company branded channels.
There are three strands to it. Each creates a positive return on investment, elevating content and digital marketing outcomes beyond those which can be achieved by a traditional paid marketing strategy.
1) Reach
Traditionally, brands sell, people build relationships. But today’s consumers don’t want to feel sold to. Which means content posted by a brand will get shared less than content posted by an individual.
User-generated content receives 50% more engagement. Part of the reason why is because employees’ social media networks are usually at least 10x larger than those of corporate brands (Source: LinkedIn). Leads generated by these networks also convert 7x more frequently (Source: IBM).
Nowadays, 56% of business professionals say a business executive's presence on social media positively influences their purchase decision (Source: LinkedIn).
Meaning the more employees a brand can convert into engaged advocates, the more success they'll have.
2) Authenticity
Authentic Marketing is about putting your employees in front of your logo and enabling them to become the authentic voice of your brand.
In addition to doing their own research before engaging with a vendor, 74% of buyers admit to choosing the company that first added value to their buying decision (Source: Sprout Social). This makes activating the collective voice of your employees an essential element of marketing today. No one brand can keep up with the level of social interaction needed to capture these opportunities.
The voice of the employee is powerful and credible. Employee-shared content is viewed as three times more authentic and typically sees a click-through rate that is twice as high as when the corporate mouthpiece shares the same information. (Source: LinkedIn).
But it’s important for brands to recognise that employees aren’t there simply to broadcast their content. Advocacy isn’t about volume of content or interactions; it’s about quality. It’s a case of connecting the dots across your business and putting people online in the context of their roles – and in a way that suits them personally. The consumer is too savvy for any other approach and sycophantic posting and sharing of the ‘corporate line’ will soon be called out.
3) Employee Engagement
Showing your people that you value their opinions and will support their right to comment shows trust and transparency. The benefits are many and varied:
Benefits for the brand:
- Builds trust and credibility through people
- Showcases expert talent within the business
- Extends content reach
- Humanises the brand
- Creates authentic content
Benefits for the employee:
- Strengthens employee credibility in market
- Deepens customer relationships
- Attracts opportunities
- Increases knowledge and value
- Builds network beyond fellow peers
The most common reason employees are reluctant to become employee advocates is a lack of confidence. With a small amount of guidance, brands can educate their people and guide them in what to post. Let champions lead the way – these are people who naturally take to sharing and creating content. In doing so, they’ll inspire others to follow.
One of the most valuable benefits to employees is the opportunity for them to build their own professional brand while they support the corporate brand. Being considered an expert is a sought-after status in the age of social media and online networking. But it comes with big results – B2B buyers are 5x more likely to engage with industry thought leaders.
When companies are socially engaged, they’re 58% more likely to attract top talent. They’re also 57% more likely to increase their leads (Source: LinkedIn).
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[Source: LinkedIn and Altimeter]
So, how do you convince your leadership team that it’s the right thing to put their employees in front of their logo?
Given the continual evolution of social media, it’s no surprise that you might need to do some work to explain to C-Suite why Employee Advocacy is important.
To convince them, the key message should be that the benefits of implementing an Employee Advocacy program are felt across the whole organisation. Here are four important points that need to feature in your social business case:
1. Communications & Employee Engagement:
According to Gallup, 74% of employees feel that they’re missing out on company information and news. Further research suggests that only 4 in 10 employees can confidently describe to others what their employer does. This scenario can quickly create disengaged employees and a lack of team spirit.
Employee Advocacy naturally positively impacts employee engagement and improves your ability to communicate internally in the following ways:
Reach the disconnected workforce:
Often, one of the biggest issues when it comes to employee engagement scores is around manual or remote workers feeling isolated, or identifying more with their local team than with the overall brand of the business. Advocacy gives these employees the opportunity to get involved. After all, who doesn’t have a smartphone or access to social media these days?
Opportunity to measure interaction:
Cascading messages have always been a challenge for internal communications teams. Does the message reach people in an undiluted form? Do people understand? According to Google, this issue is huge, with a massive 80% of the global workforce (estimated to be over 3bn people) performing work that doesn’t require a desk every day. With an Employee Advocacy app, you can find out what people read and share your news on an easy-to-reach platform.
Identify your social champions:
By discovering those who will be early-adopters to the idea of brand advocacy, you can kick-start your employee advocacy program and understand where the gaps are between those who are social hero and those who are social zero. Identify where your employees are in their Social Media Maturity journey with our Social Media Impact Quiz.
Internal communication needs to move with the times. We live in an age where everyone is used to instant access to news and information. If we don’t understand something, we Google it. If we want to know more about something, we use review sites and comparison models to do our research.
Our employee communication model needs to echo this cultural shift. To keep your workforce interested and engaged, your internal communications need to be:
- Clear – high-level announcements or confusing financial forecasts need to be tailored to their intended audience.
- Inclusive – social media is highly interactive with gamification, discussions, shares and likes being the norm. Internal communication now needs to be smarter than posters and desk-drops to capture the enthusiasm of the audience.
- Varied – by providing different ways to join the discussion, internal communications teams can create the choice and flexibility of external social media usage. This is about producing and sharing content that people feel will contribute to their own online brand.
- Empowering – internal communication is no longer an area of business where people uninformed about company news. By contributing to the advocacy role of employees, this becomes an integral part of business development and growth. By spreading the word, you empower your employees to increase their knowledge and reach their goal of being industry experts.
2. Sales & Revenue Generation:
Social selling is fast replacing more traditional methods of engaging a customer. Good content powers social selling and creates expert influence across your audience network.
Leads developed via an employee’s social activity are 7x more likely to convert and customers referred by advocates have a 37% higher retention rate (Sources: IBM and Deloitte).
And companies who experience a 12% increase in brand advocacy typically generate twice the increase in revenue growth (Source: National Business Research Institute).
3. HR & Talent Acquisition:
We’ve reached the age of the digitally native millennial. This changes how up-and-coming talent view an organisation.
88% of major employers say that employee referrals are their number one source of top candidates (Source: Macleod/Clark). And socially engaged companies are 20% more likely to retain top employees.
4. Marketing & Increased Web Conversion:
Inbound businesses drive better conversions on their website, attract higher quality traffic, and reduce their paid media spend.
A social advocacy program provides real value for money. Despite the fact that only 2-8% of employee social networks currently overlap with brand networks, content shared by employees receives an incredible 8 times more engagement and is shared 24 times more frequently than that which originates with the brand network (Sources: Social Media Today and MSL Group).
Earned media marketing is increasingly seen as a reliable source of growth. Still largely described as 'free publicity largely from promotional efforts', earned media will also be attributable to Employee Advocacy.
The presence of the internet and our social media culture is a double-edged sword: it’s easier to get your message out, but the resulting noise is deafening. Brands and businesses compete on a 24-hour stage across multiple channels, using a range of different media.
The only thing that has a chance of standing out is something refreshingly different. An average B2B buyer consumes 13 pieces of content before they purchase, from both the brand and third parties (Source: FocusVision). But it's important to make sure the content you publish is credible and high quality.
Getting the right amount of quality, authentic, and relevant content out there ensures an earned media approach cuts through the noise of the old-fashioned ways of direct selling.
So, it’s all signed off. What next? Follow these steps to ensure your Employee Advocacy program is implemented effectively and fit for purpose from the start.
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1. Establish your program objectives
Who do you want to reach?
- Are you doing this to increase brand awareness?
- Do you aim to increase the positive perception towards your brand?
- Do you want to improve recruitment and candidate talent?
- Do you want to focus on customers (including potential customers)?
- Do you want to drive more traffic and leads?
- Do you want to drive higher conversions on your website?
Don’t forget the knowledge-sharing element of social advocacy: 62% of LinkedIn members engage with content on the platform because it’s educational or informative and 50% of them say they are more likely to buy from a company they engage with on LinkedIn. [Source: LinkedIn]
2. Content Strategy
Start by developing your content strategy. Ideally you should have a split of content between third party/industry related content (4 pieces), branded thought leadership such as blogs (1 piece) and branded promotion (1 piece). This, unsurprisingly, is called the 4-1-1 rule.
Next, finalise the sources of your content:
- How will the content be categorised?
- Who will curate and review the content?
Content is king. If you get content wrong, employees won’t share anything. You may also struggle to get them to keep coming back to your advocacy tool. Content should be easy for employees to share, ideally with a good point or soundbite. It should be relevant and not too technical or generic. Too much product-focused or brand content will make them feel like a broadcast channel. Instead, you want a supply of fresh content that encourages employees to login to your advocacy tool regularly.
Before you launch your advocacy program, it’s well worth taking the time to understand who your audiences are and the content they might want to consume.
Start by developing your content strategy. This may include:
- Industry news
- Company news
- Product innovation
- Coffee corner
- Thought leadership blogs
- Job postings
- #LifeAtYourCompany
- Leadership & Lifestyle
- Fun stuff
- Partner content
Next, finalise the sources of your content. Will you invest in a bespoke Employee Advocacy tool, or will you use an external platform?
Having a tool makes it easier for employees to find and share pre-approved content. And, as an employer, you get to maintain control over the content and see the results.
3. Train employees
To kick-start enthusiasm for your Employee Advocacy program, identify employees who can help you achieve your goals. Target those already active on social media, or who you know will be early adopters of the new culture.
Take the time to ensure your people are aware of social media basics, how to use the tool, and the sharing etiquette you wish to create (e.g. customising posts, sending the right quantity of posts based on the network being used, understanding the right type of content for each channel, etc).
Next, create a training framework that best matches the employees’ social media maturity level. Target their training to the right level of understanding and use a format most suitable for them, be that workshops, webinars, or eLearning modules. Include training as part of your new starter on-boarding process.
4. Launch your Employee Advocacy program
Use your existing channels of communication to get things off the ground. Communicate the value you expect to see from the program, for both the company and the employee. Identify a team member to manage your Employee Advocacy admin. Perhaps create a collaborative group on your Enterprise Social Network (ESN). Get your leadership involved in the launch, too.
5. Keep employees engaged
You need to maintain engagement levels past the initial novelty period. Make sure you reinforce the impact that employees make, showcase best practices, encourage mobile use, and refine your content strategy. Provide continued training for employees ready to move to the next step.
6. Measure your results
So, you’ve identified your objectives, your launch is complete and your program is finally underway. How’s it going?
It’s important to take note of the measurements of success at an early stage. Being agile during the launch phase will enable you to increase your chances of success.
You should look at the following areas:
Adoption Metrics:
- % adoption across the organisation
- % invited employees that have registered
- % active users (logged in or shared at least once per month)
- % mobile users vs desktop users
User Metrics:
- Identify early adopters and highlight them
- Identify social spammers and educate them
- Identify least active sharers and encourage them
- Average number of articles shared per week per employee
Marketing Metrics:
Cost per click – check this out for paid social campaigns. Multiply the number of clicks by average cost and you'll get a quick hack for cost saved/value driven via advocacy.
Later in the program, perhaps after it’s been running for around six months, you should look at optimising your content and revisit user training requirements to hone your model and maximise success.
Website:
- % volume traffic referred via social advocacy (use UTM tracking)
- % job posting views as a result of employee driven traffic
- % bounce rate of advocacy driven traffic vs other sources
- % conversion of advocacy driven traffic vs other sources
Content:
- Most shared content by category (what do your employees prefer sharing?)
- Content driving most clicks (what are your employee networks interested in reading?)
- Content driving most engagements (what type of content is engaging employee networks the most?)
- Your most popular categories (is there a correlation between volume of content submitted to those categories and volume of content shared?)
- What patterns are emerging with high-performance content?
- Do they use hashtags?
- Are employees mentioning influencers?
- What post types work well: How-to posts? List posts? Something else?
- Is your ratio of brand/non-brand content working?
Curator Performance:
- Who submits the most content to the platform?
- Who submits the most-engaged-with content?
- Who submits the most-clicked content?
- Which categories need more volume?
- Do you need more thought leadership?
Finally, you get to connect Employee Advocacy to revenue, when Google Analytics talks to your marketing automation system and your automation platform connects to your Sales CRM platform.
Identify patterns and look for correlations across the data. Providing you have the tool stack connected and UTM tracking switched on, you can weave advocacy touched/influenced/generated attribution into your model. In effect, you turn your workforce into a sales force, where potentially everyone can influence the buyer journey.
Overall, it’s important to measure the performance of the tool but also to think more widely about how advocacy impacts the business metrics that already exist. For example, consider how Employee Advocacy impacts conversion on your website. Is the talent you attract through your employer network saving on hiring costs? What’s the impact on deepening customer relationships caused by sales keeping their networks informed about the latest innovations? Look beyond the obvious outcomes.