How to: Generate employee advocacy

Generate employee advocacy

There’s nothing like a personal recommendation to seal a deal, and no company is more successful than one with a united voice. Harnessing your team’s enthusiasm for their job will reap rewards, in the retention of key staff, the attraction of great talent, and the acquisition of new business. Word of mouth still matters, and people are your best marketing tool.

Employee advocacy enriches content marketing and provides integrity to PR. If your team members are experts at what they do, your communications should reflect their knowledge and insight, and reflect the brand they represent.

But how do you go about improving employee advocacy at your company? Here are five ideas:

1. Hire and nurture the right people

Without enthusiasm and positivity, generating employee advocacy will be a tough task indeed. While skills have always – and will always – be important, there are other things to look out for when recruiting new team members. Get an idea for how willing they’d be to go above and beyond their everyday role, and whether they would truly love to be part of your organization.

Individual goals are important here. If a person has designs to become a renowned expert in their industry, they’re more likely to be forward with their opinions and thoughts. This means they’re more likely to get involved in your marketing activities, in order to promote individual and collective expertise.

Nurturing the right people is also important. Inevitably, there will be some more enthusiastic than others. It’s better to focus on those that will be enthusiastic and positive, than to try to draw blood from a stone. If your whole team can be active spokespeople, brilliant. However, don’t force the issue if some individuals are uncomfortable.

2. Develop a culture of togetherness

This is perhaps one of the most important elements in encouraging organic employee advocacy within an organization. From the ground up, you need to build a company that works together towards its collective goals. As a leader, you need to have a clear vision for the culture and identity of your brand and its mission. This should be reflected in the brand, but also the attitude you have towards your staff, and the policies you promote.

For example, if you promote a youthful, dynamic, and flexible approach, you should practice what you preach. If employees see a severe disconnect between company communications and their everyday reality, trust will be eroded and belief will diminish. People want to talk about how great their job is, how great their boss is, and how they go in every day with a spring in their step. As far as humanly and economically possible, business leaders should make this happen.

3. Be transparent throughout the business

Business owners and directors know information that is important to employees. If the team can see where their responsibilities stand in the context of a wider plan, they’re more likely to see the value of their job, and that of the person sitting next to them. An understanding of the broader business goals (including financials to some extent) will pull the team together, and encourage them to help one another along the way.

This also goes for transparency of your marketing successes and failures. If you can show tangible results that highlight the supreme performance of expert-driven content, you have a case to demand more from the team. Data doesn’t lie, and they’ll appreciate the impact of internal advocacy and engagement more if you prove its worth. Furthermore, be honest about what the company is good at, and where it’s lacking. If the team is aware of what needs to improve, they can work together to make it happen and be proud when they achieve their collective aims.

4. Offer fun incentives

Sometimes people need a little extra encouragement, but this doesn’t necessarily need to break the bank. The marketing team is always looking to harness and harvest the knowledge of the experts within a business, but it’s famously hard to get these experts to help out. Project deadlines need to be met, and other stuff means helping marketing takes a back seat. While the project delivery team might love what they do, internal advocacy is about communicating this love. Sometimes it’s hard to do this.

To overcome this, you need to offer incentives that transcend the priority queue. Gamification is proven to inspire activity, so adding the element of competition may just make the difference. Set out measurements whereby team members can compete against each other, and breed that well-mannered rivalry.

Nobody hates fun. Well, almost nobody. Think of some fun and economically viable incentives for competition winners – a day out bowling, a job-swap day with the boss, or just an extra day’s holiday.

5. Do great work, and then find more great work to do

Put simply, your employees will shout about what they do, if what they do is great. Don’t settle for just all right; push the team to achieve exceptional things. Make your work remarkable, in the most literal sense of the word.

Downtime should be used to think up great new ideas, and to push the business forward in new areas. Gamification is something that applies here, too. At Ribbonfish we hold a Dragon’s Den innovation day every few months, which allows team members to pair up and present a new business tech idea. The winner gets backing to put it in motion, providing it’s realistic and feasible for us to do so. The key message here is to not get stale, because nobody talks about a stale business. Celebrate innovation.

Employee advocacy

There are plenty of ways to encourage employee advocacy in your organization, but the right conditions must be set. Ultimately, the crux of the matter comes down to three simple questions:

  1. Are employees happy?
  2. Are they proud of what they do?
  3. Do they have the platform to tell people?

It’s business owners and managers that have a responsibility to create an environment in which internal advocacy can flourish. Once this commitment is made, the team should be encouraged to engage and promote the brand in an honest and genuine way. While a unified approach is required, it’s also important to appreciate differing perspectives and interests of team members. This uniqueness will bring the identity to your marketing material, as well as the stories they tell about your business through word of mouth.

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