Digital has revolutionised the notion of employee advocacy. What once were word-of-mouth recommendations – a professional urging a friend to join their company or buy its products – are now high-speed broadcasts that the entire online population can access. Individuals sharing their company insights across social media, email or blogs is an increasingly significant marketing tool for brands. In fact, businesses with engaged employees outperform those without by up to 202 per cent, research by Dale Carnegie Training has shown.
The importance of these inhouse brand ambassadors was underlined in 2015, when the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn, launched ‘Elevate’. The product is described as a tool to help ‘companies and employees curate high-quality content, share easily to social networks, and measure the impact’ – basically making employee advocacy simpler. The social media platform revealed that only two per cent of employees share content their company has posted on LinkedIn, but are responsible for 20 per cent of engagement, including clicks, likes, comments and shares.
Olivier Choron, CEO and founder of Purechannelapps, highlights the importance of giving power to employees: “It is all about enabling your strongest advocates, your employees, with the power to cohesively promote your brand to their networks.
“This could include your sales employees promoting your brand on social media for social selling purposes, or it could be your tech employees being given the opportunity to advocate your brand to build a thought leader status in their industry. Internal advocacy gives your employees the tools to enable this to happen.”
The feel-good factor
Yet, building employee advocacy isn’t as easy as just setting up a formalised programme or launching an internal campaign. This type of marketing is built on staff being proud of their company and its culture.
“It starts with belief and pride in the brand, with employees excited to represent and advocate because they want to be part of something they believe in,” says Justin Hall, CEO of Protocol. “Our B2B brand is our employees. For us it is celebrating the fact they are individuals – real human beings with real lives. They represent the freethinking and truthful transparency of the brand.”
Cultivating a company environment that individuals are proud of is an epic and somewhat daunting task in the hands of the senior management, as well as the marketing department. In some cases making individuals feel happy about coming to work in the morning comes naturally. In other instances initiatives need to be put in place to ensure a happy workforce, such as team-building days, benefits and mentoring schemes.
Jacques De Cock, faculty member at The London School of Marketing, warns: “If your culture is not conducive to generating genuine employee engagement and advocacy then first change your employment culture. If you start an advocacy programme in the wrong environment it will be very hard work, and is unlikely to have the expected results.”
Consequently, having an overly formalised programme may not be the right way to go, argues Andrew Grill, global managing partner at IBM Social Consulting. He says: “While there are many ‘click here to retweet our latest press release’ platforms available, my view is that this will only work in a limited number of situations. I rarely just retweet the latest IBM news, for example. Instead, I analyse what we have announced, then distil this in a tone and format appropriate for my audience.”
However, that doesn’t mean this type of modern marketing should be left to chance. Grill explains: “You still have to instil trust in your brand advocates, and provide them with the tools to allow them to be natural and authentic in all situations. Only then will you have employees who will naturally share news and views from their company, with their own voice and through their own eyes.”
The tools
It’s crucial that businesses provide the right tools to allow professionals to become brand ambassadors. This doesn’t mean investing a large chunk of your annual budget in the latest dedicated employee advocacy tech, but instead building a structure where internal advocacy can thrive. Here’s how:
Plan and goals
You need a plan. This document should outline how the scheme will work and include clear, measureable goals and KPIs. Senior management, the marketing and sales departments as well as employees should take part in discussions before anything is implemented. Goals need to be created for the individual (something for employees to aim for) as well as fed into larger marketing initiatives and business aims.
Support
Next, build a steady support system so employees feel comfortable and confident in their role as brand ambassadors. This includes creating clear guidelines that can be easily distributed and consumed – consider filming a short video rather than compiling a 50-page PDF.
Additionally, initial and ongoing training is essential to success. This can include an introductory face-to-face training session, followed by monthly catch-up meetings where feedback – failures and successes – can be discussed.
Communication
In today’s fast-paced working world it’s easy to fall behind on your company’s latest news. Marketers should consider setting up weekly or bi-weekly email updates, depending on the size of the company. This will ensure people are aware of what’s coming up, such as a product launch or a new piece of content. If there is only a small group of brand advocates it is a good idea to give influencers access to your content calendar so they can easily check publishing dates.
Matt Goolding, head of digital at Ribbonfish, shares how his brand plans to carry out internal communications: “We’re building an editorial calendar for blog content in 2016 that features every member of the Ribbonfish team. Our experts are encouraged to pick topics that interest them. It’s so important for a company like us to project the expertise of our team, but equally important to not force individuals to write about things they’re not comfortable with. By empowering our team to discuss and debate their interests, we get the best out of them.”
Incentives
Some companies choose to use incentives to add a competitive edge to their employee advocacy scheme. Goolding believes this is an important part of the programme. He says: “We’re in the process of planning some incentives for 2016 at the moment – based on reader engagement of our team’s individual blog posts. The expertise in our team makes us what we are, and it’s about facilitating that pride in our individual and collective achievements, and projecting this in the right way to clients and leads.”
Hosting provider HEG, meanwhile, offers a range of incentives for its brand ambassadors. Group CEO Kate Cox explains: “We’ve offered formal incentives, such as friend and family schemes on product launches, but we’ve found that we have better success with enthusiasm and making an effort to understand exactly what will make each employee happy. When looking to set up an employee advocacy scheme, we’d recommend that it is less about the formal, regimented incentives and more about informal enthusiasm. If you’re excited, your employees will be excited too.”
Trust and freedom
Still, none of the above are any use without trusting individuals and giving them the freedom to voice their own opinions. Becoming a brand advocate should be optional to all employees. While guidelines and training are important, as is showing the human side of your company, there’s no point asking your entire workforce to send out the same automated tweet to promote an event or blog post – it will look robotic and unappealing, and your audience are unlikely to engage.
Colin Harrison, marketing director at Media Street, offers an example of how to empower employees: “Each Media Street team member has their own social media account and we encourage each team member to speak about what they are passionate about. We ask new staff members to choose three topics they enjoy from their personal life, their local areas (Exeter or Bristol in our case) and their expertise. Combining these allows each person to speak passionately about what they do every day and makes it much easier for them to grow our social media channel and become brand advocates.”
Measuring success
Finally, your employee advocacy toolbox is not complete without a means of reviewing and feeding back success to the company, as well as learning from failures. On top of keeping track of your goals and KPIs, tracking progress should include one-on-one meetings with advocates to find out what is working. Success stories should be shared company-wide. Establishing an ‘employee advocate of the month’ – the member of staff that has had the most engagement of social media or whose blog has received the most views – is a good way to do this.
Jacques De Cock of The London School of Marketing adds one last word of advice: “The key is engagement, motivation and re-enforcement. Like most or all marketing it is continuous positive momentum, building on what works and abandoning what does not work. With hindsight, good marketing is easy to identify. But with foresight it is most often the result of several iterations where a plan is made, marketing is executed, the results reviewed and then, based on real evidence, better marketing campaigns are executed.”