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Amplify your reach and empower your staff with an employee advocacy program
It is estimated that more than half of the world’s population engages in social media, and that number continues to increase at around 1 million users every single day. Those users include friends, family, prospects, customers — and the people you work with every day. Engaged employees are the driving force behind your business and brand building. By giving your employees the right tools to amplify their voices and leverage their personal networks, they can become your foremost promoters and brand advocates. A well-designed employee advocacy program harnesses the passion and social influence of your organization’s very best champions: your own employees.
Why employee advocacy?
When your employees advocate for your brand and share your company’s content through their own social ecosystem, you automatically extend your reach. On average, your employees have a collective network that is 10 times larger than your company’s follower base. With a well-executed employee advocacy program, employees can help your brand reach a significantly larger audience. According to a survey by MSL Group, content that is shared by employees receives eight times more engagement than content shared by brand channels, and employee advocacy can increase your brand reach by 561%. By leveraging the power of your staff’s personal and social networks you can organically:
- Increase employee engagement
- Boost your brand awareness and reputation
- Increase your recruiting efforts
- Drive sales pipeline
Here’s how.
Increase employee engagement
You want your employees to feel engaged with their work and with your brand. You want them to feel so excited by the content that they are directly involved with creating that they share it with their networks. It gives them a sense of belonging and pride to showcase your organization’s initiatives and accomplishments — and when employees are engaged at work, they are more likely to stay. A robust employee advocacy program helps you to create content that is easily shared across social platforms to streamline your employee’s connections with their networks, build their personal brands and professional networks, and position them as thought leaders within their industries. You can also gamify the experience with awards, points, and badges that incentivize them to participate and reward them for doing so.
Sprinklr
Boost brand awareness and reputation
When your content is shared by your employee advocates, their networks may be hearing about your brand, product, or service for the very first time. A Nielsen Global Online Customer Survey showed that 90% of customers are more likely to trust a product or service recommendation from someone they know, giving you a bridge to increasing your brand awareness and reputation. When quality brand content is shared by a trusted source, it’s more likely to be believed and pique the interest of the reader to learn more. This can have far-reaching positive effects on how your brand and its reputation are perceived.
Magnify recruiting efforts
In 2021, we saw a record number of people leaving their jobs, and the U.S. unemployment rate has plummeted to a record low. A recent Gartner pulse survey of 900 C-suite leaders revealed that 60% of them reported a greater-than-normal attrition rate in 2021, and 68% of those executives said that the recruiting efforts of their competition or other companies are what’s causing their employee turnover. These recent events put a lot of pressure on your HR teams to fill requisitions quickly and with the right people.
LinkedIn reported that “companies with a successful employee advocacy program are 58% more likely to attract, and 20% more likely to retain, top talent.” Your employee advocates can promote your company’s recruitment efforts and improve candidate acquisition through their networks.
Drive sales pipeline and revenue
Content that is shared by your staff is content that you share without associated marketing and advertising costs, giving you a force multiplier of your content creation efforts. This strategy saves your marketing department time and money as it is approved, quality content that is being reused across the multitude of your employees’ networks. Forbes reported that when your sales teams use their social networks to develop leads, they can outsell their peers by as much as 76% and convert those leads more frequently. Quality leads and higher close rates mean a healthy sales pipeline and increased revenue for your organization.
Activate your advocacy
You’ll want to choose the right partner to activate, build, and measure employee advocacy with powerful planning tools, content calendars, customizable dashboards, a central asset repository, and approval workflows that streamline advocacy initiatives. Once you define your primary goals, identify your best advocates, and measure your success, you can help your brand empower and activate employee advocates throughout your organization and maximize connectivity. To learn more, download Turning Employees Into Your Best Brand Advocates: 3 Steps to Amplify Your Reach by Empowering Your Staff.
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Sonam Sagar is the Director of Product Marketing for Sprinklr’s Modern Marketing & Advertising suite. Sonam has spent the past 15+ years in the marketing and advertising industry, helping companies increase brand awareness and drive product adoption
