In any business, reputation is key, and building trust with customers, prospects, and the general public is how you create that reputation. According to the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer, 62% of people trust “a person like yourself” and 52% trust a regular employee, while only 43% trust a company’s CEO. Because of the trust the public has in employees, they can help you strengthen that reputation through advocacy right now, when you align employee advocacy with your greater business goals.
Once you’ve completed all the initial steps of starting an employee advocacy program, like creating a social media policy, tailoring the program to meet your needs, and implementing the right advocacy tools, you’re ready to unleash your empowered advocates into the social media wild. But how exactly do you start?
The first step is to align your employee advocacy initiative with your business goals. Then, align with your core marketing and communication objectives. Those objectives will vary but could include brand awareness, lead generation, customer retention, recruiting, or employee engagement. With those specific goals in mind, it’s much easier to determine what content you can give your advocates to share on social that will help you achieve your business goals.
You want to start small. Give your employees content that they’ll want to share. So, what content will most advocates want to share?
Thought leadership
Thought leadership content helps employees stay informed and also look smart by sharing it. Sure, any one of your employees could find a case study you distribute to be interesting and worth sharing. However, your salespeople will be especially eager to share this content. By giving your salespeople good content (meaning both informative and interesting), you give them the ammunition they need to make a case for your product. The smart salesperson will share the right content, with the right use case, to the right prospect, but only if you give them this content and make it easy to share. This not only broadens the reach of your marketing content, but also helps generate more leads, and then push those leads further down the sales funnel until they’re ready to buy.
Job listings
Job listings are great for employees to share for a couple of reasons. For one, they know some people in their social networks must be considering new opportunities, so it won’t be an unwelcome share. Additionally, employees who love their companies (as your advocates should) will want their friends to apply for jobs there and potentially become coworkers. Plus, your HR department gets to expand the reach of their job postings and increase the number of candidates while reducing recruiting costs, accelerating hiring, and improving retention and culture.
New Product/Service Offerings
This piece of content will appeal to those team members who played a part in making this new product or service happen. Other employees might share as well but those who were actively involved will want to show off their work with their social networks. They get to revel in their success while you get help in launching your product, increasing brand awareness and generating leads.
Press Releases
Whether your company announces an expansion or a round of funding or some equally exciting news, employees feel a sense of pride. And sometimes, they want to share their pride with others, and yes, even brag a bit. It’s nice to be able to say, “I work for an incredible company that’s doing innovative work and doing well.” Give employees the press releases to share and you open up a whole new channel for corporate communications, increasing your brand’s reach and awareness.
Coupons
This is the lowest-hanging fruit. Everyone loves discounts. If you give your employees the opportunity to give their friends, family, and professional contacts deals, they’ll want to spread the discounts around. And that means more coupons redeemed and new customers for you.
Make employee advocacy a part of your marketing plan, one which complements your overall goals. Then make it easy for employees to share, with the right content and the right tools, and they will want to advocate for your brand. When you take both of these steps, you’ll see high adoption from employees and measurable ROI.
