Employee advocacy marketing is a great way to increase the organic reach of your content, using your most powerful and economical asset: employees.
Strengthen brand awareness and visibility
Marketing is responsible for developing brand awareness and visibility. It is a task that requires significant investment and effort. From inbound to social, including SEO and SEA, there is no shortage of channels available to your marketing team.
However, there is no reason why the responsibility should rest only with a few dedicated people.
Each service can help strengthen the visibility and awareness of the brand. In fact, this is the main benefit for companies with an employee advocacy marketing program.
Internal influencer marketing
Employees are the secret to improving organic reach through their influencer status.
External influencers or brand ambassadors have become a popular marketing strategy because when they recommend a product, followers are quick to buy it.
The reason ? 96% of consumers don’t trust ads, and influencers were originally seen as friends, not advertisers.
However, nowadays consumers are more aware, and advertising regulations require that paid referrals be disclosed. This means that followers recognize the commercial nature of the posts.
Even so, 62% of marketers plan to increase their spend on influencer marketing in 2021. Yet what many don’t realize is that they potentially have hundreds of free internal ambassadors.
Imagine that you could harness the power of people, improve your brand visibility for free, without having to disclose your sponsorship?
Employee advocacy programs are the solution.
Employee advocacy, the ultimate internal influence program
Micro-influencers
Employees are the first “micro-influencers,” which generally refers to people with over 1,000 social media followers. However, this status can encompass anyone with a loyal and engaged audience.
Micro-influencers are real pearls, generating higher engagement than their counterparts.
It’s common for employees to have a few hundred LinkedIn connections or a thousand Instagram followers. However, employees are often happier to share on LinkedIn, their professional network.
As subject matter experts, and with followers made up of ex-colleagues, classmates, friends and family, employee posts gain in interaction.
Now that LinkedIn’s algorithm only shows messages on the first few connections and requires more engagement to go viral, this network is a gold mine.
Reliable sources of information
When an employee shares company content, they associate their name and reputation with it.
Unlike Paid Ambassadors, internal influencers share because they find content useful, not because they have to. Yes, technically they are paid, but employee advocacy is usually not part of the job description.
What’s more, word of mouth marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies. 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family more than any other form of advertising.
So an employee advocacy platform, like the one created by Powell Software, which allows people to share content with their nearby network, is the secret of a more organic reach.
Contribute to a more inclusive content strategy
Content creators are always on the lookout for inspiration and ideas. Keeping up with all the new stuff can be difficult, so when a team of people help out, everyone benefits.
- Marketing gets new ideas and can create great content.
- Sales can suggest topics that they know potential customers will benefit from.
- IT can share a wealth of knowledge.
- HR sees improved engagement.
Everybody wins.
Subject matter experts
Marketing helps make complex topics more understandable to a large audience. They cut through jargon and information overload to deliver the right message.
At the same time, they are not technical experts. A marketer may target banks but have no experience in finance.
An employee advocacy marketing tool, like Powell Softwares, harnesses employee skills and knowledge in two ways.
- Employees can easily suggest interesting links or articles. If it is relevant, the marketing department can then add it to the employee advocacy page for other employees to share.
- Content managers get ideas for topics that could be created in-house.
- Employees can participate in marketing efforts and develop a sense of belonging.
- HR can reap the benefits that come from highly engaged employees.
2. User-generated content (UGC) can also be submitted in the employee advocacy tool. Anyone can upload an article or content idea. The marketing manager can take the idea and help shape or modify it. Once the article is ready to be published, the marketing department can add it to the company blog and employee advocacy space for anyone to share.
- Employees can suggest technical topics that marketing might not have thought of.
- This allows employees to expand their skills and knowledge. Someone working in IT might write the best articles, but never got the chance.
- HR and management benefit from a connected workforce and improved morale.
Watch this video to see our employee advocacy tool in action.
Increase reach and connect with the right audience
Social media is always introducing new algorithms, making it harder for marketers to achieve the same organic reach as before.
Brand Ambassadors are the secret to getting the message out to more people and delivering useful content to contacts who might not have found it otherwise. In fact, 98% of employees are already using social media, and half of them post about their company. The basis for employee sharing on social media is therefore established.
Take the example of a company whose ideal client is an accountant. It makes sense for the company’s finance team to have relevant contacts on their LinkedIn. They have studied and worked in the field, building up a network in the process.
If these employees share an article with lots of information that is useful for accountants, suddenly the right content reaches the right people.
Having their connections more likely to interact with the article and share it with their contacts will help increase organic reach. All marketers need to do is make sure that employees are willing to share content and that they can do it easily.
Sellers should be quick to share content as well. In fact, 73% of salespeople who use social networks in their strategy obtain better results than their colleagues.
Download the infographic PDF: Employee Advocacy: Marketing’s Secret Weapon
Best practices to increase the organic reach of employee advocacy marketing
Internal brand ambassadors have enormous potential, but getting buy-in can be a challenge. Marketing can help support the deployment of an employee advocacy marketing program with a few good practices.
- Create content – Provide everyone with the right content. Maintain control over what internal ambassadors share externally.
- give advice – Remember that marketing is the expert when it comes to social sharing. Guide employees on the right hashtags to use, the best time of day to post, who to tag, and how often to post.
- Support people less comfortable with social media – Not everyone is a LinkedIn expert. There may be people who never post on their social channels. In the beginning, marketing can help by creating role models or talking one-on-one with those who are not sure.
- Encourage ideas – Sharing ideas for content can be intimidating, let people know that the promotion platform is open to everyone.
- Reward sharing – Employees need to get rich. Gamification features, like points, badges, and competing for a spot on the leaderboard, are a great way to reward people.
Use the right tools
It goes without saying that marketing and employees must be supported by the right tool to make an employee advocacy marketing program a success.
Powell Software’s employee promotion tool integrates with your Digital Workplace. We create a space in the corporate intranet that brings together content so employees can share it on social media with one click.
Marketing can support employees through a dedicated Teams, with predefined channels.
Employee advocacy programs are a company-wide initiative that has benefits for almost any department. Yet marketing has more to gain than most other departments if it takes the time to educate employees and promote the platform. Once the program is in place, marketers just need to tie in the content already created or help modify the suggested ideas. After that, marketers can start seeing results by increasing organic reach and improving visibility.
Employee advocacy programs are truly a marketing secret weapon.
Find out how your team can use the employee advocacy tool from Powell Softwares to increase organic reach while connecting employees, with a demo from our team. Book your demonstration to see our solution in action.
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