Our employees are the face of a transparent and real-time brand for our companies. They cause the emotional enchantment, by telling their stories, to attract the top talent, giving our companies the best chance for success now and in the future – Shaunda Zilich, Global Employment Brand Leader, General Electric
Credible. Authentic. Trustworthy.
The chances are that most customers don’t connect your branding and marketing efforts with these words! However, when your employees share your branding material, the trust factor spirals up. Why is that?
Consider this statistic from Nielsen:
Employees have a greater degree of trust in their individual networks; so much so that 77% of consumers are likely to make a purchase after hearing about it from someone they trust.
Based on a study conducted by Cisco:
Employee posts can generate 8X more engagement than branded content from an organization. Furthermore, their social media accounts usually have 10X more reach.
Employee-driven marketing is all about employees within an organization doing the talking and promoting their organization’s brand through their personal social networks. This has an intrinsic credibility. This is why employees can boost an organization’s visibility on social media through serious advocacy measures.
So how can you leverage your employees as powerful brand advocates?
- Invest in the right tools: According to Edelman, employees are twice as trusted as CEOs and consumer activists to further marketing goals. Employee advocacy is now an integral part of social media management. Therefore, it makes a lot of business sense to equip employees with the right tools to channel their advocacy skills. Building an employee advocacy platform that curates content makes it viable for them to share relevant, brand-approved content and build a brand voice across social media channels.
- Empower your employees: On an average, the re-sharing frequency of brand messages is 24x more when distributed by employees. A Forbes study revealed that 72.6% of employees engaging in social selling outperform non-social media users. To tap the complete potential of employees as brand advocates, it is important for them to feel valued and heard. Leverage your employee base by creating an environment that fosters a culture of openness and trust. This can be done by initiating inputs from them on what kind of content they would want to present online. By actively engaging them in the entire process, you can build a degree of sincerity around the process of brand engagement.
Employee advocacy or influencer marketing is not a new phenomenon. As early as 2005, L’Oreal’s employees were engaging in influencer marketing strategies. In a bid to further employee engagement goals, L’Oréal firmly believes in incorporating employee engagement strategies right through employee induction and onboarding processes. This they believe is the first step towards promoting a culture of employee advocacy and developing thought leaders. Under the hashtags #LifeAtLoreal and #LorealCommunity, employee advocates at L’Oreal share user-generated content (UGC) and quotes about life working at L’Oreal.
Related: 4 Reasons why your Brand needs an Advocacy Marketing Program
Yet another case in point is the leading telecommunications conglomerate, AT&T. Called the Social Circle, AT&T’s primary aim at developing employee advocates is by identifying employees who are most active on social media and use their accounts to help promote the company. By also allowing a certain degree of online freedom, the organization allowed employees to use their personal voice to make a visible difference to their marketing efforts.
As part of its brand advocacy strategy, Starbucks has empowered its employees right from the word go by referring to them as “partners”. Created as an internal program, Starbucks Partners aims at bringing together its employees who seek to promote the brand on social media. In a bid to promote stock ownership and partially in an effort to make everyone in the company feel equally valued, Starbucks partners use hashtags such as #tobeapartner and #moments of connection to increase a sense of belongingness.
Building an employee-friendly culture has been an intrinsic part of Zappos organizational ethos. Known for its incredibly open work environment, Zappos gives a sneak peek into its culture through its Twitter handle @eyezapp and uses @InsideZappos to host the #InsideZappos tweetchat among employees. The chat engages its employees in a transparent way and reinforces the power of brand advocacy. What’s more? There’s even a company leaderboard that shows which employees are on Twitter and how many followers they have.
At Suyati, we use SOCXO’s white-label app called SocialArmy extensively to build awareness about Suyati’s branding and event marketing efforts. We successfully participated at DreamForce’17, waving on the ride of shares and tweets by over 100 employee advocates who helped us create over a 100K impressions in just 10 days. In fact, the Suyati name was trending along with Salesforce and other Fortune 100 giants!
If you do not have an employee advocacy program in place in your enterprise, I think it is high time you started one.
