Employee advocacy is involving your employees in the creation, distribution, and engagement of social media posts or word-of-mouth organically and proactively. While on a surface level, this may seem like an easy thing to accomplish, it goes beyond encouraging your employees to like posts and share pre-written content to implementing them as B2B brand advocates.
The most successful utilisation of employee advocacy for B2B branding comes when employees are given flexibility, training, and incentives for writing their own posts and distributing them in their own voice and manner. It can become a more involved process that takes a bit more effort than expected, so why deviate from traditional social media strategy? What can you expect to get from branding through employees?
Utilise different perspectives
Your employees not only know your brand inside and out, but they have their own views, opinions and cultures, as well as the ability to identify different sellable aspects of your products and services. By utilising employee engagement, you gain access to these kinds of insights and can expand the way you promote your services.
Diversify your audience
Involving your audience can expand the way you promote your products and services, but also who you are promoting them to. Chances are your employees will be speaking to a range of different online communities. Being active in multiple communities gives your brand more visibility, allowing you to gain insights that can help you tailor your strategies and content.
Become more dynamic
The content produced will change and evolve with your employees over time as they grow with your brand. This lends an organic element of storytelling to your content that would otherwise need to be crafted, creating a content legacy of sorts.
So you now understand the why, but how do you get your employees involved?
Creating a strategy
As with any element of a strategy, the first step comes from identifying what you want to gain from employee advocacy. What kind of content do you want to produce? Consider what kind of content is going to reflect your goals. Are you aiming to expand your overall community and build trust? What does that look like?
Training time
Once you have developed your strategy, messaging, and goals, you will need to train your employees on how to achieve them. Use tools like AI to streamline the training process, and create step-by-step guides and tutorials. This will also cut down on training times and costs. Giving them an idea of best practices as well as an overview of your established strategies, goals, policies, and messaging will mean they are more likely to feel comfortable improvising. And we all know personalised, authentic content is the best content.
Track your success
Strategies are only successful if you can concretely measure their effectiveness. Make sure you’re gathering data on engagement levels, shares, and everything you would usually track with a traditional social media strategy, and complete an analysis of the overall effectiveness of your employee's efforts. This will also help to guide any future efforts in employee advocacy.
Creating a strategy that takes advantage of Employee Advocacy can be difficult, but if you’re willing to put in the work to create your own, you can develop a targeted and branded approach to this strategic element that will enhance and grow organically with your business.
Get in touch with Mo Works today and find out how employee advocacy can grow your business.
