A healthy business is always on the lookout for new ways to engage with consumers. But finding a method that works in favor of consumers, employers, and employees concurrently can be a tricky balance to strike unless you consider the growing benefits of employee advocacy.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what employee advocacy is, why it’s so important today, and the long list of benefits it offers to businesses and the people that keep them running.
The Role Of Employee Advocacy In Business
Employee advocacy is a social media marketing strategy that places employees’ voices and experiences center stage. Instead of using your business channel to promote your brand and services, this strategy involves employees posting positive promotional content from their own accounts.
This marketing strategy is based on the well-researched idea that people trust the testimonials of other people far more than they do large brands. In fact, more than 83% of consumers value recommendations from people they follow over all other forms of content advertising.
Now, there are many different ways to foster a connection with consumers and widen audience reach. But few are as accessible or effective as an employee advocacy campaign.
Inviting employees to join an employee advocacy program can produce a wide variety of benefits for both your business and the people that work for it. This internal approach to brand development and consumer connection is fertile ground for increased sales, conversions, and employee satisfaction.
What Are the Main Benefits of Employee Advocacy for Businesses?
There are many benefits to running an employee advocacy program. You don’t want to miss out on any of them. If your brand is struggling to increase their digital presence, an employee advocacy program could help rectify essential KPIs and breathe new life into your marketing strategy. Here are some of the benefits you can reap with an employee advocacy campaign:
1.Enhanced brand visibility
One of the most significant and notable benefits of employee advocacy is the massively enhanced brand visibility that comes with it.
By inviting top-performing employees to post regulated content from their own accounts, your brand can reach a much wider audience of people it might never have attracted before. All of the followers your employees have will get to familiarize themselves with your brand, thus growing and diversifying the audience.
2. Improving thought leadership
Thought leadership is what happens when key brand ambassadors publicly endorse the company they work for. Consumers base a vast percentage of their purchase decisions on the words and actions of brand leaders, which means those in the position to speak hold significant conversion sway.
3. Brand humanization
As we have already touched on, consumers respond extremely well to expressions of humanity within a brand. It gives them an opportunity to relate to your brand in a more emotional and significant way.
By using employees as the ambassadors for your products or services, you can help consumers associate more authenticity with the brand overall.
4. Attracting top talent
Another major benefit to implementing an employee advocacy program is that it gives future recruitments a high incentive to apply to your business. Hearing about the positives of a brand directly from employees themselves is a great selling point, thus attracting higher-performing recruits.
5. Strengthening brand trust and loyalty
Consumers don’t just want to hear from other consumers that your brand is one to trust. Seeing employees endorse their own brand helps cultivate a sense of confidence in behind-the-scenes operations and encourages consumers to see the brand in a more positive light.
Another perk is that it can foster brand loyalty amongst customers. Once they feel comfortable with your chosen representatives, they are more likely to stick with your brand for an extended time.
6. Developing powerful company culture
A robust and healthy company culture is vital to a successful, sustainable business. Employees need to feel as though they have a purpose and place within the greater organization. This is something that not only increases productivity but also contributes to a generally more energetic and fulfilling environment.
4 Common Issues That Are Addressed By An Employee Advocacy Campaign
The social media marketing industry is fraught with constantly evolving challenges – all of which can be tough to keep up with on top of everything else.
An employee advocacy program can help your business tackle some of the most prevalent issues that businesses face today. From consumer connection troubles to disengaged employees, this uniquely multifaceted campaign strategy can be the solution to many corporate problems.
Low retention rates
Keeping employees on the team for long periods of time can be a struggle. But employee retention tends to go up when an employee advocacy program is implemented.
Poor consumer connection
Consumers want to know that there are more than just chatbots and backlinks to your brand. Connect with them by showcasing the human faces behind the brands they follow – online engagement may naturally inflate this connection.
Narrow audience scale
Implementing an employee advocacy program means that your audience network grows exponentially bigger, allowing for more online traffic and conversions.
Low employee engagement
Employees are people, just like you. They want growth opportunities and new ways of connecting with the world to diversify their careers and extract more pleasure from their work. An employee advocacy program can provide that.
Outsource Your Employee Advocacy Campaign To Clearview Social
In the highly competitive atmosphere of internet marketing, brands must do everything they can to increase visibility, streamline communication, and engage with consumers at a deeper level. Otherwise, somebody else could quickly fill your spot.
Outsourcing support and strategy development for an employee advocacy program is one of the easiest ways to implement this effective campaign. By hiring Clearview Social, your company can gain access to powerful tools and resources for sharing uplifting employee content on social media.
Clearview Social is a platform designed specifically to provide expert guidance for employee advocacy campaigns. If you’re ready to discover the power of employee advocacy in action, request a demo today.