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“Engagement” is more than just a buzzword; it is a key performance metric. Today’s top brands all employ strategies for expanding their audience reach and engaging with both customers and employees on a deeper level. But today’s audiences are overwhelmed with marketing messaging, making engagement even more difficult to achieve.
There’s still one tried-and-true approach to increasing engagement with potential customers and new and existing employees. An employee ambassador program is a strategy that capitalizes on word-of-mouth marketing while rewarding your team for being engaged with their work. In this guide, we’ll unpack what an employee ambassador program is, what makes it so advantageous, and how to design one in a few simple steps.
What is an employee ambassador program?
An employee ambassador program, similar to an employee advocacy program, is a structured way to incentivize employees to act as ambassadors for your brand both offline and online. These programs harness your team’s enthusiasm and credibility to promote your brand to customers, recruiting targets, and partners.
An employee advocacy or employee ambassador program empowers your people to act as vocal advocates for your company, sharing their experiences and insights with a wider audience. Employees are in an ideal position to represent your brand in a positive light. They know the ins and outs of the company, have first-hand experience with its values and goals, and can add a much-needed humanizing touch to brand identity.
One of the biggest challenges brands face today is the struggle to connect with audiences on a deeper, more authentic level. Today’s consumers are savvy to the marketing ploys that target them from every direction, which means companies must find authentic ways to boost engagement. An employee ambassador program can address that by having employee brand ambassadors use their social media platforms to promote your brand and amplify positive experiences to a wider network of existing and potential customers.
The advantages of employee ambassador programs
What makes employees so effective as brand ambassadors? Let’s go through the main advantages of a formal program for employees to advocate on behalf of your brand.
- Increased brand awareness
- More engaged employees
- Community building
- Recruitment support and scalability
- Enhance connection and trust within the company
- Can be a method for distributing information
- Improves staff retention
- Serves as a built-in network
Employee ambassador programs benefit the company that implements them, the team members who participate, and its audience. High employee engagement is directly linked to profitability. More than 70% of executives say that employee engagement is critical to their company’s overall success. And, companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable than their low-engagement counterparts. These programs promote a better company culture by giving employees a sense of purpose and pride in their work.
Another slightly less tangible (but nonetheless significant) benefit of implementing an employee ambassador program is that it promotes internal alignment. Companies can become more cohesive when brand values and goals assimilate with employees’ values and goals.
Research shows that the employee experience is directly linked to the customer experience. Happy, engaged employees are more likely to create great customer experiences, leading to happy, engaged customers. Engaged teams have 10% higher customer ratings than disengaged teams—meaning other key metrics, such as customer retention, are likely to improve with an employee advocacy program.
How to implement an employee ambassador program
Designing and launching an employee ambassador program is easy when you have the right steps in place. Here are five actions that your brand can take toward a sustainable, thriving program.
1. Define the goals of your program
The first and most important thing you can do to implement a program like this is to define why you are doing it and what exactly you would like to achieve.
Are you seeking to improve internal employee engagement? Reach a wider customer audience? Promote a new product or service? Defining your objectives will help you create an employee ambassador program that aligns with your goals and is ultimately more likely to succeed.
2. Provide training for employee ambassadors
It’s not a good idea to let your employees run loose on social media, uploading posts about the company. There need to be parameters in place to ensure that whatever gets publicized aligns with the brands’ goals, needs, and values.
Training is one way to achieve this. Offer interested employees a comprehensive ambassador training program covering the kind of content and language they should use when uploading promotional content.
See: How to Create a Personal Yet Professional Persona on Social Media
It’s also beneficial to establish criteria around which employees are allowed to partake in the program. Performance-based criteria are a good place to start.
3. Use the right platforms
Social media platforms have different algorithms and content styles. Choosing the right ones for your employee ambassador program is key to its success.
LinkedIn is one of the best platforms for running an employee ambassador program because so much of the content is already geared toward corporate brand environments.
You can also use a LinkedIn content calendar to determine the best times of day to post and identify current trends and popular topics in your brand’s industry. Facebook and Instagram are also good places to promote an employee ambassador brand campaign.
4. Organize content sharing
Asking your employees to advocate on behalf of your company shouldn’t require adding hours of extra work to their plates. Clearview Social’s employee advocacy platform, for example, makes it easy for your team to share content in just a few clicks.
One of its features, Social Shuffle AI, even generates copy written in varied styles for sharing across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The marketing team can select from two, five, 10, or more variations before distributing post ideas to employees via email or Slack message. Employees can choose which content they wish to share on their personal channels with just one click.
Organize content sharing even further with PeakTime™, Clearview Social’s feature that uses AI to make sure social media posts are posted at the moment when your audience is paying attention. Automated posting keeps everything running smoothly and effortlessly.
Leverage tools to keep processes easy, smooth, and hassle-free.
5. Leave room for authenticity
Asking your brand ambassadors to simply copy and paste posts written by your marketing team isn’t going to work. Social media users can tell when content is authentic. Make sure your team can bring their own voice to the table when sharing news about your business.
6. Incentivize employees with rewards
Being an employee ambassador takes effort, research, and time. Thus, the employees who participate in your program deserve to be compensated in some way for their input.
Similarly to an employee advocacy program, which also comes with a variety of benefits, you can incentivize employees to take part in this kind of campaign by offering them rewards, discounts, and other desirable things in exchange for their efforts.
Asking employees what kind of incentives would be best received is a good way to enhance employee engagement further.
7. Track and monitor the progress of your program
Without a proper tracking and monitoring system, gauging the success of your program will be nearly impossible.
It’s vitally important that your brand develop a system for measuring the performance of the program so that you can make necessary adjustments and improvements along the way. This can be achieved through the use of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), such as:
- Growth in following
- Number of impressions
- Total reach
- Number of views on video content
- Brand mentioning
- Hashtag mentioning
- Growth in content interaction
You can also enhance the performance and understanding of your program by using employee advocacy software that specializes in designing, tracking, and developing strategies for employee ambassador programs.
Webinar: How to Measure Social Sharing and Employee Advocacy Inside Your Company
4 Successful employee ambassador programs
Looking for inspiration to start your own program? Take note of these successful employee ambassador program examples to create a blueprint that works for your business.
Salesforce
Salesforce first tapped its employees to spread the word about the company in 2012, and since then, the program has been formalized and grown. Known as “Trailblazers,” Salesforce employees have their own online community where they can talk about the company, learn new skills, and network with others around the world. Salesforce’s Trailblazers share brand announcements, job opportunities, and company values, as well as content related to specific fields or regions. An estimated 25,000 employees participate in the Salesforce employee social media ambassador program as of November 2022.
Adobe
Adobe regularly features its employees on its blog, Adobe Life. It’s part of a concerted effort by the design software company to empower team members to become brand ambassadors and humanize the brand.
Adobe recognizes the power of incentives and gamification to motivate brand ambassadors. According to the brand, “To get employees to engage with the brand, Adobe makes things fun. For example, they frequently hold contests. One example was a t-shirt design contest asking employees to design what ‘Adobe life’ means to them. This created a high level of social engagement and t-shirts sold out within just a few days.”
These types of contests are a win-win for your employees and audience. For instance, a t-shirt design contest could turn your employees into literal walking advertisements for your brand. Plus: free t-shirts! Look for elegant ways to make brand advocacy fun and organic.
Reebok
Your employee ambassador efforts can be integrated with other marketing campaigns to harness word-of-mouth amplification. For instance, Reebok encourages their employees to talk about specific products in their posts — like sharing videos of their running or cycling workouts when there’s a running or cycling promo going on.
Reebok also uses unique hashtags to spread content from its team members. The brand encourages its employees to share photos of themselves wearing Reebok products, along with the custom hashtag #FitAssCompany. Employees can be authentic about their experience while sharing UGC content the brand can feature on its company profiles.
Clearview Social offers a corporate posting capability to allow brands to plan, publish, and schedule social media content from main corporate LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter accounts. These posts can easily be amplified by your employees on their pages, too.
Merck
Employee ambassadors make great sources for hiring referrals, too. While many of the brands on this list use their employee ambassador programs for marketing, Merck focuses on recruitment. Merck encourages employees to post images and content around their favorite experiences with the company. And the company celebrates the high number of women who work for Merck.
Since the best applicants typically come via referral, an ambassador program run through Clearview Social can help you lower your recruiting costs. Clearview Social makes it easy for your employees to find people already in their network to apply, reducing your reliance on expensive job ads.
Conclusion
An employee ambassador program is a powerful marketing strategy that can be used to promote high engagement with brand employees and target audiences.
By recruiting brand ambassadors internally, you can engage your employees in a whole new way. Your employees can publicly advocate and promote your brand on social media. You can increase brand exposure, foster employee loyalty, and embody your company’s best interests and values.
But setting up creative branding strategies is not always easy—unless you have help.
Clearview Social helps brands develop, implement, and streamline employee advocacy programs such as these. Request a demo now to discover how Clearview Social can help you create an employee ambassador program that delivers the best results.