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All brands need a strategy for expanding their audience reach and connecting with both customers and employees on a deeper level. But today’s audiences are marketing savvy, meaning engagement strategies need to be creative to achieve effective results.
An employee ambassador program is a prime example of one such strategy. 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, And How Can It Empower Your Brand?
An employee ambassador program is a marketing and engagement-boosting strategy that equips employees to act as ambassadors for your brand, both offline and online. This is typically implemented in exchange for incentives.
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 problems facing brands today is connecting with audiences on a deeper, more authentic level.
Today’s consumers are far from naive to the marketing ploys that target them from every direction, which means companies must refresh their stances on engagement.
Employee brand ambassadors can use their social media platforms to promote the products or services associated with your brand and amplify positive brand exposure to a wider network of existing and potential customers.
The Advantages Of Using An Employee Ambassador Program
So, what makes employees as brand ambassadors so influential and effective? Let’s go through some of the main advantages of recruiting ambassadors for an employee ambassador program.
- 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, its host of employees, and its network of consumers. It helps to promote a better work environment by giving employees a sense of purpose, which can then translate to onlooking consumers.
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.
How To Design And Implement An Employee Ambassador Program
Designing and implementing an employee ambassador program is easy when you have the right steps in place. Here are five 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 brand ambassador program that aligns with your goals and is ultimately more likely to succeed.
2. Provide training and establish criteria 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.
Providing training is one way to achieve this. Offer interested employees a comprehensive ambassador training program for what kind of content and language they should use when uploading promotional content.
See: How to Create a Personal Yet Professional Persona on Social Media
Establishing criteria around which employees are allowed to partake in the program is also beneficial. 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. 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 effort.
Asking employees what kind of incentives would be best received is a good way to enhance employee engagement further.
5. 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
The Takeaway
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. Using the Clearview Social platform, your brand can design an employee ambassador program that is effective, straightforward, and rooted in results-driven practices.
Request a demo now to discover how Clearview Social can help you to create an employee ambassador program that delivers the best results.