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Let’s face it — today’s consumers can see right through inauthentic content. While paid ads certainly have their place, your marketing mix also needs a healthy dose of authentic content that captivates, engages, and builds trust with your target audience. Who better to generate it than your employees?
The most successful employee advocacy programs empower employees to flex their creativity while also providing pre-approved branded assets and tools for making it easy to post.
Looking to other brands can help your team figure out how to build the best employee advocacy program for your business goals. Use our list of successful employee advocacy programs to guide your own journey.
Examples of Employee Advocacy Campaigns by Big Brands
In this guide, we’ll share some real-world employee advocacy examples that work to give you a clear picture of how to start a formal program at your business. Here are some of the best employee advocacy programs:
1. Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic is a tech company offering cloud-native SaaS analytics. The company was seeking a way to encourage employees to consistently advocate for the company on social media—without adding a lot of extra work for their employees, marketing, or HR teams. Sumo Logic instituted Clearview Social’s employee advocacy platform to take the admin out of organizing and galvanizing their employees to post branded content.
The results: $670,561 in Earned Media Value. During one campaign, content posted by Sumo Logic team members generated 129,452 clicks and 726,642 shares. See the full case study here.
Key takeaway: Using an employee advocacy platform to organize your efforts can have a high ROI. Clearview Social’s automated system, customizable queues, and PeakTime™ Scheduling feature enabled Sumo Logic to harness the power of employee advocacy while minimizing overhead costs and manual effort.
2. BeachFleischmann
This Arizona-based regional accounting firm was seeking to increase its reach on social media. Very few of their partners and team members were sharing the thought leadership content generated by the company on their social media platforms. Employees either didn’t know the content existed or felt it was too challenging to repost regularly on their individual pages. The firm implemented an employee advocacy platform and saw a 1,342% increase in traffic to its website from LinkedIn in the first year. They also estimate that this increase in online leads brought in an additional $200,000 in new business. See the full case study here.
Key takeaway: Make it as easy as possible for employees to talk about your brand. Clearview Social’s platform prompts employees to share approved content with one click. And, users can pick and choose the pieces they want to share, share everything with one click, or opt into auto-sharing with no action required.
3. Starbucks
Starbucks has become basically synonymous with employee advocacy. Starbucks employees are regularly featured on the brand’s sites, highlighting the people who make Starbucks, Starbucks. The brand offers a comprehensive set of guidelines for employees wishing to post on social media — encouraging team members to be active on social media regarding their work lives. They also refer to employees as “partners,” giving workers a sense of recognition and affirmation, which aids engagement levels.
Key takeaway: Make it easy for your team to figure out what to share. Starbucks’ guidelines are simple and straightforward. The brand isn’t prescriptive about what to post, but it does encourage partners to share their passion and stick to safe and respectful posting. If your employees aren’t sure what to post, try using Clearview Social’s tools that help you discover and suggest content to share.
4. Merck
While many of the brands on this list use their employee advocacy as a marketing tool, Merck focuses on employee advocacy for recruitment. Merck, a pharmaceutical company, 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.
Key takeaway: Don’t limit your employee advocacy to sales and marketing. A tool like Clearview Social can also help you lower your recruiting costs. The best applicants typically come via referral, and Clearview Social makes it easy for your employees to find people already in their network to apply, reducing your reliance on expensive job ads.
5. Reebok
Reebok encourages its employees to share photos of themselves wearing Reebok products, along with the custom hashtag #FitAssCompany. Using a separate hashtag enables the brand to keep track of its content, all while letting employees be authentic about their experience at Reebok. It also helps Reebok distinguish this content from other marketing campaigns. Reebok simultaneously provides a feed of content from which employees can select material to post.
Key takeaway: Your employee advocacy efforts can be integrated with overarching campaigns, too. For instance, Reebok encourages their employees to target specific topics with their posts, like running or cycling—often when there’s a specific running or cycling promo going on. Clearview Social offers a corporate posting capability that allows brands to plan, publish, and schedule social media content from main corporate LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter accounts. Your employees can easily amplify these posts on their own pages, too.
Expand Your Corporate Posting Capabilities With Clearview Social
Clearview Social is an all-in-one employee advocacy solution that provides the necessary tools to transform your workforce into impactful brand advocates. Check out our Buyer’s Guide to Employee Advocacy to learn more.
6. Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
BCG is a management consulting company with employees in over 40 countries. The company uses Instagram to share employees’ stories from across the organization, as well as LinkedIn and other social platforms. In addition, BCG posts thought leadership and research briefs on critical business challenges that are easily shareable. It uses the branded hashtag #bcglife to connect employees and followers across different channels. The company is often recognized in Glassdoor reviews and by other industry standards as one of the best places to work.
Key takeaway: BCG’s online content is a healthy mix of company news, thought leadership, and spontaneous content posted by its employees. In its Instagram feed @bcg_life, employees don’t only post about work — they share images completing triathlons, marching in Pride parades, and pursuing hobbies outside of the office. Encourage your team to show work/life balance and post organically while still tagging your company account or branded hashtag.
7. Adobe
Adobe regularly features its employees on its blog, Adobe Life. It’s part of a concerted effort by the design software to empower team members to engage in employee advocacy and humanize the brand.
Adobe’s employee advocacy program doesn’t take itself too seriously. As one expert describes, “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.”
Key takeaway: Internal contests and games can translate to external marketing. Imagine hosting a t-shirt design contest at your company; the right design could turn your employees into literal walking advertisements for your brand. Look for elegant ways to bridge your online engagement with offline prizes.
8. Gainsight Software
Gainsight is a software strategy company that’s used employee advocacy to foster thought leadership, increase site visitors, and expand reach by 1.3 million audience members. The company has implemented a structured program that encourages employees to upload approved, brand-focused content. Gainsight has also set clear KPIs for the program’s success: amplified leads, conversion rates, and service bookings.
Key takeaway: In addition to tracking concrete analytics, Gainsight gamifies elements of the advocacy process. Participants get a “Recent Advocacy” Scorecard that shows the advocacy milestones (results) they’ve achieved over a certain time period. With Clearview Social, you can take this a step further to create a leaderboard and recognize your best advocates with company swag or gift cards.
9. Electronic Arts (EA)
Electronic Arts leaned into its position as a top video game development studio to create one of the most successful employee advocacy programs, bar none.
EA’s employee advocacy program allows employees and “insiders” (game testers) to compete on leaderboards and share their performance on social media. The campaign has a monthly penetration of over one million people.
10. Dell
Dell is a great example of how employee advocacy and engagement intersect.
The company integrated four hours of social media training into its employee development protocol with the goal of making employees more confident when posting branded content and encouraging them to focus on informative, helpful topics.
Over the first year, Dell’s audience grew to approximately 1.2 million people.
11. Randstad
Randstad launched an employee advocacy program that cultivated more than 2,000 brand ambassadors and generated roughly $1.5 million in earned media value. The company gamified the strategy and ensured that its employees could easily access pre-approved and on-brand assets to promote participation.
Unlocking the Power of Employee Advocacy: Key Stats to Guide Your Strategy
There are plenty of stats that demonstrate the efficacy of a structured employee advocacy program. For instance: Employee advocacy programs can generate 16% better win rates and drive 48% larger deals. Leads developed through employee advocacy programs produce 7x more conversions. Stats like these are incredibly helpful in building a business case to implement an employee advocacy program.
What does your business need to do to achieve similar results? All of the most successful employee advocacy programs excel in one key area: They make it easy for employees to consistently create and share great content. To do the same, you’ll need a solution like Clearview Social’s employee advocacy software.
Our user-friendly suite of tools includes guidance about the best time to post, resources for finding and crafting compelling content, and makes it easy for your employees to become vocal brand advocates.
Simplify Employee Advocacy With Clearview Social
Clearview Social can help you cultivate a powerful social media presence. Learn how our suite of user-friendly tools can make it easy for your business to expand its reach through the power of employee advocacy.