Boosting Company Culture and Marketing Through Employee Advocacy

Have you ever asked your employees to share your latest company news on their social networks? To re-tweet your latest job opening or a story of your product launch, or to like your company’s Facebook update? Well, even if you answered yes, don’t worry; you are not the only one. Still now, in the era of social media and social sharing, many companies struggle with missing the point of brand building and employee advocacy, and creating real value through them. Employee advocacy, the promotion of an organization by its employees, is a key factor to your success both in marketing your solutions and products, as well as boosting your company culture and thus enhancing your image as an employer.

Rock Your Company Culture

The right employee advocacy strategy can be one of your biggest assets when building your employer brand and boosting your marketing efforts, but it is very often forgotten that a well implemented employee advocacy program can also be used to build your company culture.

To succeed in your employee advocacy strategy, you need to start building a culture of passion in your company when you first establish it or make your first hire. If you haven’t done it yet, start now. Not tomorrow. Now. Hire people that share your vision, your values and beliefs. People who admire and believe in your product or solution. Provide them with material, blogs, tweets, news, and insights that they want to share — material they want to share, because they care.

Empower your employees to showcase their achievements and therefore build their own professional brand. Encourage them to become the leaders in their industry, to be proud of their work and the purpose they are filling with their job. In the end, this will also help your staff to position themselves in the field — they also win.

Once you and your people share the same purpose and believe in what you do, give them guidelines on how to showcase this love towards your product and company. These guidelines should rather encourage and give freedom than to limit what can be shared.

Remember, if you need to use money to motivate your staff to engage, you have lost them.

The key performance indicators of your employee advocacy program can be used to boost your company culture too. Once you have content that your employees love and appreciate, create leaderboards or other methods to showcase success and to create hype around it!

Close That Next Big Fish

So, now that you have built a culture of passion in your company and your employees are empowered to share your content, how should you utilize it when it comes to marketing your products? According to a study, 75% of B2B buyers are said to leverage social media to support their decision making, which basically means that purchasing decisions are still strongly based on word-of-mouth. The only difference is that now it happens online.

Multiply Your Reach and Create Trust

Like many other companies, you might be struggling with your social reach. How big is your company’s reach in all the channels you are using? With the right employee advocacy strategy and content you can easily multiply your reach.

Imagine that your company has 5,000 followers in different social media sites, but you have 20 employees, all of them with an average of 250 followers each (a relatively modest estimation) and they share your content. Suddenly your potential reach has doubled.

Besides, they might be using channels that your company does not cover. According to Edelman Trust Barometer in 2014, an average employee advocate is twice more trusted than the company’s CEO. You too would more likely trust your friend who is nuts about their latest product launch than the CEO of the company promoting it.

If you are working in the IT sector, just consider that according to B2B Magazine, 61% of IT buyers report that colleague recommendations are the most important factor when making a purchasing decision.

Finally, to start the process and to evaluate it, do you believe in what you do? Does your staff believe in what you do?