Why employee advocacy is important and an essential strategy for content marketing
Why employee engagement matters to business, employees and their social media audience.
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20th May 2019
In the modern world, the importance of employee engagement can’t be overstated - engaged employees are more loyal, more productive, more motivated and most importantly, happier in their jobs. But it goes even deeper than that, a truly engaged employee has an emotional commitment to your organisation and its goals, and will genuinely want to help to improve the business.
Creating a positive work environment where employees feel motivated and inspired to make a difference can really transform a company from within. More and more businesses are starting to recognise this and best-in-class companies are proactively adopting strategies to increase employment engagement.
One of the quickest and easiest strategies to implement is employee advocacy. An effective employee advocacy program, which empowers and incentivises employees to become brand ambassadors, is highly effective because your workforce starts to feel like they’re part of a purpose larger than themselves. Quite simply, when employees become brand ambassadors, they have a vested interest in the company’s success.
And it’s self perpetuating; the more an employee proactively champions the business they work in, the more engaged they become, and the more engaged they feel, the more they are inspired to spread the word. It becomes a perfect storm and an incredibly powerful force. That creates a direct correlation between employee advocacy and employee engagement.
With digital word-of-mouth becoming more and more powerful, employee advocacy is increasingly taking place online, with social media (particularly Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) as the main medium for sharing branded content. Employees have extensive networks of friends, followers, and connections on social media who can be reached and influenced with a click of a button. By sharing valuable content to their networks, employees can increase the company’s reach and credibility by generating meaningful conversations about the business. But employees cannot contribute to the company’s success in a silo; they need to be given the right tools and the right content, and be incentivised and rewarded for their efforts.
Provide the right tools
For an employee advocacy program to be a success, a comprehensive advocacy tool is a must. A dedicated brand advocacy marketing platform, such as Brand Message, makes it easy and fun for employees to promote and share their company’s branded content across their personal networks any time, anywhere, so they remain active on social media even outside of working hours.
Create the right content
As with any social media amplification strategy, content sits at the heart of a successful employee advocacy program. In order to boost brand awareness and drive traffic to the website, the key is quality content that is on brand and relevant, that employees can share to their network in a timely fashion. Projects, case studies, thought leaderships articles, upcoming events, specific campaign call outs, recruitment shout-outs and behind-the-scenes material can all be created for sharing by your employees. With Brand Message, employees can also participate in content production, using admin created content as a starting point and tailoring it to deliver their own insights. In this way, employees can promote themselves as thought leaders and demonstrate their expertise to their network whilst remaining on brand and contributing to the businesses’ overall image.
Reward participation
The importance of creating an incentive-driven advocacy program cannot be overstated; rewarding your workforce for their participation in your companies employee advocacy program is the key to its success.
Brand Message has been gamified so that employees can be rewarded for their activities and incentivised with the opportunity of winning rewards such as a financial bonus, a free gift or time-off! To make it even more fun to share, there are hidden badges and awards along the way and a leaderboard for top sharers to compete with each other over sharing the most content and generating the most engagement. Through their Brand Message dashboard, employees will be updated and notified on the details of both their performance and that of their colleagues. This transparency creates a level of friendly competition, driving each team member to boost their own results.
With the right tools, content and incentive strategy, employee advocacy is proven to help to increase employee satisfaction and in turn inspire employee engagement. Join our beta and be one of the first to unleash the power of employee advocacy. You’ve not got long to wait. We’ll be rolling out Brand Message to new brands in Summer 2019.
Why employee engagement matters to business, employees and their social media audience.
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VIA have rolled out Brand Message across multiple teams, all of which had one thing in common; they were too intimidated to post on LinkedIn.
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Benefits of social media sharing to boost brand marketing with employee advocacy.
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