Why employee advocacy is important and an essential strategy for content marketing

12th February 2020

It’s fair to say that employees are, in actuality, a businesses biggest and strongest assets when it comes to outbound advocate marketing. When an employee is engaged and motivated to share a business’s content, message and push brand awareness, it opens up an entirely new channel for marketing; and one that’s more organic, more respected and more trustworthy because it’s from a person rather than a brand.

Why employee engagement matters

Employee advocates are those that are willing to vouch for your business and your brand. They’re just as proud of what a company is doing, its successes and its message, to share said messages with their own personal networks, whether through word-of-mouth or across their social media networks, such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

This matters, not only to the employees and having the resource and drive to share company content, but also to the end user; the customer. When employees share content across their own networks, it’s an entirely fresh audience with much greater reach. People trust people, it’s peer-to-peer communication, and when customers are deliberating over whether or not to proceed with a sale with a business, it generally boils down to their reputation (and price, of course!) But reputation is a big factor and when employees are engaged and active across their business social networks, it sheds a company in a new light.

Why?

Because if an employee believes in their company, why shouldn’t you as a personal connection of theirs too.

The importance of employee advocacy for business content

It can be a trying situation in some business to motivate employees to engage with content. That can be as simple as resharing from a business page or choosing to like a post. However, it’s an incredible strategy for digital marketing, not only to help balance social network algorithms (think Twitter and getting to the top of a hashtag feed) or seeing a high level of engagement on a LinkedIn post; it must be worth the read, right? If so many other people have found it worth their while.

Making the most of company content across social media

When it comes to social media, depending on the business (B2C or B2B) it can vastly differ how audiences are communicated to. However, social media is an essential channel for marketing and it’s growing more and more popular, with LinkedIn and Twitter at the forefront when it comes to B2B communications.

Whilst sharing business content on company profiles is fundamental in in brand awareness and having, at the very least, a presence on social channels; the core rationale behind using social media is to drive traffic toward a website or motivate a potential customer to pick up the phone, send an email, or fill out a form.

However, whether it’s a new business (with a small following), a well positioned business looking to make new headway or an older business, perhaps one with a slightly damaged reputation or lost in the noise from competitors, encouraging employees to engage and promote a business across their networks can reinforce a businesses values, stimulate growth and increase the visibility of a business faster than other marketing tactics.

The benefits of an employee advocacy platform

There are a lot of benefits when it comes to employee advocacy. We recently talked to a few customers using Brand Message to find out what they’ve found most useful about having an advocacy platform, instead of using emails or apps like Slack to promote content to employees to share:

The main thing we noticed about it was that more people wanted to be involved. There’s no escaping the fact that having the overall engagement across all members of the team in one dashboard is so useful. Without crawling individual salespeople’s LinkedIn profiles and inspecting the likes and shares that they were getting manually, that insight isn’t something we would usually have access to. We were quite surprised how much of a renewed interest in LinkedIn the platform generated. We haven’t typically had a very active team when it comes to social media, but have definitely seen that, even outside of the Jigsaw24 messages, people have started posting their own content, sharing thought leadership and liking and sharing each other’s messages on a scale that they definitely didn’t before.

Ade Leader
Direct of Marketing - Jigsaw24

Brand Message allows our whole organisation to share Microsoft Teams’ updates, ensuring terminology is consistent between teams, individuals and with VIA’s brand voice. We have found that our employees’ confidence quickly grew when posting through Brand Message. They are editing and personalising the pre-written content to suit their own job role and audience on LinkedIn.

Suzanne Whetton
Marketing Manager - VIA

Brand Message gives me the confidence to write, personalise and promote VIA’s branded messages with complementary graphics and photography, keeping the messaging consistent and in line with company campaigns.

John Wright
Sales Manager - VIA

Brand Message makes it easy for marketing departments to upload company content to be shared on Linkedin and Twitter, schedule when it’s available and how long for, as well as share directly to the compange page. It allows employees to share content relevant to their departments, interests and the interests of their network, and adjust the content messaging whilst still being on brand.

What’s more, the whole platform is gamified, so businesses can highlight rewards by month or quarter, to keep employees engaged with content and sharing it to their networks. There’s a leaderboard, a point system and badges to be won; not to mention a hidden noughts-and-crosses if an employee has shared all of the content to keep them coming back for more.

Brand admins gain insight into the most engaged employees and teams, and can understand what type of content is receiving the most engagement from their extended networks. Ready to see the benefits of employee advocacy for yourself?

Close menu

Well, what are you waiting for?

Sign up for a free beta 3 month trial

Please correct the following error(s):

  • ${ error }
Privacy Policy

Thanks for joining the beta!

We'll be in touch with you shortly to get you on board. Whilst you wait, why not take a look at our Employee Advocacy insights?