5 Benefits Your Brand Can Unlock With Better Employee Advocacy

 

Increased Brand Engagement

Naturally, the worlds social space continues to grow and develop each and every day, and due to it, it’s now being overrun with content saturation and the eager need to constantly grab the attention of an audience before another brand does. Brands are finding it harder than ever to generate real ‘qualified’ and sincere interactions across their channels with their consumers, but thankfully, there’s ways around it.

For this reason, this particularly is where employee advocacy can help and deliver significant impact and results alike. Past research shows that content shared by employees can receive up to eight times more engagement than if posted across brand channels – an incredible difference for those wanting to gain more attraction. In addition, employees can also drive a click-through rate which is double that of their organisation when sharing company-relevant content.

People are reportedly also more likely to engage with content shared by their personal connections. By that, if only 3% of employees advocate for you brand, it will result in a 32% increase in engagement.

Identify Social Leaders

Another key factor in advocacy is to identify the individuals within your business who are already socially active and thriving within’ the company. Identifying socially active employees could potentially have a huge benefit – the networks and the owned communities that they have and the opportunity that you could have if you create tension and increase your employer brand. For example, LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world and you can determine which employees are most influential on this network in a couple of ways, and also advertise your own brand in doing so.

When logged in to your account, you can see which employees in your company are most viewed on LinkedIn. The employees with most profile views are typically the most active on the network, adding connections, sharing updates and engaging with LinkedIn Groups and other members.

Thought Leadership

Empowering and encouraging your employee brand advocates through an effective employee advocacy program reveals them that you are investing in their personal and professional development. This, in turn, can create a wonderful branch of new opportunities to foster thought leadership using your content marketing efforts, which also inspire employees to become more creative. The thought leadership content brings more qualified referrals and leads to your business.

Increased Brand Visibility & Improved Brand Recognition

Trust becomes an essential part in in any business and people – possible consumers, employees, etc – typically only trust family, friends and peers and their opinions at the time of purchasing, without any prior information of a product. Your employees have a great marketing potential to amplify always on content that increases brand awareness of your organisation online. According to a recent survey by Hinge Research Institute and Social Media Today, organisations with employee advocacy programs have seen increased brand visibility, improved brand recognition and better brand loyalty. Go ahead and unlock employees’ brand potential to boost your social brand reach in real-time.

Basically, educating the importance of employee advocacy programs and its benefits to your employee brand advocates, and is typically a full win-win situation for both employees and organisations.

Improved Customer Communication

In most brands, there is typically at least one huge communications gap which could improve. Businesses usually need to plug accordingly to new research from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc while still keeping relevant and on-brand, and enticing new customers while doing so. While seven out of 10 businesses believe they are communicating effectively via platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Facebook stories, just 20% of their customers agree with them, according to research.

Employee advocacy allows brands to increase connections between people, increase person-to-person conversations and build more meaningful relationships.

With one in every £5 spent in UK shops now being online, employee advocacy bridges the disconnect between online and offline to drive more people in store.

Additionally, according to MSL Group brand messages are shared 24x more when distributed by employees, rather than the brand itself. Employees also collectively have social networks ten times that of a single corporate brand, according to research from LinkedIn.