The Fundamental Benefits of Humanising your Brand Through Employee Advocacy
Employees are an untapped asset for brand building. They can improve the reach of your organisation’s marketing efforts, boosting the exposure on social media networks and in some cases, expanding marketing efforts into new forums. The results of a successful employee advocacy campaign can drive brand awareness, change perception of the brand, resolve customer support issues, educate customers, provide insights for innovation, and grow the sales pipeline.
Creating credibility
Employees can bring an element of credibility to your brand narrative that can’t be reflected through the corporate voice. Your organisation’s employees can be influential in their own right, both in online posting, but also in offline activities. Just because an employee doesn’t have a large number of followers online, the followers they do have can also carry their own influence and help bring added prestige and attention to the brand. There are a number of channels that employees can use to talk about the things their organisation is doing, including:
Social media.
Company blog posts.
Newsletters.
White papers.
Email.
Chat.
Forums.
Discussion boards.
Deepen brand affinity
Instead of being talked to like a customer, employees can promote the brand through their personal relationships, showing the real people behind the organisation. Studies have shown that people are more likely to trust recommendations from friends and family than through advertising or public relations messages.
Peer influence
Employee branding also gives the power to develop thought leadership within the industry. The innovators and pioneers within the company can take leading roles in promoting best practices in business operations, enterprising ideas, and advanced procedures. Because it needs to reflect a unique authentic tone, employee advocacy can be a more difficult brand development step than budgeting, strategic planning, and integrated marketing. However, making employees successful ambassadors of your brand can produce wide-reaching benefits.
Activate sales
Using employee advocacy in the storytelling process can power a brand to scale its reach to new levels. Employee participation can take the organisation’s marketing into areas that the marketing or public relations team can’t reach. This expanded reach can make an impact on sales numbers, plus, it can get employees more involved in the sales process. Since their jobs can also benefit from company growth, employees are motivated to see the brand succeed.
Tracking the numbers
Another way to encourage employee advocacy is to keep them engaged in the success of their efforts. They can follow how much interaction their posts draw. But keeping them informed of how much impact their efforts have will usually boost their personal motivation to continue. This can be done through internal analytics, like sales numbers and organisation website traffic counts. Letting an employee know that their personal advocacy helped boost sales or draw in more visitors to the website will only serve to inspire them to continue their efforts, as well as encourage other employees to follow suite.
Leadership through KINSHIP
Successfully integrated employee marketing and ambassadorship programmes can be challenging. Digital marketing services like KINSHIP can help companies, businesses and organisations set up dynamic, effective employee marketing campaigns. Some of these services included in the KINSHIP Employee Advocacy programme include:
Guiding principles to give employees advice, training and motivation to carry out brand storytelling and narrative development.
Core narrative guidelines to help employees to align their stories with brand narrative messaging.
Operations development and implementation to make it easy for employees to get access to the necessary platforms and find support for content development and management.
Activating, motivating, and assisting employees in story and narrative development.
Unified analytical reporting to track progress and successes across platforms, tying data back to sales numbers, market penetration, and supply chain growth.
Advocate auditing to review and improve employee brand ambassadorship programmes to make necessary adjustments along the way.
KINSHIP helps businesses and organisations connect with its audience through content that builds a strong brand narrative, advances the corporate reputation and produces long-lasting results.