Turn your employees into advocates for your brand

Turn your employees into advocates for your brand

A company’s most often overlooked marketing resource are its employees. As marketers, we often think of influencers to be members of the press, analysts, bloggers, social media hype machines, celebrities, board members, or happy customers. Sure, they can attract attention for you and influence your customers to explore your solutions.

BUT!!! But, if you haven’t tapped into upleveling your employees to extend your reach and repeat your message, you may be missing out. Below I provide some tips on how to better activate and empower your team to be an extension of your marketing team and help build better brand affinity with your audience.

Remember, it takes a minimum number of 10 – 15 touch points before your brand makes it into a customer’s memory as a company that may be able to solve their problem. It’s highly expensive to get this volume of touch points across each member of your prospect base, so using “free” resources is a great way to do this. Let’s dive into how to do this on social media.  

Tip #1: Start at the top

The best and fastest way to get your teams on board with using their personal platforms to talk about your company and its products is to start with the leadership team. If the leadership team (CEO, CFO, COO, CMO, VPs, directors, etc.) aren’t helping to elevate the brand and get the word out on their own social channels, it makes it much harder for others to want to do the same.

As you start this amplification program, you’ll need to get your leaderships’ support and have them communicate this initiative to the organization. This can be done in an All Hands meeting, via an email, a company-wide Slack message, or any other communication mechanism your organization utilizes.

There are several ways of getting your leadership to post:

• Package social copy and complementary images into a simple email or shared document (i.e. the leaders’ preferred method) and send it to them. Make sure the copy is easy to copy and paste and the image is easy to attach so that there are only a few steps required in order for them to post on their channel of choice.

• Earn your leaders’ trust and have a VERY trustworthy team member manage the posting to their accounts. Not every leader will be willing to hand off the keys to their social accounts, so building trust and protecting that trust is going to be key.

I’ve managed many of my leaders’ social media accounts and it’s a huge responsibility that I take very seriously. It is part of their livelihood and everything you post on their channels must be reviewed, quality checked, and error-proof. Get their trust and protect it vehemently.

Tip #2: Make posting easy for them

Getting your team on board with posting on their personal social channels can be slow to start, so just keep that in mind. Not everyone likes to post, or post regularly, and they may want to keep certain channels (like Facebook, Instagram) separate from work. Making this easy and as painless as possible for them will be key.

I suggest starting with a weekly email that is sent on the same day of each week. They’ll know to look for it and get used to the cadence. In each email, provide at least two choices for each of the top platforms you want exposure on: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. This should include:

• copy

• CTA URL (use a trackable link!)

• hashtags

• images or videos

Make sure the copy adheres to the character counts for the respective platforms and that the CTA uses a trackable link attributed to the platform and employees so that you can see how this channel is working for you. The link shouldn’t be a single link for every employee because that complicates things, but one single link per platform that every employee can use.

Tip #3: Give them options

As stated in Tip #2, giving your team options of what they can post each week is great. Make sure you have options that cover different parts of the business. It also shouldn’t be considered marketing fluff. You don’t want their audiences to feel like they are constantly being marketed or sold to. Sharing free information that is valuable to your audience is how you build trust.

This can mean that you highlight things like:

• thought leadership content

• event or webinar notifications (Tip: focus on the actual meat of what the company will be talking about at the show or on the webinar, not just a “hey, come see me.”)

• customer stories

• new benefits or features and why they’re important to your audience

Remember, your company team consists of a wide spectrum of personalities and skill sets. Some want to post only technical content, others want to evangelize the benefits, and others don’t really have a preference. Creating options that can appease the majority of these personalities will get you better engagement.

Tip #4: Use platforms to scale

Tip #2 and Tip #3 focused on delivery methods that are manual in nature. This works just fine for smaller to mid-size organizations but can be difficult for larger ones.

My suggestion is that if you can keep it to a well-timed, well written email, then do that. You’re going to get the best reach and engagement having your team post organically on their platforms. [Explanation: Organic posting is defined as manually posting on the channels rather than using an automated third-party platform to do it for you.]

BUT, if you can’t do this, look into automated employee advocacy platforms such as Smarp, Sociabble, SproutSocial, and Post Beyond. These platforms allow users to sync with their respective social channel, select which social posts you’ve created for them that they’d like to to share with a single button, and the posting happens automatically. This will definitely get your team posting on your behalf quicker because they have opted-in to the platform, thus increasing the number of posts and repeated messages that are going out about your organization. Noting again here: the only drawback is that you will see less engagement or reach than posting organically.

Tip #5: Encourage engagement on non-traditional channels

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok are the leading social media platforms today. However, there are other platforms that are considered non-traditional yet are huge for word-of-mouth and getting practitioners to pay attention. These are Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Stack Exchange.

The process of engaging on these platforms is very different than with the others. Sure, you can advertise in certain sub-Reddits or boards at a corporate level, but the value of these platforms is direct engagement and communication with its members. It also requires a different commitment level from your staff.

To start, search Reddit (for example) for the keywords that are most important to your business. This will help you identify channels or boards where these words are popping up so that you can focus your efforts on those. Then have someone monitor conversations and reply where relevant: offer advice, differing perspective, help, answer questions, etc. Your team members can leave a link in their post to your website so that posters see this information over and over again.

Wrap-up

Employees are great advocates for your brand. Each one comes with a network that can open new doors for you. But let’s be real for a second: that network belongs to them and they are not required to use it to elevate the business. Only an environment of trust, great content, and transparency will sway them to leverage it for the business. Build that necessary foundation with them and watch your business grow.

If you have any questions about employee advocacy or how to get started, please contact me at rosa@rosalear.com or fill out my contact form here. Have a great day!