Employee Advocacy: How to Turn Employees Into Brand Advocates

« Back to Articles

If you’re still hesitant about starting an employee advocacy program, you’re missing out on a lot of benefits. Employee advocacy is typically seen as a word-of-mouth strategy through which businesses use the potential of their employees to tap into a new customer base.

On top of that, employee advocacy has some unparalleled benefits for talent acquisition and HR. People are more than ever dependent on third-party reviews to find out about the workplaces they’re interested in. All those hoorays and cheers by your employees could leave a mark on their minds and attract them to your business.

But false recommendations that look like plain advertising won’t do the trick – especially because they’re coming from employees who are still affiliated with you. The key to great employee advocacy is genuinity: you need to turn your employees into genuine advocates of your company.

Want to know how to turn employees into genuine brand advocates so that their recommendations actually come out on top? Let’s find out.

What is employee advocacy? And why is it important?

Employee advocacy is a popular word-of-mouth strategy where employees promote their employers by sharing information about them such as the company’s products, achievements, events, campaigns, or initiatives to the public. The idea of employee advocacy is to leverage the authenticity and trust that exists between the employees and their audience.

Statistics show that content shared by employees receives 8 times more engagement than content shared by brand channels. As a result, brands that engage in employee advocacy have recorded increased rates of lead generation and conversion.

In addition to these, cross-functional teams use employee advocacy to attract the talent that match their team’s perspective and their common goals.

Sharing the great work culture, community, and company activities offered by the company can provide insight into the work environment and entice talents with similar interests and objectives. A survey shows that 44.5% of people are more likely to apply for a job if the vacancy is shared by someone they know. Also LinkedIn’s results show that sharing brand content by employees causes an increase in views for their job openings.

There are several channels through which employee advocacy can be executed, some of which include:

• Social media posts
• Word of mouth (i.e. friends and relatives)
• Employee’s contribution to guest posts and news websites
• Sharing employee experience and expertise on the company blog

How to turn employees into brand advocates

1. Improve employee experience

Employee experience is the total perception of employees about their interaction with the company, co-workers, and customers.

Employees are more likely to become brand advocates when they enjoy a great employee experience. This includes the employee engagement level, the organisational culture, work conditions, and the nature of the work environment to which employees are exposed.

Satisfied employees who have more workplace engagement are 23 times more likely to recommend their organisation as a great workplace. Also, improved employee experience is beneficial in increasing employee recruitment and retention as well as good employee performance.

Below are some of the ways to improve your employee experience.

Soliciting continuous feedback

This performance management strategy helps in ascertaining the employee’s good perception of their work experience. Employees should be encouraged to talk about their areas of difficulty in the workplace, as well as what they expect from management.

Also, it is a performance management best practice for organisations to give performance feedback to employees to enable them to evaluate their performance and realign with the expected goals of their job role when necessary.

Darshan Somashekar, CEO of Hearts.land, explains that feedback goes both ways: “We ask our team to give us quarterly feedback through employee engagement surveys. Just asking our employees how we can improve their working experience shows that we care and as a result creates advocates for our business.”

Using software for employee support

Employee engagement software can be used in the workplace to make workflow easier, improve communication, and help make your employees feel more valued, respected, and fulfilled. This is especially true in the era of working remotely, as employees can use these tools to set goals, track them, and equally hold themselves accountable for their assigned projects.

Using engagement software helps with employee onboarding and even ongoing learning and development. This way you can track and improve the employee experience.

Recognition for work done

92% of workers say they are more likely to do a specific task again if they were recognised for doing it the first time. This is a reward system that shows employees that they are valued and appreciated for their work.

Employees who feel appreciated and seen by their employers have a sense of belonging that fosters employee loyalty and advocacy.

2. Run an employee advocacy program

Employee advocacy programs allow businesses to strategically manage, evaluate, and improve their employee brand advocacy efforts. This involves creating a content strategy to guide the employees and track their brand advocacy performance.

For example, employees can be directed on the kind of content to post, when to post them, and how to post them for maximum engagement. Without an employee advocacy program, the employer cannot ascertain what the employees are posting or if they are posting anything at all.

For example, in 2016, Reebok ran a campaign where they encouraged their employees to share pictures of themselves wearing Reebok products on their social media handles with the hashtag - #FitAssCompany - and share how passionate they were about fitness.

Through the hashtag, Reebok was able to track all employees' posts and look out for ways to improve their employee advocacy program.

Using an employee advocacy program can be as simple as distributing new content through newsletters and requesting reports.

However, there are employee advocacy program tools such as Hootsuite Amplify, Sociabble, and Haiilo where approved content can be easily distributed to employees on their preferred channels, and they can easily amplify and share the content with their audience with a single click. These tools enable employers to measure the ROI.

When choosing an employee advocacy tool, it is important to consider key features such as the software’s integration with other tools, including HR management tools, Slack, and social media platforms.

This is because some organisations already use HR management tools to automate workflow, and an employee advocacy tool that integrates with such tools makes it easy to transfer and manage already existing information between the different platforms without doing so manually or separately.

Also, social media is the most preferred channel for employee advocacy programs. This is because social media guarantees more reach. Employees typically have more followers than company accounts, and people are more likely to trust and interact with posts made by employees than brands.

This has led to lots of organisations channelling their employee advocacy program through social media.

A good example is Google. With over 100,000 employees, the tech giant takes pride in hiring the best talent in the pool. To do this effectively, they encourage employees to become brand advocates by sharing their own content about the company. This way, their brand advocacy looks more authentic and credible, thereby attracting more potential job seekers.

3. Offer incentives

Incentives are one of the most effective ways of motivating employees in the workplace. Employee performance can increase by 44% as a result of a well-structured incentive program.

Rewarding employees for brand advocacy can motivate them to actively engage in brand advocacy as they would for their other job responsibilities. In this regard, incentives may be monetary or non-monetary. For example, you can offer employees bonuses or gifts such as paid or subsidised vacation plans or personalised items as a reward for their brand advocacy performance.

4. Provide sufficient training and mentorship

A work culture of friendly training and mentorship encourages employees to become brand loyalists and share their experiences with others. With 9 in 10 workers with a mentor stating they feel happier within their career.

Also, one of the key benefits of training and mentorship is improved career growth and opportunities. Employees will learn the necessary skills needed for personal branding and social media management.

This is also a form of upskilling to unlock employee potential, which helps in improving the employee experience and invariably making employees loyal to your brand.

You can use various content formats for training. Knowledge base, blog posts, documents, webinars, or corporate videos are just some examples. You can also run a mentorship program if you’re looking for faster results.

A good example here is Starbucks. They have their own social media guidelines to help their employees stay abreast of the kind of content to post on their social media handles.

Finally: don’t force employee advocacy

86% of employees say employee advocacy has impacted their career positively. However, not all employees are willing or interested in participating in employee advocacy programs.

For such employees, it is important not to force them as this may backfire. For instance, some employees may not know how to create (curate) content or handle certain controversial engagements.

Also, forcing employees to share exaggerated content can undermine your employee's reputation and your brand image consequently.

Instead of forcing employees to post positive content, focus on making it easier for employees to become brand advocates by providing a great employee experience and teaching them the benefits of brand advocacy.

This article was guest written by Mostafa Dastras.