One of the best ways to reach your marketing potential is by maximizing your digital presence authentically through employee advocacy.
No matter the size of your company, there are people in your organization who are passionate about what you do. They might not promote your initiatives on social media yet because they need you to guide them. You need to show them the right way to promote each message, when to do it, which platform to do it on, and how exactly to go about it. They could be worried about writing a good caption or doing something on social media that the company won’t approve of. This is where employee advocacy comes in.
Employee advocacy is about enabling people in your organization to easily get involved in your brand’s initiatives. The purpose is to authentically share your message, and increase your digital presence and reach across social networks like Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or websites including Quora, Glassdoor and Indeed.
Why Employee Advocacy Works
Employee advocacy is an effective way to extend the reach of your brand because your employees have access to an audience that your brand does not — their former colleagues, industry contacts, friends, family members and more. These people a a part of your employees’ network, but might not follow your brand.
In addition, according to research, your employees may be considered more trustworthy than your brand or even its executives. Whenever your brand posts a blog, a message on social media, or anything else, it’s viewed the same as an advertisement. It’s inauthentic, self-promotional, and your audience is skeptical of it. However, when your employees share a message, it can be viewed as more trustworthy and authentic. This is because people trust other people more than they trust brands.
What’s in It for Your Employees?
This is a crucial question to answer in order for your employee advocacy program to be successful. These programs can enhance your brand, but what’s the benefit to your employees?
Enhanced thought leadership and credibility: Your employees will show off their knowledge and credibility on industry trends, challenges, and other topics, and they’ll be viewed as micro-influencers of your industry. This will increase their social media presence, reach, credibility, and the number of valuable industry connections.
Personal and professional brand enhancement: Employee advocacy helps employees boost their personal brand. This is great for their career, but it’s also good for your organization since they’ll occasionally promote your initiatives. Employee advocacy makes it incredibly easy to do, and each action you request employees to carry out is completely optional. Employees have to opt into the program, and they only have to respond to requests that they want to respond to.
These are just some of the benefits of employee advocacy. You can learn a lot from other marketers who’ve already started and maintained a successful program.
Learn More at AMPlify, the Employee Advocacy Conference
A great way to meet marketers who’ve run a successful program and hear their best practices is at an employee advocacy conference.
AMPlify, the Employee Advocacy and Engagement Conference is the only conference that focuses on employee advocacy. This is not a vendor conference. People giving sessions are not pushing products.
The conference is sponsored by GaggleAMP, but many of the speakers giving sessions work for companies that are customers of competing products. They’re not pushing the products they use either, but are instead talking about strategies they use, challenges they faced, and how they solved their problems.
They’ll tell you what worked for them and what didn’t work for them so you can be as prepared as possible before you implement an employee advocacy program in your own organization. Even if you’ve started an employee advocacy program, you’ll learn new tips, tricks and processes to improve your program.
Speakers from a variety of companies of different sizes and in different industries will explain exactly how their programs work for them.
Employee advocacy is a great marketing tactic to use to boost your social media reach and achieve your marketing goals. Learning from those who’ve done it is a great way to ensure that you’ll be successful.
We invite you to attend AMPlify in Boston on June 11-12.
Editor’s Note: As the official media partner of the AMPlify Conference, we are very pleased to offer our readers a 50% discount to attend AMPlify. Register here by June 9th using discount code JEMAMP!
