Thrive in 5: Creating a Culture of Employee Advocacy That Benefits Your Business & People

This week we're talking about employee advocacy, which is the idea of empowering your people to promote your brand.

When done right, it helps your employees create genuine business connections that positively impact sales, customer retention, brand exposure, talent attraction and talent retention.

Creating a culture of employee advocacy benefits your employees too. Employees who practice advocacy become more engaged, more productive and often have an enhanced personal brand.

So, everybody wins.

At Charlton Morris, employee advocacy has been an essential part of our culture for many years. In this newsletter, we want to share 5 tips to help any business get started:

#1 Find out what people care about.

Creating a culture of advocacy always starts with finding out what you need to shout about. What do people care about? What makes your brand unique and special?

If your advocacy campaign is focused on attracting top talent, then you need to figure out why your employees love working for the business.

Don't make assumptions, speak to real people. Why did they first join? Why do they continue to love working for you? Use engagement surveys, focus groups, exit interviews and feedback from former employees.

Not only will you discover new ways to improve your employee experience, but the answers to these questions should also inform what you speak about in your advocacy campaigns.

#2 Find your biggest fans.

A great way to identify your top advocates is to use analytics tools on social media to track the reach, engagement and conversion rates of the content shared by your employees.

By discovering those who will be early adopters to the idea of an advocacy campaign, you can kickstart your employee advocacy program and understand where the gaps are between those who are active and successful on social media, and those who are not.

#3 Get your people (a.k.a. advocates) onside.

Nearly 50% of brands find it difficult to keep people motivated in employee advocacy campaigns. That's why it’s so important to take the time to communicate its value throughout.

For example, talk about the value of personal branding. 86% of employees in firms with a formal employee advocacy program say that their involvement on social media for professional purposes has helped their career.

#4 Give your people the tools for success.

With employee advocacy, your people become your brand’s voice. What they say online or offline reflects on the business. So, it’s important to give them the tools to get it right.

To be effective, your messaging needs to be consistent. So, have a clear social media policy that defines the company guidelines for online communication. This helps to reduce confusion and makes people feel more confident about sharing company-related content.

Social media training can be a game-changer too; helping your team understand the fundamentals of how to use the biggest platforms in a B2B context.

#5 Create exciting content that people want to share.

By now you’ve got an engaged army of employees. But people won’t share content they’re not excited about. And your audience won’t care about content if it’s boring.

Create content around your people. Tell stories. Have fun. Depending on the employer brand you’re trying to project, a super high production value video might not be necessary too. Great photography with an impactful story can be just as effective. Have a look at our recent projects here.

When it comes to employee advocacy, this is just the beginning. We've not even been able to scratch the surface on measuring campaign success and ROI. If you'd like to learn more about this, feel free to give me a message at kris.holland@charltonmorris.com.

Thrive in Five is our weekly blog designed to help your people and business thrive. If you have a topic that you'd like to suggest for a future edition of #thriveinfive, send us an email to thriveinfive@charltonmorris.com.