J.W. Marriott, Jr. once said, “Take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of your customers.” This statement holds undeniable truth.
When employees feel valued and appreciated, their performance improves. This results in enhanced customer service, heightened diligence in their work, and proactive contributions to business growth out of gratitude.
That’s why implementing a reliable employee advocacy strategy is crucial.
With the right approach, your chances of running a successful employee advocacy program significantly increase.
If you’re looking for proven strategies to bolster your employee advocacy campaigns, then continue reading.
In this guide, we’ll share several tips to improve your brand visibility and engagement.
What you will learn
- What is an employee advocacy strategy and why is it important?
- Essential components of an employee advocacy strategy
- Make your employee advocacy strategy a success
What is an employee advocacy strategy and why is it important?
An employee advocacy strategy is a well-developed plan to encourage and empower employees to promote and share company content, messages, and values across social media platforms.
The strategy is designed to leverage your employees’ genuine voices to boost brand reach, presence, and credibility.
Developing an effective employee advocacy strategy can help your company with the following.
- Determine the methods and tactics to help you achieve your employee advocacy program objectives
- Ensure a flowing stream of authentic advocacy content
- Encourage and empower employees to share content ideas and insights
- Establish systems and methods to track and measure your employee advocacy program’s performance and achievements, identify gaps, and make improvements
Essential components of an employee advocacy strategy
Develop a strong employee advocacy strategy by including the following crucial factors.
Advocacy content planning and development
A huge part of employee advocacy program implementation is content publishing and sharing.
To ensure seamless content creation and distribution, plan and develop what, when, and how to post for maximum audience engagement.
One of the best ways to streamline your content planning, development, creation, and publishing is to use reliable tools such as Vista Social.
The social media management platform offers features such as social media publishing, engagement management, listening, analytics, and more.
Vista Social’s Employee Advocacy feature has handy tools to make your advocacy program implementation a breeze.
You can create your advocacy program on Vista Social in a few steps.
Then, you can easily add advocates by manually sending them individual email invitations or uploading a CSV file containing your employees’ names and email addresses.
Once done, you can create your advocacy post and schedule it to be available for viewing and posting by your advocates.
Fun fact: Use Vista Social’s AI Assistant to instantly generate or tweak your captions and taglines, including relevant hashtags for your advocacy posts.
You can also include regular social media posts created through the Publisher in your Advocacy posts.
After creating your post, switch on the Advocacy toggle, set the specific advocacy delay hour or minutes, and you’re good to go.
Employee training and empowerment
Not all employees are experts in using social media platforms and sharing content.
Plus, your employees or advocates must understand tactics such as using hashtags and optimal posting times to maximize post engagement.
That said, ensure you train employees on your social media content posting and strategy to increase the chances of meeting your advocacy program’s goals.
Below are a few tips to help you train and empower your employees.
- Run inclusive and easy-to-understand social media and content-posting training, especially for less tech-savvy people
- Share boundaries and guidelines for sharing content externally, such as on social media and other online channels
- Allow for some creative freedom in your guidelines. This way, your employees won’t be too restricted and can exercise their creativity while still working within your brand and company guidelines
- Include practical tips to help your advocates engage with social media followers
- Provide a space where advocates can ask questions and get timely responses from your marketing or employee advocacy team. You can also offer accessible resources for employee advocacy FAQs and answers
Offering incentives and rewards
The only way to sustain your employee advocacy program is for employees to keep sharing content and engaging with audiences.
That said, you must find ways to encourage your employees to keep advocating for your brand.
One of the best ways to do this is to incentivize your employees’ efforts through rewards and gifts.
Put more weight on your incentives by going beyond recognizing their efforts and offering tangible gifts.
For example, you can give top employee advocates gift cards or cash prizes.
You can also gamify your employee advocacy program and weave contest elements to stir friendly competition among your advocates.
Set up leaderboards to showcase your top contributors and their current scores and standing.
Use Vista Social’s employee advocacy feature to track top contributors and advocate performance and ROI.
Also, consider doing a draw to give all participants a fair chance at getting rewards and incentives.
Gathering and using feedback to improve your advocacy program
Employee advocates implement the main aspect of your program, making them the best people to ask about what’s working or not.
Gather feedback and leverage the information to fine-tune and improve your employee advocacy program with these tips.
- Encourage open communication by fostering a culture where your employees’ feedback is welcomed, appreciated, and crucial for shaping your employee advocacy program
- Run regular short surveys to understand how your employees feel about your advocacy program. Keep your questions relevant and focused to gather actionable feedback
- Host feedback sessions and focus group discussions to help you drill down into employee advocate feedback. You can also do individual interviews to get more in-depth feedback, especially with employees who are more comfortable sharing in one-on-one settings
- Use dedicated tools or apps to streamline feedback sharing, collection, and collating
- Create a feedback loop to show employees that their comments and suggestions help improve your employee advocacy program. Show that actions based on their feedback were taken and communicate the changes to highlight their input’s impact
Listen to the Boosting Brand Visibility: How Employee Advocacy Transforms Marketing podcast for more time-tested tips.
Make your employee advocacy strategy a success
Running a successful employee advocacy program doesn’t have to be overly complex.
With the right strategy, tools, and careful execution, you can achieve meaningful success in your employee advocacy campaigns.
Use the strategies shared in this guide. As for your go-to software for running a successful campaign, use Vista Social.
With Vista Social’s advanced social media marketing and employee advocacy features, you can simplify and streamline your campaigns.