Employee advocates. Just another corporate buzz strategy that’ll die out in a year, right? Actually, no.
As a business, your employees are your most valuable and accessible asset. Companies are driven by the work of their employees, who create room for growth and experimentation through their efforts. Your employees can also help to promote your business to the wider world, however, and that’s where the concept of employee advocacy comes in.
What is employee advocacy?
In simple terms, employee advocacy is the process of using your current staff to promote your company. This can be a concentrated campaign with specifically crafted language or something as simple as a post on social media. They don’t need to be self-congratulatory or overly corporate; employee advocacy is generally a much subtler process designed to make a long-term impression. Pushing employee advocacy too far will only have negative effects.
Employee advocacy can take many forms. Traditionally, it would spread through word-of-mouth on conference floors and at events, as people networked with peers and talked about how much they enjoyed their work. Marketing is more sophisticated today though, and there are numerous channels through which an employee can become an advocate for your company.
We know how important customer reviews and testimonials are, but personal insight from employees is often even stronger. Today, brand advocacy traditionally comes in two forms, both with similar yet distinctly different goals.
Brand advocacy for acquiring business
In theory, your employees are your most knowledgeable and passionate audience online. Their voice can be amplified to improve the visibility of your brand, bringing what you do to the attention of new customers and clients.
If an employee shares a piece of content across their personal social media, they’re shining a positive light on your brand to all their followers, whether they’re potential customers or work in the same industry. The fact they work for the company will come into it in two ways: followers either won’t know, in which case it is a free piece of organic advertising to a unique audience, or they’ll see it as enthusiasm towards the content and the business as a whole.
Employee advocacy adds a personal touch to an advertising campaign that would traditionally be glossed over by a potential client or customer. Rather than a bland ad designed to appeal to as wide a range of people as possible, you have a very person-specific piece of promotion, featuring a link to your website complimented by a personal story.
Brand advocacy for attracting new talent
There’s been a shift in recent years in how companies hire new talent and try to develop their workplace culture. Rather than relying on traditional methods like job postings and recruitment agencies, many companies are turning to newer, more innovative ways to attract new talent.
Brands who previously found employee satisfaction secondary are now attempting to foster a strong community feel. The problem with trying to promote this kind of structure in recruitment ads and flashy promotional material is that it comes across as just that — promotional. And inauthentic, for that matter.
A much stronger way of selling the positives of working for your business and the culture you’ve created is employee advocacy. Just like customers trust other customers, applicants trust existing employees. 
It’s not enough to just build an effective strategy to promote this; you actually have to have it in place before you do. Employee advocacy starts with a great culture, and the types of work perks and conditions in which people can do their jobs to the best of their abilities. These benefits need to be unique to the role and allow an employee to thrive.
In a largely remote-first world, of course, flexibility is now seen as an essential part of workplace culture — whether that means autonomy over working schedules or the ability to work from any physical location, or both.
If your team has a demanding schedule, for example, consider offering them unlimited annual leave like Visualsoft does with its staff. And if your team is fully remote, you can theoretically allow them to work from anywhere (hiring in Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, or any other exotic location isn’t out of the question if you use an employer of record service). If you offer genuine benefits like this, your employees will want to shout about them.
Think about how you’re presenting the attitude and culture of your workplace. A corporate style post from an employee praising what you do may come across as forced, while a blog that subtly includes mentions of why they enjoy working there does the job of your campaign more discreetly. The best way to improve talent acquisition is to not push things too hard, and create natural-feeling content.
Why does it matter to your business?
Brand advocacy from your customers is one of the best ways to create an organic stream of positive content about your company. Employee advocacy works in much the same way, and it can provide a number of benefits and quick-wins.
Provides marketing opportunities
Employee social media accounts and personal channels create a unique opportunity to spread the good word about a brand and its company culture. They may have a more diverse network of followers than the business they work for, giving you a drastically different reach into new markets.
Even if their reach isn’t enormous, the authenticity of their reach is worth the time investment. It may enable you to gradually grow your followers by encouraging social media users who may not otherwise be interested in your brand to engage with your content.
Guides sales
Whether you’re operating in a B2B or B2C environment, employee advocacy can be a great tool for driving sales.
‘Sales talk’ is generally not taken as genuine, so to have an employee back up that sales talk is a great boost for anyone unsure about taking the plunge. This kind of marketing doesn’t just increase the number of overall sales, but it can shorten the sales cycle and remove buyer doubt.
Company culture
You want to enjoy where you work, and make sure the people you’re working with enjoy their work too, don’t you? And not just for the purpose of creating employee advocacy, but to create an environment where that advocacy happens naturally.
If you focus on creating an environment everyone enjoys and wants to talk about, you’ll also have the knock-on effect of improving productivity and seeing your business grow from word of mouth. Stock up on that branded swag to give out and plan those company-wide day trips.
Employee advocacy is a brilliant avenue for any business to explore, especially one with a positive pre-existing culture. It can have a significant impact on your marketing strategy and lead to an increase in business in a way few other campaigns can.
