How to Start an Employee Advocacy Program

If you are unsure on how to start your employee advocacy program, don’t worry, this is the blog for you.

With the pandemic and influx of remote working and social distancing, there has been a huge increase in the amount of people online and using social media. This has resulted in employee advocacy on social media becoming one of the most efficient and effective ways to improve business performance on so many levels – from HR to sales, marketing and social – with benefits available for the entire organisation.

When we shop online, how important are reviews to you? I know for a fact when I research products on Amazon, the customer reviews have a huge part to play in my purchasing decision.

Here are some key steps that will help you empower your employees and lay the foundations for your employee advocacy program:

Choose Your Brand Ambassadors

Now, you have two options here - and it comes to personal preference and business culture.

The easiest thing would be to enrol the whole business into your program, and hope for the best. Or, you could be more strategic, and choose the people who you know will adopt this program and excel. In turn, this will act as a proof of concept to the rest of the organisation, hopefully able to remove any doubt that may prevent them from adopting the program too.

You can also start small with a test run to iron out any issues when it comes to the big launch. Take on board how you plan to enrol people and make sure that the program is positioned correctly, and the benefits are clear. It’s also a good time to trial tech and tools and to make sure it’s as easy and as frictionless as possible for your users.

Whatever approach you take, make sure your key personnel are on board, championing the program.

Define Your Goals

What are you looking to gain from your employee advocacy program? It’s important to have clear goals so you can measure and show ROI.  A few common goals are to:

- Increase website traffic

- Improve organic reach

- Get more engagement on blog posts

- Get more shares on social posts

- Understand which content topics are performing the best

- Lower ad spend

- Increase the number of conversions for a specific landing page

It's important to have your goals outlined before you start your program and make sure that the KPIs you choose are clear and relevant for your business.

Write a Content Strategy

Content is king, and its important you have the right content and topics to feed your employee advocacy program - this means an ideal mixture of in-house content and third party content.

Remember, each employee will have different requirements when it comes to content; some may be focused on industries and sectors, while others may want to share more of their own content.

Format of content is also key, so mix it up with blogs, sound bites, vlogs, animations and infographics. You need to give your advocates a bank of content that educates, engages, and entertains their networks.

Remember the ‘Why’

You need to get a buy-in from your employees, and the only way to do this is to onboard them correctly, explain to them why you are going to launch this program and the benefits it has to offer them.

Show them how it can enhance their personal brand, sales, and career. Plus, it always helps to incentive them, so adding a form of gamification to your program is always a winner.

Employ the Best Employee Advocacy Tool

To make the planning and implementation of your program successful, you need the right tools to make it possible.

One such platform is our very own Origin.Blurbs.

Blurbs is a single voice that can be heard be everyone in the company. It takes the job of pushing all your content to all your employees and lets them share it with their networks across any social channel, with one easy-to-use tool.

Everything you need to efficiently manage your content and social strategy is available at the click of a button – from analytics, permissions and reporting – you can see exactly what each employee is sharing and how that is being received and shared in their social networks and channels, enabling you to refine and develop your content strategy.

Put in the Work

Whatever tool you choose to use for your program, it’s important to give your advocates and owners of the program the correct training. Not everyone is digitally native, and some people may shy away from new technology and tools. Invest the time with those individuals so that your entire team are confident when it comes to using the features.

Ask for Feedback

Always be learning. Its key to keep asking your advocates for feedback. The more engaged they are in the program, the more they can enhance it. Keep dialogue open, and be open to changes and tweaks that enhance the user experience and the performance of your program.