You’re planning to start an employee advocacy program but you’re not sure how to pitch your project to your executive team? We’ve gathered in this blog post key insights and metrics that will help you to build a business case for employee advocacy.

Employee advocacy is gaining traction: one of Altimeter’s studies highlights that 90% of brands surveyed have already launched or are planning to start an employee advocacy program, and you may be considering implementing a similar project at your workplace.

You have researched the benefits for the company and for the employees, you know how employee advocacy works and you may have already planned your onboarding process. However, you still need to get the executive team’s approval before rolling out your program!

Let’s go through key insights and stats you can share with C-level leaders involved in the buying process to get them on board:

Employee Advocacy Boosts You Internal Communications

If you want your employees to engage with your content and share it with their own networks, you have to make it easy for them to find it. That’s why you’ll need to use a proper tool such as an internal content hub to launch and scale up your employee advocacy program.

Your employees shouldn’t be spending time looking for company or industry-related content they can share on social media. Think about it: the typical knowledge worker spends 2.5 hours, or roughly 30% of their time a day searching for information, either because they don’t know where to find the information they need or simply because they don’t have access to it.

haiilo employee working in office

In parallel, employees spend a total of 17 hours a week reading and sending work emails and 30 percent of these emails are neither urgent nor important. In organizations where remote work is common and teams are geographically dispersed, it is highly challenging for employees to catch up with the company news. With an internal content hub, you can easily gather in one place all the company news, key insights, and any third-party content that your employees may be interested in. That way you save your employees’ time as they don’t need to search for information and content they need.

By using an internal content hub, not only can you manage your employee advocacy program in an effective way by filtering content based on employees’ roles in the company and their language and topic preferences, but you also improve internal communications and employee productivity by making sure that the right content finds the right employee at the right time.

Engaged Brand Ambassadors Support Your Content Marketing Strategy

Whether your marketing objectives are improving brand awareness, increasing website traffic, building brand trust or generating inbound leads, your employees can help you to get a higher ROI!

When your employees share your content with their own networks, they can reach a higher audience than you could reach by posting your content through your brand’s social media channels. That’s because employees’ collective networks are on average 10 times larger than the company’s they’re working at. Hence, posts shared by employees earn 561 percent more reach than when they are shared through the brand’s social media channels!

In parallel, by sharing company-related content through their own accounts, your employees help you to outsmart algorithm changes that lower brand’s organic reach on social media platforms. For example, Facebook is developing new algorithms that prioritize interactions between friends and relatives and these updated algorithms affect business pages’ organic reach.

However, marketing is not only about improving brand awareness and website traffic, it’s also building an authentic brand. When your employees share engaging content such as videos, customer testimonials, blog posts or any company news with their own words, they drive engagement all while adding a human touch to your brand. And let’s face it: people trust more your employees’ opinions than your brand messaging!

Take Your Social Selling Strategy to the Next Level by Empowering Your Sales Team on Social Media

61% of companies engaged in social selling report a positive impact on their revenue growth. Social selling tactics are more effective than traditional sales techniques such as cold calling, but these tactics are quite demanding: they require sales representative to constantly find and share interesting content with their sales leads. And that’s because content is critical when it comes to having engaging conversations with leads: salespeople have to share unique content that their leads haven’t come across earlier to stay ahead of the competition.

haiilo employee working in office

By launching an employee advocacy program, you help your sales representatives to find value-added content they can share with their leads all while supporting their personal branding efforts.

Sales professionals who are engaged in an employee advocacy program select the content they’re going to share with their leads and they also personalize their posts rather than posting random company-related content. That way they stand up from the crowd by positioning themselves as industry experts.

Your Employees Can Help You to Attract the Right Talent to Your Organization

Posting job ads to your own website or job boards is definitely not enough to build a talent pool and even less to attract the right talent to your organization!

Job seekers research companies online before submitting their application. 86 percent of younger job seekers who are in the first 10 years of their careers use social media in their job search. They are not that much interested in marketing materials. Instead, they usually search for company reviews, comments from customers but also from employees working at the companies they’re planning to send their application to. You may then want to encourage your employees to build their footprint on social media!

In parallel, your employees can help you to broadcast your company culture on social media. According to Gallup, high-quality job candidates are attracted to companies that match who they are and what they believe in. By posting posts related to their onboarding experience, pictures taken during team building activities, or any content related to key events taking place at the company, employees show what it’s like to work at your company. That way, they help you to attract the right culture fit for your company and to avoid the hidden costs of employee turnover!

What’s Next?

Once you get your executive team’s approval for launching an employee advocacy program at your workplace, you’ll need to communicate to your colleagues how employee advocacy can benefit them in terms of productivity, personal branding and professional growth to make sure that everyone is on board!

Haiilo Manager Haiilo Manager

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