Employee Advocacy: What, Why, & How To Leverage It

To get started, if you are new to the concept of what employee advocacy is? Why does your brand need it? How can you leverage it for your brand? Then we have a short yet explanatory guide to help you with it. 

As marketing is becoming more humanized, realistic, and transparent with time, brands are leaving no stones unturned to promote themselves and capture consumers. 

Consumers tend to associate themselves with & invest in brands that are known to be trustworthy, credible, exciting, relatable, and credible. And this is where the role of employee advocacy comes into the picture. 

What Is Employee Advocacy?

In simple words, Employee advocacy means the promotion of a brand/business done by its employees & staff through their positive word of mouth and employee-generated content. 

Employee advocacy means when the workforce of an organization sharing positive & fruitful content about the company’s culture, environment, products, services, campaigns, leaders, people, etc. on their digital profiles, mainly social media networks.

Importantly, it can be managed & organized, or it can be informal & organic like any employee talking about the work culture or employees sharing new product updates, etc. 

According to Lensa “Employee advocacy is a trending terminology among the brands, their marketing pros, human resource teams, etc.” But why do you need it for your brand?

Benefits Of Employee Generated Content

1. Brand Awareness & Exposure On Social Platforms

Your marketing campaigns are your paid advertising, but employee advocacy and employee-generated content on social media help you gain organic exposure to a vast audience. 

Every individual in an organization has their own network of friends & family on their social profiles, and employee advocacy provides exposure to this unique and immense audience through the content of your employees.

For example – if you have 500 employees and each of these employees has 300 unique friends (average) on their social profile so the brand can maximize its reach, awareness, and exposure by 15000 new consumers. 

2. Enhance Brand Image & Personality

Brand image & personality is hugely becoming an influential factor is capturing consumers and driving conversions for any brand. Many people look for a brand that resonates well with their values & ideas while making purchase investments. 

So, It can help you uplift your brand image by highlighting how your brand works, its mission & vision, the process it uses, the quality of products, internal efforts for better customer experiences, etc. 

All these will help in creating a compelling & beneficial brand image among the people through the words of your employees that can boost brand growth. 

Case Study: QPS Employment Uses Taggbox: Goes Big On Event Engagement At Annual Event

3. Build Trust, Authenticity & Credibility For Brand

People tend to trust the words of other people over the marketing campaigns as it is more realistic, relatable, and authentic comparatively. Also, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, a company’s employees are more trusted than the CEOs. 

Where trust, authenticity, and credibility are a few of the most important elements that consumers look for before investing in any brand. Therefore, it is important to leverage your employees to build a trusted & reliable brand as it also helps in consumer loyalty & retention. 

It is very important to ask your employees how they actually feel in your organization and by doing this you can retain them much better. Many companies use employee survey platforms to make their task easy.

4. Attract The Best Talent By Showcasing Brand Culture

When it comes to a brand or an organization’s long-term success, the forerunners are the employees of that brand. Therefore, it becomes essential that you attract & retain the best talent in your organization. 

But the best talents also look for brands where their work will be valued, brand’s work culture, policies, benefits, etc. So, advocacy can help you showcase your brand’s work culture and attract the best talent to your team. 

It will also help in building in improving employee engagement, brand loyalty, and retention, along with a reduction in the recruitment costs. As per new recruitment trends 2024 of workers’ unions, with 70% of workers saying they are interested in joining one, you might consider adding employee advocacy to the union program.”

5. Boost Employee Engagement At Workplace

Employee engagement at the workplace defines the quality of work and the productivity of an organization. So, if employees are becoming advocates for your brand, it will automatically increase their engagement. 

As advocacy comes out, their positive experiences and rewards & recognitions that they will receive for the advocacy. Thus, it will help in making the employees more passionate, engaged, and dedicated to their workplace.

Holger Sindbaek, the founder of the classic gaming platform Online Solitaire, says, “In our team, we’ve found a unique way to boost employee engagement: we turn them into brand ambassadors. Whether working remotely or in the office, every employee is encouraged to share their own ‘High Score Moments‘ at work on their social media. It’s not just about the game; it’s about the culture, the challenges, and the wins we experience as a team. This simple act has turned our employees into our biggest advocates, and engagement and camaraderie have never been higher.”

Employee-Generated Content For Employee Advocacy

1. Encourage & Get Employee-Generated Content (EGC)

The primary element that is necessary for leveraging advocacy is to have a hub of positive, relevant, and valuable employee-generated content about your brand. 

So, it is essential that you encourage your employees to share more meaningful content about your brand on social media and other digital platforms that perfectly display employee advocacy for your organization. 

2. Activate All Digital Platforms For EGC

If we are talking about content sharing, it does not only social media networks, but you should go beyond that by activating other digital platforms like websites, review platforms, internal communication networks, etc. 

As social media serves a different kind of content to their audience and some of your employee-generated content might not be the perfect choice for your employee advocacy. Thus, you can bring EGC from all other relevant digital networks, especially internal communication networks.

3. Set Up An Employee Advocacy Program

Employee advocacy programs are a well-organized way of leveraging advocacy for brand growth while ensuring compliance with specific laws governing labor relations. In this program, you can include goals & objectives that you wish to achieve from the program.

Your employee advocacy program should address the following aspects:

• The intensity of employee-generated content like time investment, daily updates, etc. 
• Mention the reasons why the employees are indulging in advocacy like benefits, gains, strategies, etc. 
• Key guidelines about what is to be done & how they can do it (The do’s & don’ts)
• Rewards & recognitions should be included for the advocacy
• Any additional requirements & guidelines, if any. 

4. Find A Uniform Solution To Leverage Employee Advocacy

The solution could be a tool or technology that you can leverage to turn your employee advocacy program into brand growth & success. The solution should be an all-in-one that can unify your advocacy efforts. 

The tool or technology should be able to collect & display employee-generated content with many more functionalities to make it easier for your brand to generate buzz, engagement, and conversions through employee advocacy. 

Taggbox – The Best Solution For Employee Advocacy

Discussing the solution to leverage employee advocacy, Taggbox is the best option to do so. 

Taggbox is a UGC tool that helps you to collect, curate, and customize content from digital platforms & display it across different marketing channels like embed employee generated content on website, events, digital screens, emails, digital signages, and more. 

So, you can use Taggbox to collect & curate your valuable employee-generated content into one feed, be it from social media networks or even internal communication networks like Slack, Yammer, Workplace, etc. 

Also, you can customize & moderate the employee generated content for your employee advocacy campaign. And the in-built functionality to display this campaign can help you drive brand trust, traffic, engagement, and conversions. 

Not just for external campaigns, but you can leverage Taggbox to boost your internal communications and increase employee engagement at the workplace. 

Here’s how you can do it

• Connect your internal communication network with your Taggbox account
• Connect your social media channels also (if you wish) to fetch content
• Ask your employee to share their content on social media channels or fetch EGC from the internal communication network 
• Display your curated content on your website or in your office space through digital screens or your corporate events

Conclusion

If you manage properly, employee advocacy can be a great support to your marketing activities to drive brand success and growth. As employee advocacy can be extremely beneficial, it also comes with some challenges that you need to manage effectively to reap the benefits.

Having a proper advocacy program, encouraging & motivating the employees, leveraging the employee engagement & advocacy tool, and maintaining the authenticity of employee advocacy will help get the best returns from it.