4 things to consider when implementing an employee advocacy program

A successful employee advocacy initiative cannot be completely transactional and must place engagement as their top priority. An approach where we ask employees to advocate, or "we encourage employees to share this content" are common demands will work, but only in short term. You should show your employees the benefits of becoming ambassadors of your brand, and clearly, state "what it is in it for them" it is the foundation for any employee advocacy initiative that aims for long-term success.

Once the benefits of becoming a brand ambassador are understood by the employees, the challenge is to make this practice a regular habit. Engagement is the time that your employees spend advocating for your brand. Based on our knowledge, user-friendly accessible technology, meaningful content and periodic offline gatherings are three aspects you would want to bear in mind for engagement.

Five things to keep in mind while implementing employee advocacy program1) Define a simple but necessary governance model

An employee advocacy programme needs Guidelines, roles, and accountability, like any other action that involves employees across different departments. It should be friendly enough for every participant in the programme to understand the message. Creating an infographic or a short video with the main ideas is quite impactful.

Choose a team to own the programme and be accountable for it. They will become the champions, the advocates of the advocates, the people who play a crucial role to get the board involved and to guarantee the initiative moves forward.

2. Run Test in "Beta Mode"

Recommendation speaks for itself. Like the ones tech giants are used to running when experimenting with new features, beta versions let you set the picture. These help you understand the participation dynamics of your advocates. They should adjust the time your team responsible for the programme must allocate, you must outline your content strategy and determine the need for information or content flows.

3. Keep a growth hacking-like approach

The whole point of your programme is growth make the digital presence of your people grow. On the other hand, the brand must also grow in exposure, recognition, and leadership. Increased engagement, conversion, retention, all measurable variables, are the outcome of a growth hacking-like approach.

4. Distribute a curriculum to help brand advocate

We understand curriculum as a range of training and coaching sessions for your committed people to become better brand advocates. This influences engagement and helps avoid transactional nature employee advocacy programmes tend to adopt if their champions do not pay close attention to. It also helps some employees get digitally ready and feel even more comfortable when sharing content on social media.

An effective employee advocacy tool can be of immense help to boost a company's social media reach which in turn assists in driving organic traffic to your website. Employees can also become brand advocates for the company as most consumers believe more on the review of their family and friends when purchasing a product or service rather than influencers. This is going to be the next big thing in social media marketing.

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