5 Reasons You Should Invest in Employee Advocacy

In today’s world, consumers are constantly in the process of analyzing their options – be it surfing on the net, watching youtube videos, chatting up their friends on social media. The point is, consumers today, are consistently blown up with brand advertising messages. There’s a lot of clutter online with more and more new posts, blogs and articles coming up every minute and navigating through that white noise to reach your audience could get really difficult. That’s the reason employee advocacy is such a strong force when it comes to generating leads, building brand-awareness and eventually doing sales. Brand advocacy actually helps you improve every aspect of your business. We’re going to discuss 6 compelling reasons your business needs employee advocacy. 1. The reason behind cutting through all the clutterResearchers, on several occasions, have proved that consumers are the carriers of your brand’s message. People trust other people more than they trust brands that send out marketing messages. About 88% of consumers tend to trust online reviews just the way they trust personal recommendations. Consumers need to be exposed to your brand on social media. But they want to hear about you from another source – your customers, partners, employees, etc. This is where your employees come in.Employees can be an extremely powerful asset but are often overlooked and neglected in the company’s content strategy. Employees help in conveying your brand’s vision. 2. Customer or employee advocacy – which is preferred?Customer advocacy could be great but requires a lot of hard work and is a little risky. It requires customer’s compliance to participate, create and share for which you need to keep them happy. Despite the high investments involved, customer advocates can deliver for big businesses. Your employees, on the other hand, have more of a reason to be your advocates – If your company benefits, so do they. Employee advocacy is a process that goes on in many companies regardless of whether it’s being managed or not. 47% of the employees communicate with customers online by responding to queries, troubleshooting for them or through other means.50% of employees share company content such as videos and pictures even without having to tell them. Most advocacy platforms aim at only one type of advocacy, ignoring the others and forcing companies to spend more money and other resources to manage two sides of the same coin.Very few advocacy platforms help you to leverage the potential of both categories of advocates and use their synergy to get to more customers with trustworthy messages. 3. How employee advocacy adds value to your businessYour workforce is a critical resource that can be leveraged to benefit your company. The investment for an employee advocacy program, as discussed earlier, is a lot lesser than that for customer advocacy.However, the results are fascinating: Online Reputation Management – According to an interesting survey, 6 out of every 10 employees will defend their employers to people who raise a finger against them. If managed well, you could bump up this number by a notch or two.Creating and Distributing online content – Your own employees are capable of creating great content and distributing it to social media cheaper than ever.Boost in sales – As little as a 12% gain in employee advocacy could skyrocket your sales. Doing so through another could possibly cost a lot more. Greater reach – Your potential reach has a direct correlation with every employee advocate to include their social connections. This number will surely be more than what the company actually expects to reach organically. In fact, 90% of the people targeted by your employees behave heard about your brand for the first time.A boost in authenticity – There’s no authenticity with a company social media account. People trust other people more and the reason for that is authenticity. A message put out by an employee advocate will be amplified by real word of mouth communication.Investment is minimum –