Your employees can be great brand ambassadors for your company. You can achieve all kinds of marketing goals if you build an employee advocacy program. 

From supporting employee health & well-being to creating a positive workspace, businesses can take care of several elements to boost employee loyalty. In return, these employees work as unique voices to generate exposure for your company. 

But how can you encourage employees to talk about your brand on social media? 

When you build an employee advocacy program and implement it successfully, you can achieve that.

Here is a quick guide to build an effective advocacy program for your company to boost awareness, generate leads, and drive business growth.

What is an Employee Advocacy Program?

An employee advocacy program is a way for employees to contribute to your marketing strategy. It is a simple yet effective marketing tactic where employees individually talk about their company, its products or services, policies, and what sets it apart. 

This program will contribute to your market development strategy and prove to create a successful organization eventually. 

When you build an employee advocacy program, it can amplify your company’s brand awareness, acting as social proof.

You can get your marketing team to work with professionals with an online HR degree program to craft a highly effective employee advocacy program.

Steps to Build an Employee Advocacy Program Successfully

In 2022, move your marketing tactics a notch higher to boost the company’s reputation, by building an employee advocacy program.

Here are the five must-follow steps to build an employee advocacy program. 

1. Define Your Goals

Let’s start with the most fundamental question:

Why do you need to build an employee advocacy program? What are the specific goals that you want to achieve?

Answer these questions by defining your goals and KPIs before you build an employee advocacy program.

Having a clear vision is vital to building such a program. The key is to be specific and work on the details.

For instance, you can use your team to build your company’s image as a positive employer and attract the top talent as well as retain the existing employees.

Brainstorm with your core team to determine the goals as well as KPIs, and focus the efforts of your employees in the same direction. Determining the goals will also help in measuring and analyzing the success of your program. 

2. Train Your Team 

When you build an employee advocacy program, you need to invest adequate time and resources to train your employees. 

Training sessions can cover topics ranging from how to properly use social media to details about the company policy. You also need to inform them of the goals you have set, and how you are planning to execute the program. 

You can educate your employees about do’s and don’ts, best practices, and everything else which will make them confident of driving results to your business. Don’t forget to train them on how to use the lead generation tools that they may be required to use.

That brings us to the next point.

3. Back Your Team with the Right Tools 

It’s a highly competitive world out there and your employees need additional support. That can be provided in the form of useful tools that help your team and also help you build an employee program and execute it with ease. 

What can you use? 

Opt for a team communication tool, telecommunication system, project management tool, and a research tool to equip your team. Give them also all the necessary tools to boost their day-to-day productivity and efficiency.

Chances are, your team already has access to such tools. If so, you should work towards integrating them and making the whole experience easy and fun for your team. Apart from this, you can use the online form by using an online form builder tool to get employees’ feedback.

4. Incentivize Your Team 

Yes, your employees would love to receive some incentives for advocating your brand on social media to boost your brand awareness. When you reward your employees, it encourages them to join the program and take the job of being a brand advocate seriously. 

Monetary incentives are the most preferred way to reward your employees for promoting your brand on social media. 

Along with a monetary incentive, employees will also feel motivated if you recognize and appreciate their efforts. The right kind of engagement and incentives can be useful for employee retention as well.

5. Monitor and Analyze the Progress of Your Program 

As with any marketing campaign, when you build an employee advocacy program, you should regularly monitor its performance. 

How can you measure that? 

It completely depends on the goals you have set. You can measure factors like: 

• Likes, share, and comments 
• Increase in the number of followers
• Leads generated 
• Traffic guided towards your website 

You can invest in good tools for social media management and analyze the performance of your campaign at every stage.

Get Ready to Build Your Employee Advocacy Program

As an employer, you need to support your employees both physically and mentally. Boosting your HR’s emotional literacy is a good move forward. When your employees are happy working for you, they will gladly participate in your employee advocacy program. 

Use these tips to build a highly lucrative employee advocacy program to spread brand awareness and drive sales for your company.