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Employee advocacy

Employee Advocacy is about utilizing your employees to generate brand recognition and create a favorable impression of your company, mainly by sharing content on social media. It uses word-of-mouth to establish trust in your brand. Traditional marketing, the company itself touting its value to the customer, has shown to be less trustworthy than when employees promote it. It is a form of “bottom-up communication”.

Employee advocacy is generally most successful when voluntary rather than “on demand”. To achieve a good result, the company culture becomes crucial. To foster employees’ willingness to collaborate in this way, it is generally most productive to create a culture where the employee feels their voice is both respected and appreciated. One way businesses encourage employee advocacy is to offer incitements and rewards. Inspiring and attracting quality employees enables this marketing tactic to work. An unhappy worker will not be a good advocate for your brand. This approach also encourages employees to be fully aware of your brand’s goals and mission. The goal is to inspire employees to become more motivated and more engaged. According to Dale-Carnegie, companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202 percent.

The benefits of employee advocacy to an organization have been measured and analyzed. Employee advocacy increases brand exposure, increases an awareness of its marketing campaign, and supplements it in a credible way. The voice of employees also humanize a business, fostering trust. Statistics show that employee advocacy is rewarding for a business, beyond the added benefit of creating a more productive working culture. Cisco has determined that employees connect via social media to 10 times as many people as their company. Brand messages shared by employees have a 561 percent greater reach then when a brand shares content through their own channels, and employee content is re-shared 24 times more (MSLGroup).

Employee advocacy is a marketing tool fostered by the culture within a company, which can strengthen the company from within while using content and social media (including social media tools developed for the purpose), with employees as your brand ambassadors.