Information from this blog post was obtained from Hubspot, Semrush, and SproutSocial.
As a company, you have put in the time and effort to create an employee advocacy program, but how can you continue the program’s success over time? Each year, or even every quarter, take the time to evaluate your employee advocacy program. It is important to place an emphasis on including your employee advocates in the evaluation process.
General Tips for Sustainability
In order to keep your brand ambassadors engaged, you should consider providing them with the tools and resources they need to create and share content easily. Here are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to continuing the sustainability of your employee advocacy program:
Curate ready-to-share content: To make it easy for your ambassadors to share content, it can be helpful to curate content for them. Send weekly emails with a few pre-selected pieces of content that you think would be relevant to their networks. By making it easy for your ambassadors to share, you'll encourage them to continue doing so.
Personalize the message: While it's important to provide your ambassadors with content to share, remind them to personalize the message to fit their own voice. This will help to ensure that the content resonates with their networks and that they are building their brand at the same time. As the leader of the employee advocacy program, you want your employee advocates to put their personal touch on their content. So, ensure you are encouraging creativity through their personal message.
Use custom, tagged URLs: If your goal is to drive sales, give your ambassadors custom, tagged URLs to track their success accurately. This will help you to determine which ambassadors are driving the most sales and which content is resonating with your target audience. This may also assist in recognizing employee advocates, as discussed below.
Measure the effectiveness of your program: It is important to measure the effectiveness of your employee advocacy program to see how well it is working and whether or not you need to make any adjustments. Start by looking at your goals for the program and determine which metrics would help you best track those goals. This can include things like brand awareness, relevant leads, and sales.
Metrics
Measuring the success of your employee advocacy program is crucial to ensuring its sustainability. It can also help you identify areas for improvement and measure the impact of your efforts on key business areas like sales, recruiting, and marketing. When tracking metrics, it’s important to consider internal and external metrics. Here is a more in-depth look at the various metrics that will assist in your measurement of success:
Internal metrics are essential for the success of your program as they help ensure its longevity. You can track several internal metrics, but some of the most common include conversion rate, active participation rate, top contributors, and story contributions. The conversion rate measures the percentage of invited employees participating in the program. The active participation rate measures the percentage of all employees who are engaged and sharing advocacy content. Top contributors are those who share often and receive a high level of engagement per post. Story contributions refer to the content submitted by employees for other program participants to share. Each of these internal metrics contributes to the employee satisfaction and longevity of the employee advocacy program.
External metrics measure how employee advocacy efforts impact key business areas like sales, recruiting, and marketing. Some of the external metrics you can track include engagement, website traffic, and earned media value. Engagement refers to the comments, shares, likes, and clicks generated by your employee advocates. Employees have an average of 10 times as many connections on social media as a standard brand, which sets your brand up for a world of new engagement opportunities. Website traffic measures the traffic driven to your website directly by your advocates. By attributing traffic back to your advocates, you can differentiate between traffic driven by colleagues and traffic driven by your brand account. Earned media value measures any publicity or media generated by organic methods beyond your own marketing efforts. This metric is highly effective in proving dollar-for-dollar ROI when reporting on your employee advocacy program.
Tracking both internal and external metrics is crucial to the success and sustainability of your employee advocacy program. Focusing on internal metrics during the early stages of your program can help ensure its longevity while tracking external metrics can help you measure the impact of your efforts on key business areas.
Evaluate Goals
Once you've identified your key metrics and established a baseline for your employee advocacy program, it is important to continually evaluate the goals for what you want to achieve. These goals should align with your overall marketing and business objectives. For example, if your main objective is to increase sales, your employee advocacy program goals might include generating a certain number of leads or closing a specific number of deals.
When evaluating your program goals, make sure they are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. This will help ensure that your goals are realistic and achievable and that you can track their progress over time.
It is also essential to communicate your goals and progress to your ambassadors. This will help keep them to be engaged and motivated and give them a sense of ownership and accountability for the success of the program. Not only would you communicating the program goals increase engagement in the employee advocacy program, but it would also increase employee engagement throughout your organization. Consider a form of recognition, as discussed later in the blog post, to highlight top performers and incentivize participation.
Appreciate Your Ambassadors
It is important to recognize the efforts of your ambassadors and show appreciation for their contributions to the program. Acknowledging and celebrating their contributions can help keep them motivated and engaged in the program.
Some ideas for recognition and rewards include:
Publicly thanking ambassadors for their contributions on social media, through email blasts, or in company-wide meetings
Creating a leaderboard that highlights the top-performing ambassadors
Offering prizes or incentives for top-performing ambassadors, such as gift cards, vacation days off, or company swag
Recognizing ambassadors in company newsletters or other internal communications
By recognizing and rewarding your ambassadors, you not only encourage them to continue participating in the program, but you also create a culture of advocacy within your company. Your advocates may want to be SEEN for their work, so be sure to recognize them!
Up-to-Date Content
Another important aspect of sustaining your employee advocacy program is keeping your content fresh and relevant. This means staying up-to-date with industry trends and news and regularly creating and sharing new content your ambassadors will be excited to share with their networks. Consider creating a content calendar and involving your ambassadors in the content creation process. This can help ensure the content is relevant and resonates with their networks.
In addition to creating new content, it's important to repurpose existing content in new and creative ways. For example, you could turn a blog post into an infographic or create a video version of a case study. Repurposing content not only helps keep your program fresh but also maximizes the reach and impact of your content. Never underestimate the marketing power of fresh content, regardless of the source.
Listen to Your Ambassadors
Finally, it is important to listen to your ambassadors and take their feedback into account. They are on the front lines of your brand advocacy efforts and can provide valuable insights and ideas for improving the program.
Consider sending out surveys or hosting focus groups to gather feedback from your ambassadors. Use their input to make adjustments and improvements to the program and communicate those changes to your ambassadors to show that you value their opinions. The simple act of listening to your employees may increase employee engagement outside of the employee advocacy program as well.
Ongoing Effort and Attention
Ongoing effort and attention are crucial to the success and sustainability of your employee advocacy program. By keeping your advocates engaged, adapting to changing trends, measuring and adjusting your strategy, fostering a culture of advocacy, and staying top of mind with your audience, you can ensure that your program continues to drive results for your business over time.
Sustaining the Success
In conclusion, employee advocacy can be a powerful tool for any business looking to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales. However, simply creating a program is not enough. In order to ensure its success and sustainability, ongoing effort and attention is necessary.
You can encourage your advocates to continue sharing your content with their networks by keeping them engaged. Providing them with the necessary tools and resources, such as pre-selected content and click-to-tweet options, can make it easier for them to participate in the program. Personalizing the message and measuring the effectiveness of your program are also important factors to consider.
Adapting to changing trends is essential in order to keep your program relevant and effective. Fostering a culture of advocacy within your organization can help to ensure that employees see the value in participating in the program and that it becomes a part of your company culture.
Finally, staying top of mind with your audience is crucial. Regularly sharing high-quality, relevant content can help to build trust and credibility with your audience and keep your brand at the forefront of their minds.
Remember, building an effective employee advocacy program takes time and effort, but the rewards can be significant. By following these tips and strategies, you can ensure the success and sustainability of your program and ultimately drive meaningful results for your business. Your employees are your biggest advocates, and by empowering and engaging them, you can create a powerful brand presence and achieve long-term success.
No AI was injured in the production of this content. AI (ChatGPT) was used as a tool to supplement, enhance, and make suggestions in writing this blog post.
Resources
Polverino, S. (2019) Brand Advocacy: Unleashing the Power of Employees in 4 Steps https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/brand-advocacy-power-employees-4-steps
Kalyadina, M. (2018) The Elements Every Successful Brand Ambassador Program Needs #Semrushchat
Gomez, R. (2021) How to Measure Employee Advocacy at Every Stage of Your Program
Komentarze