How Can Employee Advocacy Strengthen Your Company's Brand Message?
In the world of Public Relations, employee advocacy can be a game-changer for amplifying a company's brand message. We gathered insights from seven PR experts, including CEOs and Directors, on how they've successfully harnessed the power of their workforce. From highlighting employees in marketing campaigns to involving them in the company blog, these professionals share their most effective strategies.
- Highlight Employees in Marketing
- Amplify Brand Via Employee Social Media
- Implement Employee PR Takeovers
- Create Internal Engagement Systems
- Publicize Employee Success Stories
- Leverage Employee Advocacy for Authenticity
- Involve Employees in Company Blog
Highlight Employees in Marketing
We always strive to put our employees front and center in our PR and marketing materials. Putting a human face on our services goes a long way toward establishing trust with our customers and convincing them to choose us for their move. Because moving is an expensive process that requires customers to trust us with all of their belongings, we need to appear to be more than just a website. Some of our most successful content has paired our movers with influencers to create strong narratives of successful moves.
Amplify Brand Via Employee Social Media
TrackingMore uses employee advocacy to strengthen the company's brand message through social media amplification. We encourage our team members to share company news, updates, and thought leadership on their LinkedIn profiles.
Some of the content we encourage them to share includes details about new features we've added to the platform. Recently, we rebranded our website to commemorate our tenth anniversary as a company. Our employees played a critical role in helping us spread this news through their LinkedIn profiles, which helped boost our reach.
Aside from innovations that we make on our shipment tracking platform, we also encourage employees to share their experiences working at our company. This type of content strengthens our company's brand message further.
Implement Employee PR Takeovers
One surprising approach we implemented was the "Employee PR Takeover."
Instead of having our marketing team orchestrate every detail of our social media campaigns, we handed the reins over to our employees for one week each quarter.
Each participating employee was given a day to showcase a day in their life at the company through our social media accounts. From the backend developers to the folks in finance, each shared their personal narratives, challenges, and achievements.
We provided them with basic guidelines and oversight to ensure alignment with our brand's core messages, but the content was unfiltered and genuine.
This led to increased organic reach and engagement, as followers were drawn to the personal stories and diverse faces behind the brand, making our message more relatable and trustworthy.
Create Internal Engagement Systems
Internal engagement systems are the most effective in involving staff, in my experience. For instance, I've worked with businesses to create systems that make it simple for staff members to post news or brand content on their own social media pages. It is basic but effective. Employee sincerity comes through when they are proud of the work they do and truly believe in your brand. It's similar to having an army of unpaid brand evangelists. Employee engagement increases the likelihood that they will spread the company's message, which gives it a genuine feel. Additionally, I made sure to give shout-outs to staff members who contributed actively in order to raise spirits. People trust personal recommendations, so this form of internal promotion strengthens the brand message externally.
Publicize Employee Success Stories
I've used staff success stories to strengthen the brand messaging by publicizing them both internally and externally. We designed a monthly "Employee Spotlight" to highlight those who went above and beyond. These stories were shared not just within the organization, but also on our website and social media platforms. By doing so, we demonstrated how much we cherish our staff and promoted a sense of pride among them. Externally, these stories strengthened our audience's trust by highlighting the company's talent and passion. It also helped to attract new talent by demonstrating that we genuinely care about our workforce.
Leverage Employee Advocacy for Authenticity
When it comes to employer branding, the authenticity of messaging is always important! That's why there is so much value in employee advocacy, because it is perceived as more honest, real, and authentic compared to most employer brand content. I work with clients to create and implement strategies to increase employee advocacy through internal campaigns.
One example is a fashion company I recently worked with. After the annual engagement survey concluded, I ran an internal campaign including company reward points that could be used to purchase various swag items with the company logo embroidered, in exchange for LinkedIn text or video posts including a branded hashtag. More reward points were available for a video and text post, giving an incentive for employees to create and share video content instead of just a static text post. The employee social media content was repurposed to include in the Careers section of the website, onboarding training, and shared on the company LinkedIn account.
The war for top talent is highly competitive. Since top talent have a choice when deciding where to take the next step in their careers, employee advocacy is a smart tactic to leverage and share captivating stories about employee experiences and workplace culture.
Involve Employees in Company Blog
One strategy that worked well was getting employees involved in our company blog. We asked team members to share their perspectives on industry trends and insights, which added authenticity that traditional corporate messaging often lacks.
Their voices gave the content a more relatable, human feel, and it showed the expertise we have within the company.
