Meet employee advocacy, the first cousin to influencer marketing.
Your employees are generally the best advocates you have. They can be a credible and creative way to build brand recognition and instill trust in your business as well as generating word of mouth.
And let’s be really honest, where you may not have budgets for an influencer program, your employees can be a cost-effective alternative (providing they are happy and willing of course!).
Why should you consider your employees part of your marketing program?
Relatable experiences, thoughts and opinions from regular people generally deliver higher engagement rates. Other advantages include:
- Breaking through the ever-increasing wealth of content is difficult; employee advocacy is one way to cut through this.
- Promotion of content is more complex as organic reach declines; advocacy broadens the opportunity for your content to be seen and also has other benefits like increased web traffic.
- Most importantly, people trust word of mouth and recommendations from real people much more than they do from brand advertising and promotions.
It is easy to forget that employees are people. And as with all people, employees have their own unique take and opinion so can bring new and exciting content to your marketing that is rooted in real life.
B2B focused brands can benefit too!
And it’s not just a marketing tactic for consumer brands; employees can be seen as more trustworthy and ‘real’ than the top corporate leaders when delivering key messages.
But don’t just take our word for it!
The stats we sourced speak for themselves:
- Content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels
- Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs the same messages shared via official brand social channels
- 98% of employees use at least one social media site for personal use, of which 50% are already posting about their company
- 21% of consumers report “liking” employee posts – a far higher engagement rate than the average social ad
Empowering employees to spread your content on their own social channels is a cost-effective alternative to influencer marketing plus you can achieve the expanded reach and consideration you are looking for, as well as delivering more engaging content.
