Boosting Brand Visibility: How Employee Advocacy Transforms Marketing

Hey everybody, Reggie here with Vista Socials Beyond Social podcast. I’ve got Vitaly here and today we’ve got a really interesting topic we’re going to cover. It’s about employee advocacy. It’s one of the most underutilized and underappreciated marketing strategies, marketing resources. It’s available to every company.

So I’m excited to dive in to understand a little bit about, well, what is employee advocacy, and also why aren’t people using it? So can we start with that?

What is Employee Advocacy?

Sure, so I think in principle, advocacy is really simple. It’s an employee, somebody who works at the company, promoting the company’s message or the company itself or the company’s products, and that’s it. Right, that’s very simple in principle.

And in many ways, this is not anything new. I think that’s been kind of happening in the way of, let’s say, your employee wearing a t-shirt with your company name, having a mug with your company name, I don’t know, putting a sticker of your company name on the car. That’s all advocacy, right? Promoting your brand’s message, product name.

I think in the world of social media, the opportunities are that much greater than simply wearing a t-shirt, let’s say, because your employees, they have followers, and those employees they have engagement, and they have people who pay attention to what they say. And if you can convince your employees, if you can get your employees involved and sharing your company’s message, you have extraordinary opportunity to reach audiences that may otherwise be outside of your marketing focus altogether.

Why Companies Are Hesitant to Formalize the Process

So the the interesting concept here is that sounds like we’re already advocates, right? I mean, you mentioned that at Vista Social, I wear Vista social Polo sometimes when I’m doing demos or talking to customers. If I’m being honest, sometimes I go to the grocery store and I’m wearing the Vista social shirt, so it sounds like for the most part, companies already have advocates in their place.

Absolutely, yeah. And I think perhaps there is a bit of a reluctancy to kind of formalize the process. It’s one thing to give your employees merch and have them wear it, and it’s another to ask them to, or to convince them to share a message about a product, which is almost maybe advertising or promoting your company. So perhaps companies and brands are somewhat uncomfortable with that transition to something very voluntary, something very light touch versus something a bit more heavy-handed, where employee actually posts a message about a particular product or something like that.

Major Challenges in Getting Started

I think the challenges, major challenges in convincing your employees to participate. Um, would be hard to make somebody an advocate if it’s a mandatory task. So for as long as efforts are made to kind of get people that work at the company to both love the environment, which is slightly more fundamental than even advocacy. So obviously advocacy in a dysfunctional organization is not going to lead to anything. So obviously evaluating that aspect of, of, of, uh, the environment is important.

What Digital Advocacy Looks Like

But logistics would only be challenging getting people to do advocacy and to to be advocates of the message consistently. And we should also sort of maybe define what does advocacy mean, and specifically like we said the t-shirt wearing is advocacy, and we all understand what that’s about. So what is advocacy in a social media space? At a minimum, this is your employee sharing a message on their social profiles, like on LinkedIn profile, on their Facebook about your company. It could be also your employee liking a post by your company. It could also be your employee commenting on the post by your company. Could also be resharing.

Measuring ROI and Impact

And measuring that is a lot easier than some offline t-shirt wearing, sticker posting options. Because in, in, in, in many ways, you can easily calculate your ROI by looking how many employees have posted, how many followers do they have, and, uh, you can look at the engagement metrics around those post. And, uh, you can then compare that against what your other marketing initiatives are driving for you on the paid side, on the organic side.

The Power of Organic vs. Paid Advocacy

Yeah, so the, I think there are a couple points that I want to kind of comment on in in your uh, reply there. So, first of all, the playbook for convincing your employees to participate could differ from company to company. Um, incentivizing it with perhaps gift cards and whatnot is certainly an option, it may very well work for uh, many brands. Uh, that is not necessarily the out of the gate sort of strategy to, um, get employees to share your message. Going back to the cultural aspect of it, so I know that within Vista Social, when our marketing team asks us to engage with some of the content that they’ve just created, from what I observe, people do that gladly, people do that voluntarily because the content is interesting.

Reaching Beyond Your ICP Through Employee Networks

Absolutely. And, and also remember that the, the network of people that your employees are part of, right, particularly professional networks like LinkedIn are quite interesting to the business, to the brand itself. Right, the amount of ICP, kind of like an ideal customer profiles within that space may or may not be significant simply because, listen, if you are, if your people are let’s say developers, programmers, and they know a lot of other programmers, but you have a product like Vista Social that sells to marketers, so, okay, so arguably, you would say that that’s not your ideal customer, right there. But the, it’s the propagation, right? So it’s, it’s that tier of followers followed by their networks.

Creating Personal, Authentic Messages

And, and also in here, we should point out that the company, the message itself would be suggested by the company. So let’s say we’ve launched a feature within the system, say Instagram Threads, and now available for direct publishing. So now, let’s say social media managers can schedule Threads. And, uh, but that’s not how your employee could phrase it to the audience. And again, a better advocacy system would offer ready to go templates for your employee to make a very personal message about it, right? So that it does not come across so, again, this is now kind of coming back to the Playbook and to the execution of the advocacy.

Keeping Employees Engaged Long-Term

And the success of such program would really depend on company’s ability to, uh, with the help of a proper tool, to keep advocates employees interested in participating. So you can invite as many employees as you like, they’ll all get invites, and chances are they could even confirm it, right? And chances are the system would send them notification every time you got a message for them to share. But how do you get them to actually do it on a daily basis?

Building Thought Leadership Through Advocacy

Yeah, and and maybe this one’s going a little bit beyond the scope, or at least the scope of this conversation, but the whole concept and notion of having your employees invested as thought leaders in the space, And how that could have meaningful ramifications for the brand in itself. An advocacy program could in essence also go beyond just sharing a company [ __ ] I’ve had a couple conversations so far with brands that are utilizing employee advocacy as a way to provide valuable posts for their employees to help position them as thought leaders in the space, right?

Practical Tips for Getting Started

From the, uh, tooling, from the tool you use perspective, I would say that any tool that combines the social media management and advocacy in one tool is going to be a better play for an organization because you don’t have to do the work twice. You schedule the content and automatically that content could be part of your advocacy. So that just makes the process even simpler. So it it it takes no extra step to get your advocacy going. It just becomes part of your regular social media content strategy and uh, so simplifying that for you, uh, any tool that also does, um, um, offer features around, um, fostering participation for Advocates, reminders, daily digests, uh, notifications of content, some really interesting leaderboard type reports, you know, letting people know who is like the the best person at this, gamifying as you put it, right?

Awesome. Well, thank you again, Vitalia, for the time chatting here today. U, for you guys listening in, whether you’re watching on YouTube, Spotify, make sure you like, share this around. If you have suggestions on other topics you’d like us to cover, make sure that you reach out to us visisocial.com, beyond podcast, you’ll be able to find us there. Um, and yeah, we’ll see you next Wednesday.