A customer’s action is usually the culmination of a marketing process. It is determined in particular by a consumer’s purchase decision. For a marketing professional, it’s a small reward. If convincing a potential customer to take action isn’t always easy, it’s no less easy for an employee. But why the hell bother? Because employee advocacy is quite simply a powerful marketing lever.
Often forgotten in communication and marketing strategies, employees are impressive ambassadors of a company. This is called theemployee representation. This article is not a guide to employee advocacy for dummies, but feedback after you’ve implemented this lever in multiple ways for organizations.
What is employee representation?
Employee advocacy is a mechanism opposed in a policy where a company positions its employees as ambassadors in both professional and personal life, mostly in a B2B logic. While this trend of the super-engaged employee of a startup tends to democratize social media in the corporate world, turning employees into ayatollahs is not necessary to ensure an employee advocacy program. The idea is to encourage employees to spread the company’s good word and become its ambassadors.
Employee advocacy should not only be seen through the prism of social networks or digital communication. An employee has a narrow circle, acquaintances, his own network. The same employee has more or more dense social interactions that will feed the oldest communication channel of all time: word of mouth.
Why introduce an Employee Advocacy Policy?
This marketing lever is not only completely free, but also offers the development of visibility and a much larger audience. Although employee advocacy is initially viewed as an external acquisition strategy, it is still a great in-house tool that HR departments will love.
Better than a list of arguments, here’s an example from Employee Advocacy:
Consider a motion design studio that has an art director on staff. The communications department offers the latter to convey the latest achievements by writing a publication on the design of a recent project. The Artistic Director is working on it and sharing the publication on her personal LinkedIn, her Behance page, and her own Instagram.
Thanks to a predominantly artistic and “created” community, the company, benefitting from its artistic director, develops and strengthens its credibility in the motion design community. This has no direct commercial interest but the brand image and employer brand (known from its vulgar translation of employer brand). The studio offers visibility in a community and the artistic director positions herself as an expert in her field by gaining legitimacy.
By sharing company news, the employee not only offers them a wider audience, but also better support. Statistically, a consumer has more trust in a person, i.e. an employee, than in a brand. A significant marketing lever given the increased distrust of consumers towards companies, which has increased tenfold in particular due to the “influencer” scandal. Employee advocacy can be one of the solutions to this misleading marketing threat. But that’s another topic.
As I am sure you have understood, when the company mobilizes its employees as ambassadors in an indirect or direct commercial interest, the latter will benefit personally. At a time when e-reputation has become our second pass, an employee who subscribes to an employee advocacy policy benefits directly from their personal branding and business credibility. An unreliable argument to get an employee to act.
Size doesn’t matter! It is natural for every company to regard its employees as ambassadors. A startup with only two partners can claim to establish such a strategy…
Continuation and entirety of the tribune by Thomas Jelonek
