Aligning your content strategy with employee advocacy programs is not just innovative; it’s necessary. Businesses want (and need) to leverage every asset to stand out in a crowded marketplace, and employee advocacy is a cost-effective way to amplify your content marketing strategy.
Through an employee advocacy program, you can empower your employees with insights and stories about your brand and give them the tools to amplify your content’s reach through their networks. However, you won’t just be expanding your reach — this is about more than that. It’s about enhancing the credibility and trustworthiness of your content.
What are employee advocacy programs?
Employee advocacy programs empower your teams to share your brand’s message, their personal experiences and insights into the brand, transforming them into trusted brand ambassadors.
Employee advocacy amplifies your content’s reach exponentially and increases its impact, as messages shared by employees typically see a significantly higher engagement rate compared to those shared via corporate channels. According to LinkedIn research, employee networks are much larger than a company’s follower base, which means that you’ll be reaching a whole new audience through them and claim visibility on a much larger scale.
Aligning your content strategy to your employee advocacy program
But how do you ensure that your content strategy not only fits with but actively supports and enhances your employee advocacy efforts? Aligning these two strategies helps you create a cohesive narrative that employees can confidently share, thus driving deeper engagement and stronger results from your target audience.
1. Develop Relevant and Shareable Content
First and foremost, ensure that the content you create resonates with both your employees and their networks. Creating relevant content involves understanding the interests and needs of both demographics and crafting messages that strike a chord.
That means, for example, providing engaging thought leadership pieces, highlighting your unique identity as a company, industry-relevant news, etc. Content that employees find personally compelling and professionally enriching is more likely to be shared, and in turn, that is more likely to also resonate with their audience. Include a mix of industry insights, company news, and human interest stories to keep the content diverse and engaging.
2. Provide Clear Guidelines and Training
Employees should feel comfortable and confident in sharing content. Providing clear social media guidelines on what can and cannot be shared helps prevent any potential missteps.
For example, training sessions on effective social media usage will empower employees and give them the necessary confidence to share content and use their authentic brand voice. And it will enhance the quality of their online interactions, too. Think about diving into topics like branding basics, dos and don’ts of social sharing, and how to personalize messages to fit their voices and networks.
The key to leveraging your teams’ authenticity lies in giving employees the confidence to use that voice. Not everyone is a content creator, and not everyone will have the same level of tech-savvyness to jump right into this. So, make sure to allow them (and your program in general) some time to gain confidence, build up their skills, and start delivering the desired results.
3. Incentivize and Recognize Contributions
Recognizing and rewarding employees for their advocacy efforts goes a long way in maintaining high participation rates. Recognition and appreciation programs are a precious tool for companies to cultivate a positive workplace culture. They affirm — and practically show employees — that the contributions of employees are valued, creating an environment where motivation and job satisfaction flourish.
It’s not only about their daily tasks about their different roles; it’s also about their outspokenness as brand ambassadors or social media advocates. This is why recognition plays a crucial role in fueling these advocacy efforts, too.
By acknowledging and rewarding employees for their contributions and advocacy, companies can encourage continued participation and support. Incentives can range from public recognition in the workplace to tangible rewards such as bonuses or gift cards. The recognition not only boosts morale but also encourages a culture of sharing and advocacy, reinforcing the value of employee contributions to the company’s marketing goals.
4. Use Tools to Facilitate Sharing
Leveraging the right technology can simplify the process of content sharing for employees. You want to ensure that your employees’ job of ‘being an advocate’ for your company doesn’t become too cumbersome, and the easiest way to do that is by relying on software that makes content sharing as easy as clicking a button.
Tools like Ambassify make it easy for employees to access company-approved content and share it with their networks. The platform also allows users to easily track engagement metrics, which helps refine the content strategy and advocacy program over time based on what performs best.
5. Co-Create Content with Your Employees
One thing to keep in mind that not many people talk about (and that many mainstream employee advocacy platforms don’t support) is that advocacy is not just about social sharing. One approach is to ask your employees to share your content and hope that it will resonate with them and their audience; another is to collaborate with them to create that content together.
Advocacy is not a one-way street: it’s about giving and taking and forging a solid and durable relationship with your advocates. A forward-thinking and future-proof advocacy tool will support collaboration as well as social sharing and allow you to make your employees your collaborators, too.
6. Regularly Measure Impact and Adapt
Continuous measurement of your program’s impact is crucial to demonstrate impact and adjust your strategy as you go. Analyze metrics such as reach, engagement, lead generation, and sales conversions that stem from employee-shared content.
This data will not only show you what type of content works best but also highlight potential areas for adjustment. Establishing regular feedback loops with the employees can also provide insight into how the program is perceived and what could make it more effective for them.
Stepping Up Your Content Strategy
With these strategies in place, you can step up your content strategy and amplify your efforts, the impact of your content and drive results that matter.
Begin by reviewing your current content and assessing its alignment with your employee advocacy goals, then update your content creation plans to include input from across the company. Remember that collaboration is key if you want to ensure it resonates with the diverse voices within your team (and their audiences).
Next, set up training sessions and establish a clear, easy-to-follow policy for sharing content. This will go hand in hand with choosing and implementing an appropriate technological solution to aid in content distribution and tracking. And finally, set up regular check-ins to review the performance of your content within the advocacy program and adjust as necessary.
By effectively aligning your content strategy with your employee advocacy program, you can maximize the potential reach and impact of your content while also building a stronger, more engaged community around your brand. This strategic alignment transforms your employees into powerful brand advocates. Start harnessing the full potential of your teams and see a marked difference in how your content performs and influences.
Post Contribution: Camilla Brambilla Pisoni | Content Creator & Copywriter at Ambassify
