Employee advocacy strategy - How to get started

Employee advocacy strategy

When you want to create a strategy for your employee advocacy, you can advantageously focus on the following points:

1. What is the purpose of employee advocacy?
2. What does it take to work with employee advocacy?
3. How is good content created?
4. What measurement points do I want and how do I measure?

Let's start with the first point, the purpose.

1. What is the purpose of employee advocacy?

Some of the clear benefits of employee advocacy are that people trust people. The same trust is significantly more difficult to achieve and create in relation to a company or a brand.

People also create a credibility and impact that companies or brands cannot achieve in the same way.

If you've seen 'Dragons Den' on Danish television, you've also heard Jesper Buch say more than once: I don't invest in brands, but in people. Why? Because it is people who are moving and moving us emotionally.

Another example: What do you prefer? Talking to a chatbot on a website, or would you like to write to a person who doesn't give you a standard answer? The same mechanisms apply within employee advocacy.

With employee advocacy, you can therefore achieve:

• More interactions such as likes, shares and comments
• A higher degree of credibility
• Good storytelling
• Employee engagement and passion
• The impact is higher than in employer branding, as these are real stories that are shared on social media

So let's look at how you work with employee advocacy.

2. What does it require to work with employee advocacy?

There are a number of points that are relevant when you want to work with employee advocacy:

1. First of all, it requires that you have the support of the organisation, including the management. Otherwise, you might as well leave it alone
2. Find out where the resources are in the company. Who might be interested in being first movers?
3. Make a plan for the implementation
4. Find out what can motivate the participants in your ambassador corps (what's in it for me)
5. How do you ensure that the project does not stop before the project is well underway? In this context, for example, think about: Training, education, motivation and ongoing communication with the participants in the ambassador corps
6. Set goals (KPIs) so you can measure your success. Make interim goals and long term goals if necessary. The goals must be transparent for your entire organisation, which can create interest in the project, which can make other employees interested in becoming part of the community that the colleagues in your ambassador corps have
7. Ensure that the management understands that it takes longer than you think to create good content and to act be agile in relation to news, comments or debating with colleagues

You are then ready to set the framework for how the good content is created.

 

3. How is good content created?

The good content on social media is decisive in whether you will be successful with your employee advocacy program. You probably know it from Instagram. 

If the profile is dominated by bad pictures, bland posts and a lot of pictures with selfies that show a pout (duck face), then it doesn't catch your interest and you quickly move on.

Try asking yourself the following questions:

• What do you want to talk about?
• What is your message?
• Who would you like to influence? (everyone in the local area, specialists, the students)
• Which employees should be involved in the communication?
• Which techniques do you want to use? (expert knowledge, professional advice, recommendations, insight into everyday life on the job, focus on social issues, etc.)
• How is good storytelling created? (You can read more about that here)

The final point in your employer branding strategy plan is how you measure your progress in developing the ambassador corps.

4. What measurement points do I want and how do I measure?

The first thing you need to define is your KPIs.

Measurement points

When you work with employee advocacy, you can choose to start from the data that is easily available on social media, for example number of:

• Views
• Like
• Divisions
• Comments

Is the purpose of your employee advocacy program that you should have a larger field of applicants for your graduate programme or more applicants for your student positions? So it is important that you have a starting point for your measurement. That is, before you set about establishing an ambassador corps.

You can also choose to measure how many of the new hires continue after the trial period. A side effect of your employee advocacy program should be that the applicants have a good and in depth knowledge of your company, before applying for the job. This means that there are no surprises in relation to expectations seen, with regards to the experienced everyday life in the company.

The next question that arises is how you can measure the effect of your employee advocacy programme?

Measuring tool

As a start, you can easily be content with using an Excel sheet. We shouldn't make it harder than it needs to be. But the more success you have with your employee advocacy program, the greater the need for you to use an employee advocacy tool.

You can choose to make the following requirements for the employee advocacy tool:

1. Is the tool easy to manage?
2. How easy is it for your ambassador corps to use the tool?
3. Can you upload material that employees can edit themselves?
4. Would you like to be able to segment the content you upload to the platform? That is to say, it is not certain that all material is relevant for all participants in the ambassador corps
5. Does the tool allow for some form of gamification? Can the employees compete with and against each other? For example, is it possible to create a sprint (a campaign) so that the entire corps goes after a specific goal?

Summary

You have now defined:

• What is the purpose of employee advocacy in your company?
• Who is your desired target group that you would like to be in contact with?
• What message do you want to convey?
• Which employees will you use in your ambassador corps?
• What are the requirements for successful employee advocacy?
• How do you measure when employees are used as ambassadors?

The next thing you need to do is find the right employees for your ambassador corps. How to find: