One of the most important pieces of advice you’ll hear as a business owner is that you need solid customer reviews. After all, 92% of customers read testimonials before making a purchasing decision.
However, there is something equally as effective in increasing your brand credibility, and surprising underexploited. Introducing: An employee advocacy program.
Fundamentally this is a resourceful way to build customer trust in your brand by utilizing your employees' social media reach. Your employees become in-house brand ambassadors and as a result, you gain more visibility.
An employee advocacy program:
- Helps increase lead generation by getting your brand’s name out there.
- Lowers your marketing costs as you’re paying for less advertising space.
- Creates more meaningful relationships leading to better customer retention rates.
- Get your business noticed by potential talent as well as increase your customer base.
We’ll discuss these benefits in more detail below and talk about the best solution to incorporate an employee advocacy program into your business, plus we’ll answer some frequently asked questions.
1. Employee Advocacy Creates Brand Awareness
This first benefit of having an employee advocacy program is one of the most important: it creates brand awareness, and this, in turn, increases your company’s lead generation rate.
It’s simple: if your employees are talking about your brand, they’re actually doing a form of advertising called word-of mouth.
The best benefit of word-of-mouth advertising is that it increases the probability of purchase. In fact, a recent Chatter Matters report shows:
- “83% of Americans say that a word-of-mouth recommendation from a friend or family member makes them more likely to purchase that product or service.”
Having an employee advocacy program also opens up different avenues allowing more traffic to connect with your brand.
For example, if your employee tells their friends to buy from you, and those friends tell their friends, you get the beginnings of a snowball effect that can increase your sales by at least 5 times.
In short, employee advocacy programs are a super effective way to create brand awareness, and that’s where the GaggleAMP platform comes in.
“As our first foray into employee advocacy, GaggleAMP has made it really easy to get our team more active on social media and it's been a huge success for us. We were only expecting to get 10 or so members at first, but we've actually ended up with over 50! Our people love using GaggleAMP and how easily it fits into their day-to-day workflow.” — Administrator in Computer Software.
2. Employee Advocacy Reduces Your Costs
Since your employees are working as your brand ambassadors, you don’t need to spend so much on advertising campaigns. This can reduce marketing costs quite significantly and can even help ‘recession-proof’ your business.
Plus, your company’s growth will be much more organic. New traffic will be coming in from within your employee's social circle — which is likely going to be more reliable than traffic reached through an advertising campaign.
There are several reasons for this:
- You’ll know your customers better through their connection to your employees
- Your customers will receive first-hand support from your employees, meaning you won’t need to restructure complicated systems to accommodate them
- Your customers will immediately trust your brand since they’re in your brand ambassador’s social circle. Therefore they’ll be more likely to make a purchase.
By harnessing your brand ambassador networks, you are able to bring in new customers while reducing costs – leading to more profit.
If you choose the right employee advocate program, it will feature an intuitive user interface (UI) that allows your employees to engage with your brand with one click. This further reduces costs by saving your employees time. As we all already know: time is money.
“GaggleAMP is easy to use, and saves a ton of time reaching out to employees to try to get them to engage with the company's content on social media.”
3. Employee Advocacy Can Lead to Better Talent Acquisition
According to a LinkedIn study, candidates are 1.8x more likely to apply for a job if they're familiar with the company.
An employee advocacy program can work wonders with that.
Why is that so great? You’ll have a bigger pool of talent to choose from and subsequently a higher chance of securing an ideal candidate. Plus, when an employer has strong employer branding, it does not mislead people. It gives future talent a window into the unique benefits the company has to offer.
Here’s a short list of the advantages better talent acquisition brings:
- You’ll enjoy a richer diversity of applications.
- You’ll more likely see job applications containing the key skills your business needs.
- You’ll be able to expand into new markets more efficiently, as your company will see growth in its employees.
- Your business will operate more efficiently as you’ll get more relevant applications and hire more skilled workers.
If you’re looking to save costs, this can even replace launching job adverts through companies like Indeed or Glassdoor.
4. Employee Advocacy Creates Meaningful Relationships Between Your Employees and Consumers
Here are two facts you need to know:
- According to a study on cutting costs by Bain & Company: “A 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%.”
- According to smallbizgenius, “65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers.”
Now, with employee advocates, you’ll create more meaningful relationships between your employees and customers.
Think about it: if your employees are your brand ambassadors, and they’re posting about your business on their personal social media accounts, then the customers your business gains will already be a part of your employee’s social circle.
Now, there are several advantages to this. For example:
- Your employees will be able to relate with your customers better, and in turn, they’ll be able to more easily solve problems customers have with your product.
- You’ll have more representation on social media, meaning queries will be resolved more efficiently.
All of this leads to higher customer satisfaction, which means more positive testimonials, more repeat business, better customer loyalty, and more.
For these types of results, you must implement a powerful employee advocacy strategy. There are so many advocacy programs on the market, so which one is right for your business?
Let's take a look at a couple of employee advocacy program successes.
Employee Advocacy Program Successes
TeachStone and Magna5 are two examples of brands who implemented successful employee advocacy programs using GaggleAMP, an employee advocacy tool. Here’s how GaggleAMP was able to help each brand.
TeachStone
TeachStone, the makers of a classroom assessment tool called CLASS® (Classroom Assessment Scoring System), were looking for a way to be more active consistently on social media, specifically on LinkedIn.
By implementing GaggleAMP as their employee advocacy solution, TeachStone saw over 1,200 social interactions in the first 90 days, 60% increase on clicks to content, and immediate returns (i.e., new business) from thought-leadership posts.
Magna5
Magna5, a managed IT service provider, had made it a priority to increase its social media presence to communicate its identity to customers, prospects, and partners. As a result, it chose GaggleAMP as its employee advocacy platform.
By using GaggleAMP, Manga5 empowered its employees to be thought leaders on social media, driving 8% of the company’s total sales pipeline, organically increasing reach by over 7.1 million people, and growing the brand’s LinkedIn followers by 42%.
Start Your Successful Employee Advocacy Program Today
GaggleAMP gives you the tools to launch an employee advocacy program and boost marketing efforts at the click of a button. It comes with several powerful features that you can get started with today:
- Detailed insights to learn how your employee advocacy program is doing.
- Gamification that employees can utilize to engage with friends on their social media platforms.
- Easy-to-access and quick-to-use features that can increase employee participation without added pressure.
Here’s what one customer had to say about GaggleAMP:
“This software makes it simple to share company news and promotions internally for amplification across many social media accounts for our Sales teams. We've been pleased with our engagement, reach, and tracking metrics from this software.”
Get in touch, request a demo, or start a free trial.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is an Employee Advocacy Program?
An employee advocacy program encourages employees to raise brand awareness through their chosen social media platform.
Doing this reduces marketing costs as you won’t be paying to launch new campaigns, and you’ll also be reducing the strain and cost needed to manage your marketing department.
What Is an Example of Employee Advocacy?
A simple example of employee advocacy is asking your employees to share company news or blog posts.
However, to see successful employee advocacy in action, check out 5 of Your Favorite Brands With an Employee Advocacy Program.
What Are Some Good Ideas for an Employee Advocacy Program?
Honestly, the best idea for an employee advocacy program is to pick the right tool. GaggleAMP has several powerful features to encourage social media advocacy, raise brand awareness for your business, and keep your employees engaged through various components such as leaderboards and gamification.
Do You Have Any Data Around the Benefits of Employee Advocacy Programs?
Of course we do! In fact, your company can achieve 100% ROI within the first 90 days of an employee advocacy program. (In fact, 90% of our customers do!) You can read more about how people are approaching employee advocacy in our State of Employee Advocacy Report.
