6 Tips To Build a Strong Employee Advocacy Program

1. Define your objectives

Most successful strategies include an initial stage to establish objectives. You need to have a clear vision of where you want this program to take your company. Do you want to improve brand visibility? Or maybe you want your employees to be more engaged in the conversation? (We recommend both, as they are linked!)

Objectives you might want to consider:

• Higher Employee Engagement
• Better Audience reach and engagement
• Building Brand Image and Reputation
• Drive more traffic to your website

2. Plan small but smarter

To launch a strong employee social advocacy program, it’s always better to start at a small scale and then expand. This approach allows you to test types of content and audience, while keeping feedback easy to manage. Program failure like initial errors in the product or a feature malfunctioning can be easily fixed before the second roll-out phase.

Before finalizing your intranet content strategy, explore your test publications and establish which content types or topics resonated better with your employees!

3. Choose the right ambassadors

The ambassadors are the employees you trust to share an authentic and positive message. The first ambassadors are often those who are normally expected to speak about the company (execs, team leaders, communication experts), however, you should consider opening the program to a wider base.

Another good initiative is to ask for volunteers! When someone willingly volunteers, they have the potential to become one of the most active ambassadors inside your online community. Casting an open call also lets you diversify company ambassadors. You may find the most interesting employee voices come from unexpected places.

Some teams to focus your initial ambassador base:

• Human Resources
• Sales
• Marketing & Communication

4. Train and explain

Don’t assume that your employees will immediately understand the new advocacy program’s purpose, or how to use it from the get-go. It’s essential that you both explain the tool’s functionality and the program’s overall goals.

Put in place short training sessions to explore the program and to help employees understand how advocacy can contribute to both the business as a whole and their professional growth – by building their personal brand image.

3 main steps:

• Develop onboarding sessions
• Provide general guidelines
• Create educational assets – explanatory photos, videos, infographics, emails

5. Prepare your content in advance

You cannot start a program without a good foundation of relevant and eye-catching content. Plan these in advance so you can immediately offer a range of articles for your ambassadors to share.

Topics

Choose topics that resonate the most with your business goals. Define easily distinguishable topics that reflect the “hottest” internal and external company informatio

Timing

Provide new content on a weekly basis. However, keep in mind that your employees won’t share every day, so don’t overwhelm them with new posts. A cluttered dashboard will defeat the purpose, so make sure to remove past or “expired” content.

Sourcing

Create a strong database made of trusted and established external sources of information. This will save you precious time in the future when you need to provide new content.

Diversity

Provide your ambassadors with a variety of articles, case studies or news that will help you reach your program objective.

Ideas for Content Types to include

• Branded content – blog posts, events, customer stories, infographics, promotional assets.
• Employee-branded content – job postings, new arrivals, behind-the-scenes videos and photos, other publications revealing your company culture.
• Industry experts – articles from trusted sources and experts that will expand both employee knowledge about the industry and demonstrate company expertise
• Employee content – employees create tons of assets that can be selected and shared with the public. Share employees articles, white papers, presentations or other sources to prove your confidence and empower their voices.

6. Measure

At the end of the day, we always need to measure success. In the beginning, you must decide on a few KPIs that you will monitor. Observe the behavior of your ambassadors during a given period and then determine what worked best.

After this test period, you can make some alterations in your content strategy. If your KPIs are not giving you enough information, you need to expand your data collection.

Underestimating the importance of strategic planning steps can hinder your program’s overall performance. Consider all main key points and then start building the base for an engaging and interactive employee social advocacy program!