Employee advocacy refers to actions taken by employees of a company to promote the employer. These marketing initiatives typically occur on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Planning ahead is essential for starting an effective employee advocacy program. This step-by-step guide to boost B2B sales will help you get your employee advocacy program up and running,
Step-by-Step Guide to Boost B2B Sales Through Employee Advocacy
Step 1: Developing Your Content Strategy for Employee Advocacy
As a starting point, discover the company content your employees wish to share or are already sharing. Examine how their interests fit into your entire social media marketing plan so that you can develop the right program subjects and formats.
The most effective content either amuses, informs, or educates your audience—ideally, it does all three. For every 10 social postings on the employee advocacy board, six must be curated, three must be owned, and one should be promotional. This is known as the “6-3-1” rule of thumb for social content. This reduces the pressure of creating a large amount of fresh content internally, while also ensuring that your audience is not overwhelmed with excessive promotional content.
Step 2: Securing Executive Buy-In
Instead of trying to enlist the whole organization at once, concentrate on the staff members who will be your best early adopters. Often, companies have employees who have a large social media presence, already share company content, and will likely be enthusiastic about doing more of it.
They should ideally be social influencers or thought leaders in your business. Find your social champions within top management and front-line staff members (such as those in marketing, sales, or customer service). These are the people who need to buy into your program from the get-go.
Step 3: Offering Social Media Training
Keep in mind that some employees might not feel comfortable using social media, or not know where to begin when sharing corporate material on their social media accounts.
Make sure to provide them the advice and instruction they need to address their confusion and concerns, and bolster their confidence. The training could comprise workshops, one-on-one sessions, or even an explanatory newsletter.
Regardless of the mode, the training should cover:
- A tour of the business’s social media accounts.
- A summary of the company’s social media objectives, target market, and content strategy advice for creating a stellar profile.
- Onboarding of your advocacy platform
- Review of the business’ social media policies.
Even if the team is comfortable with social media, you should conduct a social media policy review to ensure that everyone is on the same page with regards to the DOs and DON’Ts and clear about the things that may affect the company’s image.
Step 4: Running a Pilot
Once everything is ready, you should pilot the employee advocacy program. This will help you identify any weaknesses or issues in the program strategy or execution. To keep things simple, start by focusing on a single social media platform. Run the pilot program for at least 2-4 weeks before assessing the numbers. Remember to keep an eye on the content which is:
- Most popular among the advocates (this will be the content fetching the most shares from the advocacy board
- Found most engaging by the audiences (this will be the content with the most likes, comments, shares, and conversions)
If you observe consistently positive trends, you can scale up, bring in more advocates, and use additional social media channels. If the trends are unfavorable or inconsistent, you may need to go back to the drawing board (step 1) and tweak your approach.
Wrapping Up
Employee advocacy programs are a great way to boost social presence and B2B sales, humanize your brand, and help your employees come across as industry and thought leaders.
Using this step-by-step guide to boost B2B Sales, you will be able to launch an advocacy program aligned with your company’s size, industry, and unique B2B marketing goals.
