Is Employee Advocacy a True Win-Win?

Employee advocacy programs empower employees to become brand advocates for the companies they work for. When employees share their employers' posts with their social networks, they generate new audiences while building personal branding and thought leadership.

MarketBeam researched if employee advocacy is creating true win-win among employees and employers. We found out there are three main departments within companies that benefit significantly from the program. So, we called it the "win-win-win program."

Marketing Wins

Usually, marketing teams run the program and have tools to monitor the program accurately with detailed numbers. Some of the most popular marketing metrics they monitor are:

• Impressions
• Clickthroughs
• Increase in website traffic
• Direct lead generation

At MarketBeam, we work hard to provide true analytics, not only the above-mentioned metrics. We also share:

• What type of content resonates with an audience?
• Which is the most popular social network among the audience?/li>
• Who is the most influential employee?
• When are your audience most active and on which social network?

This strategy is a win for marketers that help run social campaigns successfully.

Sales Win

With an employee advocacy program in place, lead nurturing is the main goal of sales teams. Knowledge sharing, educating, and building curiosity about products or services is critical. Reaching out to prospects and pipeline customers through non-intriguing social posts is very effective.

The rule-of-thumb is that if a connection reads about a product or a service at least six to seven times on their social feeds, there is a high chance that he or she is ready to take the next step of doing further research about the product. That step would be the right time for sales to reach out to their prospects to engage further.

This time also shortens sales cycles.

MarketBeam has a leaderboard to measure employee influence based on engagement they bring to each post. In most cases, we see sales teams rank the highest among various teams.

Employees Win

When valuable content is shared frequently on social networks, employees are perceived as thought leaders. In this case, marketers create quality content for sharing. In the absence of an employee advocacy program, employees find it difficult to create or curate quality content. Social networks rank profiles high in search results if a user is active and posts consistently.

So, employee advocacy is the easiest option for employees to become thought leaders and build long-lasting social profiles beyond current employers.

This article was originally published on MarketBeam.

MarketBeam is an AI-driven, personalized, social marketing platform that utilizes untapped executives' and employees' social networks to increase reach, elevate their brands, and nurture leads dramatically beyond the usual corporate channels.

Gamification encourages content-sharing on social networks while building executive branding and individual employee thought leadership. AI-driven analytics constantly learn and identify top influencers, popular content, and social networks to maximize marketing ROI.

Opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of WITI.