The Benefits of 'Employee Advocacy' and How Companies Can Utilise It
In today’s marketing landscape, companies are facing a challenging reality: rising costs, shrinking budgets, and high expectations for delivering results. According to Gartner’s 2024 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, an astounding 64% of CMOs feel they lack the necessary funds to execute their strategies effectively. With traditional marketing pillars, such as digital campaigns, becoming increasingly expensive, organisations must ask: Where does the solution lie?
The answer lies in a resource that has always been available but often overlooked: employees. By embracing employee advocacy, companies can not only address budget constraints but also unlock long-term benefits for their brand, marketing ROI, and workforce engagement.
What is Employee Advocacy, and why does it matter?
Employee advocacy occurs when an organisation empowers its workforce to represent the brand authentically, often on social media platforms. Instead of relying solely on paid advertisements or external influencers, businesses utilise the connections employees have established within their networks.
When employees share content related to their company’s mission, goals, or products, the message appears more authentic and trustworthy. After all, authenticity is crucial, and in an era filled with advertisements and promotional noise, authentic voices stand out.
Employee Advocacy as a cost-effective solution
As budgets continue to shrink, expensive marketing campaigns may become less feasible. Employee advocacy offers companies the opportunity to redirect spending and focus on a more effective strategy that is:
- Cost-effective: It doesn’t require the large budgets typically allocated for extensive paid media campaigns.
- Authentic: Employees sharing messages resonate more personally than generic brand communication.
- Differentiated: External campaigns can be duplicated, but competitors cannot replicate the unique voices within an organisation.
The unique influence of Employee Networks
Employees’ social networks are vast, diverse, and often undiscovered treasures for audience reach. According to Sprout Social, content shared by employees receives eight times more engagement than content shared via brand content. Additionally, employee content has a 20 times greater reach than all organic channels combined.
Why is this the case? Friends, family, and colleagues inherently trust the voices of the people they know, making the message more meaningful and impactful. This trust transforms standard brand messaging into something that connects on a personal level.
Long-term benefits of Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy is not just a short-term tactic; it’s an investment in the future success of your brand, workforce, and marketing efforts.
Authentic brand awareness: When employees create and share content, they enhance the brand’s presence in an organic yet highly effective way. Authentic messaging generates higher engagement rates, builds trust, and connects with audiences in ways traditional campaigns cannot.
Employees as influencers: Instead of relying on external influencers, businesses can cultivate internal employee influencers to drive brand awareness and engagement. These individuals have a natural connection to the brand, allowing them to speak from experience and understanding. Their endorsements are genuine, resulting in a more substantial alignment between messaging and audience expectations.
Retention and engagement: When employees are empowered as advocates for the company, their roles extend beyond just a job; they become contributors to the organisation’s success. This can boost engagement, nurture a sense of belonging, and aid retention.
A strategy for bold companies
Implementing employee advocacy requires vision and a willingness to break free from traditional marketing moulds. For forward-thinking organisations, here are key strategies to maximise this opportunity:
- Allocate a budget for employee activation: Set aside a portion of your resources to empower employees. Whether through training sessions on content creation, tools for building their online brands, or rewards for exceptional advocacy efforts, investment can yield significant returns.
- Insights and data: To ensure success, companies must utilise data and analytics to understand engagement patterns, identify audience behaviours, and measure the impact of employee advocacy.
- Align sales and marketing: The true power of employee advocacy is activated when sales and marketing teams collaborate effectively. By training employees, particularly sales teams, on how to engage with audiences authentically, companies can encourage deeper connections early in the buyer’s journey, maximising the ROI of advocacy programs.
Employee Advocacy: A win-win strategy
In conclusion, employee advocacy offers organisations a radical yet highly effective approach to marketing that not only addresses budget constraints but also fosters a more engaged and connected workforce.
What is Thought Leadership?
Thought leadership is the practice of positioning individuals or organisations as trusted authorities and forward-thinkers within their industry. It goes beyond traditional marketing by offering genuine insights, innovative perspectives, and valuable expertise that educate and inspire your audiences, rather than simply promoting products or services. True thought leaders do not just respond to industry trends; they shape conversations, challenge conventional thinking, and provide guidance that helps others navigate complex challenges.
Through channels such as articles, social media, speaking engagements, and research, thought leaders can build credibility and influence by consistently demonstrating knowledge and a unique point of view. In today’s digitally connected world, thought leadership has become a powerful tool for building a brand’s reputation, establishing trust, and creating connections with customers, partners, and industry peers. When employees become thought leaders, they amplify their organisation’s voice authentically, humanising the brand and extending reach beyond what corporate channels alone can achieve.
Natalie is a corporate communications and social media specialist with extensive experience in thought leadership, employee advocacy, and change management. She is passionate about transforming how organisations communicate both internally and externally. As a trusted advisor to C-suite executives and a LinkedIn expert, Natalie has spent nine years helping companies unlock the power of thought leadership, employee advocacy, implement complex change programs, and develop communication strategies that genuinely engage people. She assists organisations in amplifying their voice through strategic internal communications and her LinkedIn expertise.
