The Importance of Employee Advocacy for Employer Brand Strategy

For an employer, building a brand strategy and highlighting their brand in the market to hire talented people are always a priority. However, even with an employer brand strategy in place and elaborate marketing plans, many companies still struggle to breathe life into their brand stories. They can create buzz, but it too fizzles out quickly without providing any conclusive results. So, how can a company build a brand story that resonates with the audience and attracts the top talent in the market?

The real brand-building exercise happens with the help of people who inhabit the brand’s dream every day. These individuals are the most powerful, cost-effective and an available brand resource for the company. They are called — the employees.

When a company redeems its workers as advocates and champions of the organisation, people notice and listen to what they have to say. And trust us — there is no better way to create and highlight your brand story than by the word of mouth of your employees. Research has shown that employers who invested in an employee advocacy program experienced a ten-fold increase in their audience outreach. So, let us discuss how to make full use of employee advocacy in building the employer brand strategy.

Cracking the employee advocacy code

Most employers understand and acknowledge that their employees post reviews on job sites, such as Glassdoor, and updates on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. These activities can create a lot of difference in influencing a potential job seeker towards your organisation. However, more often, employee advocates go unseen or are difficult to find.

Also, simply encouraging people to speak positively of the organisation on various social media platforms will hardly create any impact on the audience or attract any attention and talent towards your brand. An effective brand strategy always needs a systematic approach to provide the desired results. The first step in building employee branding strategies for organisations is to build their brand story and identify the champions of their brand. Then, empower these champions with training and proper technology to succeed in their endeavours. And finally, measure their results and achievements. Keeping in mind these important aspects, let us check the ways to develop a successful employee advocacy strategy for right employer branding.

Understand your EVP (Employee Value Proposition)

Your value proposition has to answer effectively various relevant questions to attract the right talent to your company. The most important questions that it should answer are :
Does the organisation support and encourage self-starters and proactive risk-takers?
Alternatively, does it function as a family and draws different perspectives to enable thoughtful access to projects, opportunities and problems?

By providing a comprehensive answer, you will engage your audience and seek the right candidate recruitment for the job.

Also, you must understand and assess the true qualities of your organisation, which have helped it grow to newer heights. Then, you must share them with your employees and ask them to promote these qualities through their individual social media channels.

Discover champions

The organisation should actively look to develop influencers to activate the employee advocacy program and human resource management successfully. A conventional review can help you identify the true champion employees. However, an organic social activity has the potential to attract more influential advocates. Nevertheless, changing your employees to brand champions is one of the most powerful employer branding strategies for an employer to follow, as the brand wins brownie points both externally and internally. Therefore, there should be a deliberate effort to push the brand message through champions to obtain maximum results. This will also help with employee retention.

Right technology

Using the right platform to drive the employee advocacy program and human resource management can prove to be instrumental in implementing a successful brand strategy. With the help of technology, you can develop innovative solutions. For instance, you can give your employees a single platform to share their views and messages with their network.

An efficient platform to share messages should be easy to use, provide the employees with positive user experience, measure the results, and track the online views. It will help you check your performance and collate credible data to improve your performance. It will also help with employee engagement.

Measure your progress

Tracking your data is the only way to measure your success and performance. A focussed brand strategy and an innovative technology platform will help you measure your outreach activity, which will, in turn, determine the overall success of your advocacy program. This will also help you with employee retention.

The employee advocacy program should not be restricted to conventional messaging and current employees. All individuals who come in contact with the corporation and have excellent reviews should be allowed to advocate the company and share their positive experiences. This will usher in more advocates for the company and help you with employee engagement. Plus, it will help you build your brand story online. And, if handled properly, even a rejected candidate can convert into an advocate and a champion for the company.

Today, marketing is more than taglines, campaigns, logos and advertisements. People want something more to engage and associate themselves with a brand. That’s why, when people associated with your company say good things about it, people tend to listen and trust them. This word of trust is very powerful and can never be achieved by any kind of marketing gimmick. Belief in the brand is what an employee advocacy program brings to the table, and it has the potential to propel an organisation to the forefront of competition in attracting the best talent.