Employee advocacy is the practice of empowering your employees to share your brand’s messages, values, and culture with their personal and professional networks. It can be a powerful way to enhance your digital transformation efforts, as it can improve your brand awareness, reputation, trust, and engagement with your target audiences. In this article, we will explore some of the benefits and best practices of employee advocacy in digital strategy.

Employee Advocacy Enhances Your Customer Experience

One of the main goals of digital transformation is to create a better customer experience by delivering personalized, relevant, and timely content and services. Employee advocacy can help you achieve this goal, as it allows you to leverage the human element of your brand. Your employees can act as authentic and credible spokespeople who can share their insights, stories, and testimonials with potential and existing customers. This can create a more emotional and meaningful connection with your audience and increase their loyalty and satisfaction.

According to a study by Sociabble, employee advocates can convey experience, affinity, and trust online, which are three conditions that are difficult to meet with traditional digital communication methods. By enabling your employees to share their positive experiences with your brand, you can also increase your social proof and word-of-mouth referrals, which are proven to influence purchase decisions.

Employee Advocacy Attracts and Retains Top Talent

Another key aspect of digital transformation is ensuring that you have the right talent and skills to drive innovation and growth. Employee advocacy can help you attract and retain top talent by showcasing your employer’s brand and culture. Your employees can act as ambassadors who can share their stories, achievements, and feedback with potential and existing talent. This can help you build your reputation as a great place to work and increase your talent pool and retention rate.

According to a report by Talentry, employee advocacy can significantly speed up the process of turning “hidden” talent into applicants, especially when it incorporates digital employee referrals. By leveraging your employees’ networks, you can reach out to passive candidates, who are not actively looking for a job but who are a good fit for your organization. You can also reduce your hiring costs and time, as referrals tend to be more qualified, engaged, and productive.

Employee advocacy improves employee engagement.

A third benefit of employee advocacy is that it can improve employee engagement, which is essential for your digital transformation success. Employee engagement is the degree to which your employees are committed, motivated, and satisfied with their work and organization. Engaged employees are more likely to perform well, innovate, and collaborate. Employee advocacy can boost employee engagement by giving your employees a voice, a sense of purpose, and recognition for their contributions.

According to an article by Vervology, employee advocacy can create a “virtuous circle” where employees share more, which boosts positivity and engagement, encourages employees to write more positive reviews, attracts more appropriate candidates, and so on. By providing your employees with the tools, training, and incentives to share your brand’s content, you can also increase their knowledge, skills, and confidence.

Best Practices for Employee Advocacy in Digital Strategy

To make the most of employee advocacy in your digital strategy, you need to follow some best practices, such as:

• Address your workplace culture: Before launching an employee advocacy program, you need to ensure that your workplace culture is positive, supportive, and aligned with your brand’s values and vision. You need to foster a culture of trust, transparency, and collaboration where your employees feel valued, respected, and empowered.
• Set clear goals and metrics. You need to define what you want to achieve with your employee advocacy program and how you will measure your progress and results. You need to align your goals with your overall digital strategy and set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives. You also need to track and analyze your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as reach, engagement, conversions, retention, and revenue.
• Establish solid guidelines and policies. You need to provide your employees with clear and consistent guidelines and policies that outline what they can and cannot share, how they should represent your brand, and the legal and ethical implications of their actions. You need to educate your employees on the best practices and etiquette of social media and ensure that they comply with your brand’s standards and values.
• Provide relevant and engaging content. You need to provide your employees with relevant and engaging content that they can easily and willingly share with their networks. You need to create content that showcases your brand’s stories, values, culture, products, and services and that appeals to your target audiences. You also need to diversify your content formats, such as blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, and webinars, and optimize them for different platforms and devices.
• Empower and reward your employees: You need to empower your employees to share your brand’s content by giving them the tools, training, and support they need. You need to use a digital platform, such as Sociabble or Talentry, that simplifies and streamlines the process of sharing content and integrates with your existing systems and channels. You also need to reward your employees for their participation and performance by offering them recognition, feedback, incentives, and gamification.

Employee advocacy is a powerful way to boost your digital transformation efforts, as it can enhance your customer experience, attract and retain top talent, and improve employee engagement. By following the best practices outlined above, you can create a successful and sustainable employee advocacy program that can help you achieve your digital strategy goals.