How To Properly Launch An Employee Advocacy Program

Too often, traditional thinking marketers believe that owned or paid media is the only way to scale a consistent message. But that’s not true! In fact, tapping into employees as advocates not only provides a vastly increased reach, but also taps into the passions, excitement and loyalty of your employees.

We work with companies in all stages to roll out employee advocacy programs that have scaled into the 1000s of employees. By launching with the right technology, the right training, and also a library of pre-approved content we helped our partner obliterate all other lead sources customer acquisition channels.

Our process model ensures for maximum adoption, participation and success. Here are a few steps to success we’ve documented when rolling out a successful employee advocacy program.

1. Plan – Understand how things will go is vital. What people or departments will you need to engage in order to get maximum uptick? How will you engage and communicate the program to the employees. Who will you choose as your pilot group? Ask yourself these questions before roll out.


2. Pilot – When launching your pilot, begin with a small group so that you can measure and optimize accordingly before scale. We recommend finding the first 25, 50 or 100 employees who participate being social active already as well as having some influence amongst their peers in the organization. Once you have the recipe for success, it’s time to scale to other groups. Divisions who have customer facing employees tend to be a good choice for the second group. Consider Sales, Marketing, Support, HR all great choices stage 2 rollout.


3. Train – Your advocacy program should seek to consistently improve. Basic social media and policy training will be needed when folks enter into the program but should have consistent training. Once they’re onboarded consider how to train them on adding context to messaging so that your company isn’t just an echo-chamber. Then consider training then on how to engage and respond to potential customers who will respond to their posts.


4. Organize – As the program scales you want to avoid becoming spammers putting out the same message across the board at the same time. This means that content should be organized and delivered properly to each group. Sales people should get content that influences buyers while folks in HR might be posting about company culture and career opportunities. Figure out how your organization can organize content for maximum results.


5. Govern – Ensure that you have oversight into the program. For example, our technology tells you if participation drops below a certain threshold, or when a particular division has dropped off, or who’s team’s content is performing best/worst. Closely tracking this will allow you to spot early stage problems and provide the proper training or assistance to improve.

Source: B2C