When resources are scarce, algorithms are evolving, and feeds are saturated, an employee advocacy initiative stands as an invaluable resource for social teams. Advocacy initiatives empower social marketers to broaden their brand’s outreach beyond their limitations—without incurring extra costs.
For instance, Sprout Social generated over 28 million impressions from our Employee Advocacy platform last year.
From boosting brand visibility to crafting an employer identity that draws elite talent, employee advocacy aids brands in meeting their business objectives.
Yet, many advocacy programs often exist as informal side endeavors. Moving forward, establishing a refined program necessitates strategic content organization and interdisciplinary teamwork.
This article provides actionable advice on how to assemble a content pipeline and secure the success of your advocacy initiatives in 2024—and beyond.
Set objectives and establish success metrics
To develop a solid content strategy for your employee advocacy platform, you must initially outline specific goals for your employee advocacy program and select the metrics you’ll utilize to evaluate success. Here’s a detailed guide on how to approach this.
Establish clear, measurable objectives
Clarify what you wish to accomplish with your employee advocacy program, and then solidify those objectives. For instance, is your aim to enhance brand recognition and reach? Or are you looking to elevate employee morale and strengthen brand affinity by engaging employees in advocacy? Your objectives could also involve tactical goals, such as generating new leads through employee networks or establishing your company as thought innovators in your field. Another excellent objective could involve leveraging advocacy to draw in top talent by displaying your company culture.
Now, let’s get down to specifics. Ensure these objectives are measurable. For instance, aim for a 50% employee participation rate in sharing at least one piece of content weekly, or target a 20% boost in website traffic attributed to employee-shared content within a six-month period.
Make sure your objectives are achievable with your current resources and capabilities. Ensure they’re relevant by aligning them with broader business aims, like enhancing overall brand visibility or increasing lead generation.
Finally, introduce a time-bound framework, such as aiming for a specific engagement rate within three months, to keep your objectives on track and ensure timely advancements.
Identify key performance metrics (KPIs)
Once you’ve established your objectives, identify the KPIs you’ll employ to evaluate success. These might include social media metrics like reach, impressions, shares, and engagement rates. Alternatively, lead conversion rates can showcase the number of leads generated from employee shares. Additionally, metrics that track website traffic sources linked to posts shared by employees, employee engagement rates, and referral metrics are also vital.
Utilize tracking and measurement tools
Implement social media monitoring tools for tracking and measuring your program. For example, platforms like Sprout assist in managing, tracking, and analyzing the effectiveness of your EA efforts. These metrics illustrate the ROI of your employee advocacy program, and they can easily be shared with your leadership team to gain executive backing.
Additionally, consider setting up custom UTM parameters to monitor the precise effect of employee-shared content on web traffic and conversions. Regularly gathering feedback from employees helps identify their experiences and highlight areas needing improvement.
Regularly review and refine tactics
It’s essential to conduct monthly or quarterly reviews of your KPIs. This practice will assist in assessing and ensuring the sustained success of your employee advocacy program. Also, gather feedback from employees to keep them motivated and engaged, as their collaboration is integral. Aim to acknowledge and reward employees who actively engage and achieve outstanding results. This encourages a culture of participation and recognition.
The foundations of an employee advocacy content strategy
According to Sprout’s research, a significant challenge for brands is a lack of sufficient content for advocacy. As one marketer pointed out, “You require a considerable amount of content to support a program. If your company’s content strategy is lacking, you will encounter difficulties.”
The focus should be on curating quality content that aligns with your brand’s goals and values rather than merely producing content in bulk. To energize your employee advocacy program and construct your content repository, ensure your content satisfies all critical criteria.
Educational materials
Your advocacy content should deliver value to your audience. Share educational materials that inform, engage, and provoke discussions. Concentrate on relevant topics that assist your community in confronting common industry obstacles.
Valuable educational materials can include both in-house and external:
- Blog articles
- Videos
- Social media updates
- Data reports
- Templates and tools
- Case studies
Behind-the-scenes/company culture materials
Employee narratives serve as the most persuasive representations of your company culture. Share materials that provide insights into life within your organization. Incorporate blog posts or videos from employee perspectives. Invite team members to showcase behind-the-scenes at industry events, training workshops, or volunteer initiatives.
This type of content humanizes your brand, resonates with your audience, and enables team members to celebrate their colleagues.
Executive thought leadership (both owned and earned)
Effective executive communication strategies are vital for managing brand identity, enhancing employee spirit, and attracting talent. Integrate executive thought leadership into your advocacy approach. Distribute blog posts, videos, social updates, and other materials created by your leadership or C-suite.
Enhance your strategy by proactively tracking publications that quote or interview your executives. Prioritize curating earned media placements to strengthen your brand’s thought leadership credibility.
Recruitment content
A strong employer brand effectively persuades talent that your organization is ideal for their career growth. Today’s candidates often want more insight into the reality of working at a company prior to joining.
This is why employee testimonials can be a powerful recruiting asset. By incorporating employee advocacy into your recruitment strategy, you can amplify job postings while allowing your team members to share their personal experiences in their social channels. Ultimately, the perspectives of your employees hold three times more weight with possible candidates than those of your CEO.
Candidates are also keen on industry accolades and recognitions. Distribute award announcements, graphics, and videos through your employee advocacy platform to spread the word. At Sprout, this type of content is the most widely shared by employees.
Philanthropic updates
Prospective candidates, current employees, customers, and industry partners want assurance that you fulfill your corporate social responsibility promises. While taking a firm stance through tactics like social activism is crucial, it’s equally important to share the actions being taken to back up those statements.
Through your advocacy platform, share updates pertaining to scholarships you fund, volunteer days, or contributions that support your charitable initiatives.
Product updates/industry collaborations
A vital approach to keeping your team and customers informed on industry developments and product modifications is to utilize your employee advocacy channel. Share press releases, blog entries, and videos that announce product updates, new launches, seasonal releases, and trend analyses.
When introducing new partnerships with other industry leaders or companies, leverage employee advocacy to create significant buzz. For instance, when Sprout announced our Salesforce partnership, 95% of the social impressions from the launch came from employees promoting content via the advocacy platform.
Evergreen content
Cultivating generic and evergreen posts for employee advocacy guarantees your content remains relevant, engaging, and useful over time, regardless of current trends or events. Employees can share these posts year-round, providing continuous value without frequent updates. Consider posts celebrating work anniversaries or personal milestones, as well as “Thank You” messages that highlight an employee’s journey and contributions to the organization.
Five strategies to ensure a continuous flow of content for your employee advocacy program
Gathering the necessary content for a thriving advocacy program may feel daunting. However, you needn’t tackle it solo. Below are several strategies to engage other departments in curating content to ensure you always have sufficient resources available.
1. Enhance collaboration within your marketing team
Engage closely with your content, communications, product, and customer marketing teams to stay abreast of forthcoming articles, key announcements, and company updates. Schedule regular meetings and utilize shared calendars for improved visibility.
Your content team can also assist in curation. As the creators of blogs, videos, case studies, and more, they can efficiently draft prepackaged social media messages to accompany each curated post. Their curation efforts will not only enhance your advocacy strategy but also help them meet their traffic targets.
2. Cultivate relationships beyond marketing
Forming partnerships within marketing is a great beginning, but to develop an employee advocacy strategy that resonates throughout your organization, you need to extend beyond marketing. Build cross-functional ties throughout your business.
Consider identifying your contacts within HR, sales, engineering, R&D, and operations. Collaborate with them to unearth content pertinent to their departmental goals and find out what engages their external audiences. Each team might possess distinct content they want to distribute.
3. Gather ideas from across your organization
Your team members are in touch with trending content. Leverage them to discover intriguing third-party articles, reports, and analyses relevant to your industry.
Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution provides all users with the option to curate content. By selecting the “Add Story” button in the upper right corner, you can propose a content piece be added to your organization’s current stories feed.
4. Discover what content your employees wish to share
Design an employee advocacy program that your team members want to engage in by evaluating your performance at each phase of your program. Identify which stories garner the most shares, what topics resonate, and where there are gaps in your content approach.
Feel free to solicit feedback from your employees. Consider questions like:
- How do you perceive our employee advocacy program?
- Has our employee advocacy program enabled you to grow your personal brand on social media?
- What assistance do you need to maximize your use of our advocacy tools?
Try our complimentary checklist, where we’ve condensed it into six straightforward steps for initiating an employee advocacy program.
5. Involve your executives
Engage your executive team to draw more focus to your content and enhance interaction. Executives sharing their insights, achievements, and personal anecdotes can humanize leadership, rendering the brand more relatable and genuine. This can foster confidence and pride among employees, supporting a culture of transparency and trust. Furthermore, when executives actively participate, it underscores the initiative’s significance and motivates employees to contribute.
However, effectively managing executives and maintaining their engagement in content curation demands a proactive approach. Encourage them to share personal experiences, insights, and accomplishments that align with the company’s mission. It’s also vital to routinely communicate the value of their involvement and how it can inspire the broader team and enhance the company’s brand.
Platforms like Sprout can facilitate this process by allowing your executive team to effortlessly share content and evaluate the impact of their posts. This ensures they remain actively engaged without disruption to their demanding schedules.
Guarantee a continuous flow of employee advocacy content
Employee advocacy is no longer an optional enhancement. Modern social teams face ongoing algorithm changes and resource challenges that complicate organic growth on social media. A developed employee advocacy program is pivotal for gaining impressions, boosting visibility, securing leads, and attracting exceptional talent.
To leverage the full potential of your advocacy program, collaborate with various departments to assist in sourcing and curating content. By consistently providing your team with fresh material, the results relating to your business goals will be evident.
Interested in assessing the effect of employee advocacy on your company’s bottom line? Try Sprout’s employee advocacy ROI calculator tool.
The post The complete guide to developing your employee advocacy content strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.
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