6 Business Benefits of Employee Advocacy

If you’re wondering if you should establish an employee advocacy program at your organization, we wrote this guide just for you. Here are six business benefits of employee advocacy, as well as six practical tips for success.

1. Extend Your Social Reach Overnight

Again, one of the most immediate benefits of employee advocacy is the widespread reach your content can achieve. Your sales reps and other employees are active on many social outlets every day and are connected to diverse, worldwide audiences.

No matter how many social media connections your company has, chances are high that your employees have more. In fact, research from Cisco has shown that on average, your employees have 10x more followers than your company’s social media network.

It only makes sense, therefore, to leverage the connections of your workforce for the benefit of your entire organization.

The best-case result you’re after is exponential reach. If your company has 100 or more employees, and each employee has a social media audience of hundreds (or thousands) of connections, imagine how fast your company’s content could spread when your employees share it.

On social media, your workforce has “audiences with audiences.” This means when your employees share a company-related post to their audiences, that post can get re-shared by these audiences – which could get further re-shared by the audience’s audience, and so on.

Obviously, to achieve this type of exponential growth, your content will have to be good. Really good. So make sure your marketing and sales teams are aligned so you can create content your audience finds irresistible.

2. Grow Brand Awareness

Cisco research has shown that 90 percent of your employees’ social audience is unfamiliar with your brand. This unfamiliarity creates the perfect chance to increase your company’s brand awareness. Peer-to-peer sharing through employee advocacy gives companies powerful word-of-mouth opportunities that paid advertising just can’t match.

3. Boost Sales

Brand awareness through employee advocacy can significantly boost sales. B2B prospects research and do business primarily online. They ask questions and conduct fact-finding long before making a purchase. Your sales reps will be more effective at selling to leads who have already heard of (or even engaged with) your company or product online.

4. Strengthen Brand Trust

In this era of fake news and increasing skepticism about advertising, trust is a crucial component for business survival. As your employees share company content to their audiences, your company’s trust factor grows.

Through employee advocacy, your content is spread by real people – your employees – rather than a paid ad. With today’s trust gap, and only 23% of B2B buyers being directly influenced by vendors, employee advocacy’s “people” factor is significant.

5. Improve Business Performance Through Employee Engagement

Employee advocacy leads to higher levels of employee engagement. “Engaged” workers are those who are committed to their companies, passionate about their careers and eager for professional growth. As you’ve probably guessed, the larger the number of engaged employees working for your company, the better.

Employee advocacy boosts engagement: Because engaged workers are dedicated to career growth, they often look for professional-development opportunities. Employee advocacy is one excellent way to provide such professional development.

When your people continually absorb and share company content, they grow in their knowledge of trends and issues facing their industry. Further, by participating in industry conversations happening on social media, engaged employees gain a fuller understanding of their customers and competitors.

As employee advocacy increases professional development, and professional development increases employee engagement, a best-case scenario begins taking shape: profit growth.

Employee engagement boosts profits: Engaged employees are characterized by higher levels of productivity, decreased incidences of workplace injuries, and lower rates of absenteeism. They also contribute to higher levels of customer satisfaction by solving customer problems and providing service that wows and delights.

Overall, highly-engaged employees generate more profits for their employers and even lead to higher stock prices for publicly-held companies.

6. Recruit and Keep the Best Talent

LinkedIn reports that social enterprises are 58% more likely to attract top talent and 20% more likely to retain them. Why? Job candidates look for companies who provide professional development opportunities and help employees strengthen their personal brands.

Employee advocacy enables your people to become sources of valuable industry knowledge to anyone searching for such information online. As your people promote original content developed by your organization, they quickly gain stronger personal brands and earn recognition as industry thought leaders.

Helping employees strengthen their personal brands is a win-win for both the organization and their people. When organizations become known for enriching their people professionally, these companies find it easier to attract loyal, highly-engaged job candidates.

Return for the final post in this blog series 7 Tips for Employee Advocacy Success.

See Also: Part 1: What is Employee Advocacy?