Employee Advocacy

What is employee advocacy?

Employee advocacy is the explicit and implicit promotion of a company by its employees, mainly on social media channels. Companies with active employee advocacy programs leverage their employees' social networks to promote messages, cut advertising costs, and drive sales and recruitment.  A formal employee advocacy program involves encouraging employees to post messages about their company’s products, culture, and recruitment initiatives – and rigorously monitors these advocacy efforts to control the messaging.

The benefits of employee advocacy

You can experience several benefits from running an effective employee advocacy program in the form of increased reach, engagement, sales, and ROI.

Improve your social reach and engagement

Your company can expand beyond its own reach by taking advantage of your employees’ social media influence and communities. Employee-shared content — which can be seen as more credible and authentic than brand-sponsored content— has the potential to drive a high volume of engagement.

Augment your sales, hiring, and thought leadership efforts

Uncover new opportunities for sales and thought leadership by tracking and responding to employee-led conversations proactively. Your employees can, directly and indirectly, help attract and acquire new talent by amplifying job opportunities and company-approved recruitment messaging — augmenting your HR team’s efforts.

Create a stronger brand voice

An employee advocacy program with robust governance enables you to guide your employees’ voice, so it aligns with — and amplifies — your overarching brand voice. Consistent brand voice helps foster trust from existing and potential buyers and recruits.

Lower your marketing costs

Word-of-mouth marketing leveraged by employee advocacy can complement demand generation efforts by scaling and amplifying content that drives leads. This can help your company generate additional qualified leads without incurring additional marketing costs.

Improve your team’s engagement and morale

Employee advocacy steeps a sense of ownership and loyalty in employees by converting them into advocates and stakeholders — improving their morale, productivity, and retention in the long run.

Key elements to an employee advocacy program

An impactful employee advocacy program has several key elements:

1. Goals and metrics: well-defined goals and metrics provide direction to the program and enable you to define a strategy, as well as create reporting and budgeting guidelines. To measure and quantify your program’s success, leverage metrics such as organic reach, engagement, top contributors, attributed traffic, recruits hired, and brand sentiment.

2. Contributor guidelines: robust policies for social media sharing, governance, and compliance are salient to the concept of employee advocacy as they help companies reinforce their brand voice and avoid reputational damage and legal complications.

3. Incentives and rewards: incentives and rewards drive employee participation and help measure program overhead. Social media shoutouts, swag, cash rewards, and appreciation posts are common ways to incentivize employee contributors to post more aggressively.

4. Shareable resources: maintaining a ready repository of approved content eliminates guesswork from the process and helps keep employees’ voices on-brand.       

5. A robust advocacy platform: an employee advocacy program has many moving parts, all of which can be unified and automated by a robust employee advocacy platform. By putting the programs on autopilot, brands can offer a superior experience to their employee contributors and keep control.

Expand the reach of your employee advocacy program with Sprinklr Advocacy

Due to the steady decline of organic engagement rates on social media, it’s now harder for brands to be heard without spending marketing funds on costly, inefficient ad campaigns. Sprinklr Advocacy — built on the world’s only unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform — allows companies to empower your workforce with a digital-first employee advocacy program that enhances reach, engagement, revenue, and talent and helps you:

• Maintain a central asset repository

• Define approval workflows for 30+ social channels

• Gamify the experience to improve employee participation

• Build customizable program dashboards and metrics.

With Sprinklr’s employee advocacy solution, it’s easy to transform your loyal employees into your strongest advocates, who feel motivated to promote your brand organically.