Employee Advocacy: your most powerful employer branding tool

Your most powerful brand assets are your people. They are committed to the success of your organisation and are driven to contribute to your mission. It is crucial that you are harnessing the power of their loyalty! Here we have shared four ways that organisations are stimulating employee advocacy and promoting a culture of employee advocacy.

Social Advocacy
Traditionally word-of-mouth marketing was not the most desirable messaging channel as it was limited to the close friends and family of an individual. Today, most people are connected to an average of 250 people across their social media networks.

Encouraging your employees to speak about your business and their experiences with you, now has the potential to reach thousands. At Zappos, staff are trained in the art of the tweet and are encouraged to share their life at work with the hashtag #InsideZappos. LinkedIn is also a great platform to expand your businesses network, and encouraging your employees to share your content and post about their workplace may also empower them to develop their personal brands too.  

People profiles (celebrate their success!)
As the #1 contributor to your organisation’s success, your people deserve to be celebrated! Employee-of-the-month programs can be an excellent platform to recognise your people internally, but shining the spotlight publicly is even better. Profile stories like the ones we’ve written here for Nganampa Health Council are an example of one approach to sharing the personal journeys of your people and to show potential candidates what life at your organisation looks like.

These can also be featured through video, a fantastic tool for expressing the feel of your workplace.

Not-for-profit Initiatives
Gaining company support for non-profit projects can be enormously beneficial to organisations for a number of reasons. Putting aside the consumer branding advantages from conducting CSR initiatives; volunteer projects and fundraisers are a great way to show your people the human side to your organisation. This builds their personal support and encourages them to speak positively about you and the philanthropic work that you do.

A great example of this in action is the Deloitte pro bono program. Funded by Deloitte, non-profit projects are staffed and evaluated as if they’re an external client. The organisation also supports staff to volunteer their skills to social services and each year they send more than 200 consultants to week-long projects in collaboration with non-profits and micro enterprises.

Asking staff to share their experiences with the Deloitte CSR program, the company reached 3.9 million people, resulting in 4000 likes, comments and shares. This is a great result of active employee engagement and highlights the benefits of socially responsible activities to the employer and consumer brand.

Industry Events
Conferences, workshops and seminars are not only a highly beneficial way for your people to gain industry insights and updates, they also present an unmissable networking opportunity for your employer brand. Encouraging people to speak about organisational initiatives and culture is an excellent way to attract competitor’s talent whom are sitting in the same room!

Editor’s Note: Employment Office works with businesses to attract and retain quality talent. Their Employer Branding Specialists expertly uncover and elevate the client’s Employee Value Proposition to help achieve their long-term recruitment marketing objectives.