Employee Advocacy: How to Create your Most Powerful Branding Channel

What if there was a way to empower all your employees to be brand ambassadors—while at the same time helping them be more successful in their career?

Every person in your organization has the power to enhance or hurt your reputation in the market. Through social media, blogs, peer review sites and more—every person is a content publisher. We all have a voice and are free to wield that power as we see fit.

You can help your coworkers share beautiful, persona-based content through an employee advocacy program. And it doesn’t matter if you are a team of one, or part of a large organization!

At Kforce, I founded its first-ever employee advocacy program. The Shareable Content Program was my passion project and one of my top accomplishments in my career so far.

And today, this employee advocacy program is one of Kforce’s most powerful marketing channels, taking the firm’s employer branding, content marketing, talent attraction, employee engagement, recruiting enablement, and sales enablement prowess to a new atmosphere.

The first thing I did when hired at Kforce was a digital audit. I analyzed what employees were posting on social media. Many employees were not sharing any content at all.

I noticed that many recruiters were only sharing job postings. No other content. As a former recruiter, I understand what it’s like to work a full desk. Recruiters are busy juggling multiple reqs and building relationships with hiring managers and candidates. They aren’t trained in content marketing. And that’s not their job.

Outside of recruiters, other employee groups were also not sharing much. As I scanned social media for activity, I started to consider the reasons why employees were not sharing quality content. 

Through dozens of focus group sessions, 1:1s with leaders and my digital analysis, I discovered there were four main reasons employees weren’t sharing content.

As an enthusiastic student of content marketing, I realized what I needed to do: create a strategy that aligns to the buyer and candidate journeys.

The program would deliver persona-based B2B and B2C content, in user-friendly templates, to all employees on a consistent basis. This customer-centric content would answer their questions, shoulder their burdens and fulfill their needs.

At this point, I had created and launched a firm-wide, mandatory social media academy. The training provided step-by-step instructions for posting content on social media. It touched on the importance of sharing content to grow your network, reach people you may not otherwise reach, enhance your personal brand and build trust and relationships.

But training wasn’t enough. It didn’t solve the challenge of content curation and creation or learning how to write for social media. The content people were sharing was company-centric, not customer-centric.

We weren’t there yet…so here’s what I did next...

As you’ve likely found in your career, to make things happen you’ve got to take people with you. Right? Whether you're standing up a new offering, spearheading an important project, or establishing a new program, it’s important to generate excitement and earn buy-in for your vision.

I’ve found it helpful to start with why an employee advocacy program will benefit the person you are talking to.

For each stakeholder you’re hoping to motivate, understand their challenges, fears and what lights them up. There are so many benefits of employee advocacy; the key is clearly articulating which benefit will resonate most with the individual you’re talking with.

After deciding to launch the employee advocacy program, I “hit the campaign trail.” I selected 5 offices to run a pilot for my passion project. I started with a simple email with a few social media posts included. I knew my coworkers in these offices were influencers—and if they found the program valuable, they’d tell their friends.

Fast forward, and we went from sending emails via Outlook to using our existing email marketing platform to deliver two emails a week to all employees and consultants. The content spread is designed for each target audience (which I touch on a bit further down this page). We have a few pre-written posts per content piece, complete with tracked links, hashtags and other channel-optimized components. Employees are encouraged to put the posts into their own words, or they can simply copy and paste.

Only three months after going firm-wide with the program, we were seeing incredible results.

I flew down to our headquarters in Tampa to join an internal live webcast. One of the objectives of this webcast was to discuss the success of our employee advocacy program.

Our results were so extraordinary that LinkedIn took notice and was wondering what we were doing. A LinkedIn executive joined me on the webcast to tell us they had noted a 496% lift in content engagement over the last three months. She told Kforce that LinkedIn’s data scientists needed to run the numbers a couple of times because they couldn’t believe the dramatic lift in content engagement! The LinkedIn exec explained to our entire firm that the content engagement due to employees sharing content was not only far and above what our competitors were doing, but 2-3 times higher than what she typically sees with global, "household name" brands.

As I sat next to our COO, still on camera and in front of the whole company, I was fighting back tears. I couldn't help it. I felt so proud of my coworkers and the way they embraced the program and used it for their continued success.

The program continues to be a top-performing marketing channel for Kforce, generating revenue for the firm, enhancing its employer brand, expanding its digital footprint, and getting people to know, like and trust Kforce. Just as importantly, the program empowers all employees to elevate their personal brand, stay updated in their field, learn new skills, become social media-savvy, and grow their networks.

Start with a pilot

Start with a pilot, and choose your participants carefully. Can you identify colleagues that are open to experimentation? Are there people who are already doing innovative stuff, and/or people who are already active on social media? I believe willingness to try something new is the most important trait to look for; you can teach them everything else.

Use personas

An effective employee advocacy program is based on a content marketing strategy that is customer-centric and tailored to your employees and their target audience.

Content mapping is very effective to ensure your content aligns with the specific needs, questions, and challenges for your target audience.

Be their advocate

Understand that people are going to be at a wide range of comfort levels when sharing content with their networks. Be patient, warm and friendly. You are their cheerleader. Go at their pace. Maybe you need to hop on a call and screen share. Perhaps you need to put together a step-by-step guide, or a video. Do it! Hold office hours. Make yourself available. The work you put in to drive adoption will pay off, I promise. Show empathy and understand their comfort level.

Steep your strategy in data

Any successful content marketing strategy, or talent attraction strategy, or any other important strategy should be data-based. Track whatever you can track – from your email open rates, to clicks on the content you provide, to page views on your website. You need to carefully monitor what is working, and what isn’t.

Seek (and act on) feedback

Demonstrate to your colleagues that you are not only open to their feedback, but that you are actively pursuing it. If you have focused your program on serving your coworkers’ needs, then it makes sense to ensure you are actually meeting their needs. Encourage content suggestions, and when you receive them, give that person a shout-out. Conduct surveys to solicit feedback, which you’ll then use to improve your program.

Have fun

Having fun at work is so important! We are emotional beings, and the desire to have fun is innate. You’ll bring more people with you and significantly increase adoption if you make it an enjoyable experience to participate. Once people start seeing positive results (i.e. increased response rates, traffic to their LinkedIn profile, brand recognition, etc.), you will earn their buy-in.

But to see those positive results, they have to first participate. And making sharing high-quality, targeted content fun, quick and easy will increase the likelihood of participation!