Employee Advocacy Mistakes to Avoid

Employee Advocacy is the approach to marketing where select employees of an organization are actively involved in promoting the brand, its culture, products, news, and media authorized by the administrators. Imagine Tesla sharing information about its latest launch compared to Elon Musk announcing it himself – which would be more inclined to believe and follow? Employee advocacy can be a human touch behind marketing, an internalized approach that delivers a better promise to the consumer that they can easily trust.

Common?Employee Advocacy Mistakes to Avoid

The idea of employee advocacy takes a reasonable amount of time to yield results after implementation – and that too, only when it’s implemented and executed right. Thus, it helps to avoid the following common mistakes in advance to build a strong employee advocacy strategy.

Rushing Into it All Guns Blazing

The revolution of employee advocacy at your organization doesn’t need to begin at full throttle. Instead, this strategy needs to evolve organically, with a handful of employees advocating for the brand at any given time. Onboarding a hundred hands to start communicating doesn’t work – the move must be voluntary. Think of it this way: wouldn’t your consumers be overwhelmed seeing half your employees talking about the brand simultaneously?

Being too Trusting of The Existing Mechanism

To synchronize public media content sent to respective employees, a centralized system or a protocol needs to be in place. It is not safe to bank on things playing out by themselves. There are many roadblocks in traditional methods that hinder effective employee advocacy:

• Emailing pre-set content to various employees is the perfect recipe for creating echo chambers.
• Employees are busy people. It is easy for them to miss the broadcast email and completely forget to post on time.
• Mechanical treatment of the posts, since the employees aren’t interested in getting to know what the post actually contains.

Trying to Control Everything

If your organization decides to adopt an employee advocacy program, the chances are that trustworthiness of participants is already established. However, certain administrators still try to control and monitor every post that goes out from the channels of the spokespersons.

Absence of Tracking and Analytics

Every marketing campaign is set to generate a return on investment. By tracking the campaign and analyzing the numbers about its key performance indicators, organizations come to know whether or not the strategy worked.

The same concept applies to employee advocacy as well. Tracking the progress your posts are making online is a great way to assess the success or failure of your campaign.

Conclusion

Employee advocacy isn’t a new concept; neither is it a miracle tool that can fix everything wrong with an organization. Instead, it is a practice of mutual respect between the employer and the employee, with a common goal to positively improve the business’s performance.

When appropriately implemented, employee advocacy has the power to bring an entire organization together, aligned towards the same purpose. Here are some mistakes that you should avoid if you are planning to implement an effective employee advocacy program: Click Here