For gold-standard engagement learn to harness the power of your internal influencers

Here are three? truths to fire up your next employee engagement campaign.

1. No-one understands your brand better than your employees
2. We trust people who sound and behave like us - we have a different gut response listening to our mates or colleagues than we do our boss
3. When we trust the message, we're more likely to believe and engage

This is why using internal influencers, or as we call it 'empfluencers', can be the difference between your campaign flopping or flying.

Advocacy is the gold-standard of engagement. Your employees are more likely to join in when they connect with the message. Simple as that.

Do it by:

• Becoming storytellers. Your employees can share unfiltered, unscripted stories about their experience. For leaders, this can be a valued source of playback and insight. For colleagues it’s an experience they can share in and be part of. Ideally you want to create a community of employee content creators, and it’s easy to find them too. We’d recommend one of these options:

Ask your comms or HR teams to hand pick people who are good on camera, have a voice and are known as strong advocates for your brand.?

Or go full broadcast and stick a recruitment ad out internally to call for employees to sign up as content creators. As part of the selection process ask them to create a piece of content featuring them on camera, talking about a simple work related subject.?

• Being relevant. There’s an increased need to replicate the content experience we all have across the media we consume every day, at work. Using the tools and approach used in external content management and delivery has never mattered more. Not every internal message can be landed using a meme, but if you can tap into a cultural moment that speaks to us all in the form of a funny one liner to push people to complete your Pulse survey, it’s way more likely to have the desired impact than to add into the white noise by saying ‘Your feedback is valuable to us’.
• Trusting experience. Like any parts of the comms mix, employee engagement needs expert, experienced hands. Focusing your content strategy on using more Employee Generated Content doesn’t mean losing all sense and handing over the reins entirely. But finding moments where employee voices could tell the story could make the difference.

Empfluencers = less dull, broadcast bulletins and more creative, insight led, peer-to-peer engagement. And all delivered through content fronted by the people who know your stories best.?