The Definitive Guide to Employee Advocate Marketing A SEVEN STEP GUIDE TO ENSURE SUCCESS

The Definitive Guide to Employee Advocate Marketing A SEVEN STEP GUIDE TO ENSURE SUCCESS

The Definitive Guide to Employee Advocate Marketing A 7 STEP GUIDE TO ENSURE SUCCESS Overview Step 1: Make Your Plan Step 2: Identify and Invite Your Most Social-Savvy Employees Step 3: Train the Core Group of Advocates Step 4: Launch the Program and Engage Your Advocates Step 5: Raise Internal Awareness About the Program Step 6: Measure Success Step 7: Grow the Advocate Marketing Program Conclusion Page 2 Page 4 Page 9 Page 12 Page 15 Page 18 Page 20 Page 23 Page 27 1

Overview: What is an Employee Advocate? An advocate is one that argues for a cause, a supporter or defender. Advocates are passionate about your brand and talk it up to anyone who will listen. When it comes to your brand, your employees fit the advocate description better than anyone else. It s likely they re already promoting your brand on their own social media accounts and providing their friends with insider knowledge about how awesome your products or services are. However, when it comes to formal Advocate Marketing programs, employees can often be overlooked. Employee Advocate (n.): A socially engaged employee who creates and shares their employer s brand content on their social networks. 2

Why employee advocates? When your employees share content, they reach ten times as many people as the posts on your brand s social pages do. This expanded reach is powerful, because 77% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product when a friend recommends it. 1 Since employees are more familiar with your brand, their friends and other consumers consider them trusted resources. In fact, employees are trusted more than company CEOs. 77 % of consumers are more likely to purchase a product when a friend recommends it 1 Advocate Marketing programs have great benefits for employees too. These programs can empower and engage employees, improve their personal brands, as well as help them build new skills. Your employees are already your greatest asset; by empowering them to advocate for your brand, you can make them more engaged, knowledgeable and skilled while improving communications, marketing, sales, human resources and other company goals. Part of piloting a project like this is trying new things. You ll soon discover what works and what doesn t, and you can improve the program with this knowledge. Plan to the start the program small, with a select group of savvy employees, and scale slowly to new groups. 1 Nielsen. A Multi-Mix Media Approach drives New Product Awareness. 2 December, 2013. www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2013/a-multi-mix-media-approach-drives-new-product-awareness.html. 3

STEP 1 Make Your Plan 4

Create Social Media Policy Before you jump into an employee Advocate Marketing program, you need to have a solid plan in place. Regardless of how socially savvy your company is, the first step will be to create a social media policy to ensure compliance with the program. This resource will outline the rules of what employees can and cannot post. It s also important to note that all employees who participate in the program should indicate in their social profiles that they work at your company. The policy should be written in everyday language that is easy for all your employees to understand. Identify Goals Next, identify your goals for the Advocate Marketing program. With an employee Advocate Marketing program, your company has the potential to reach new audiences, drive leads for sales, demonstrate thought leadership and make your brand s identity clearer. Your goals can be internal as well. Perhaps you want to build your employees social media skills and foster a sense of community and pride. Be realistic about the goals you can achieve and understand that different parts of your company will want different outcomes from the program. Reach new audiences Drive Leads for Sales Demonstrates thought Leadership Establish Brand Identity Build Employee Social Media Skills Foster a sense of community and Pride 5

Get Executive Buy-in Getting internal buy-in may also be an important part of the process, depending on the size of your company and the scope of the project. Use the goals you identified to justify the program internally. With support from executives, the project will unroll more smoothly and achieve greater success in the long run. Employees already have a lot on their plates and without management buy-in, staff are less likely to participate in the program. When executives support employee Advocate Marketing from the beginning and are proponents of implementing a company-wide social media program, there is greater potential for growth. Having this executive support amplifies the chances that employees will also buy into the program. Find a Champion Finding a champion is essential. Your employee advocacy champion is going to spearhead this initiative company-wide. This champion either needs to be an executive or have executive sponsorship to ensure that he or she has the pull to make things happen. This person will own and be responsible for the employee advocacy programs internally. EMPLOYEES CAN REACH AN AUDIENCE 10 TIMES LARGER THAN WHAT YOUR BRAND IS REACHING 2 2 Technorati. Engaged Employees Build Engaged Customers - How does Addvocate Help you Engage? 8 October, 2013. technorati.com/business/advertising/article/engaged-employees-build-engaged-customers-how. 6

Create a Content and Engagement Plan Next, create a content plan that outlines the types of content you will include in the program. Make sure you have a strategy to refresh the materials weekly, with six to 10 pieces of short-form content, and vary it so that it will be engaging to all your employees, not just a few. Align the employee Advocate Marketing program content to your marketing calendar to ensure future updates align with important company initiatives. We re pulling content for our employee Advocate Marketing program from upcoming events, product launches and marketing activities. Look at what you already have planned on your social calendar and pull the most engaging topics and posts and ideas for your employees to share. DeShelia Spann, Digital Marketing Strategist at Eaton The content you will want employees to share will depend on the goals you identified. If your goal is to recruit new employees, your content should focus on company culture, like video interviews of current staff. If the goal is to raise awareness of your brand, you could share press coverage from third parties that relate to your brand or its products, content from brand partners and relevant industry information, such as how the company has aligned itself with corporate social responsibility initiatives. 7

The next aspect of the planning stage is determining how often you will be in contact with your employee advocates and what the form of communication will be. Will you send weekly emails or post biweekly on an internal social media platform? Align your choice with how the company s employees conduct their day-today activities. Next, come up with a strategy for thanking your advocates. Without a plan for recognizing your employees, it may be hard to keep them engaged. Try scheduling meetings with company leaders so they can personally thank employee advocates. Give top advocates access to career building seminars or training. Supply brand-aligned gift cards or other giveaways to the top advocates. Even smaller measures like sharing advocate content on the company site or an executive shout out for those who are the most engaged with the program can be a great way to highlight employees for their success. Without a plan for recognizing your employees, it may be hard to keep them engaged. LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW TO MOTIVATE AND REWARD YOUR EMPLOYEE ADVICATES HERE. Finally, you will need to come up with a program hashtag for Federal Trade Commission compliance and transparency. Try to be intuitive when creating a hashtag, like #[companyname] or #[companyname]insiders. Don t make it too long or you may run into issues with character limits on certain social platforms. You can learn more about the FTC guidelines here. 8

STEP 2 Identify and Invite Your Most Social-Savvy Employees 9

To build a solid foundation for your new employee Advocate Marketing program, it s a good idea to start with a small group of socially savvy employees. Use social listening platforms to identify staff members who are most active on social media. Look for departments that are accustomed to conveying the company message and are already active on social media. Departments like public relations, marketing, corporate communications and sales are all likely to contain rising social media superstars who are comfortable expressing the brand s identity publicly and sharing on social networks. At first, the program should be invite-only. You want a select group who will be comfortable with social platforms and able to experiment with new ideas to give the program a strong start. Between 10 and 50 people is a good number to begin the program with, depending on the size of your company. BETWEEN 10-50 PEOPLE IS A GOOD NUMBER TO BEGIN THE PROGRAM WITH, DEPENDING ON THE SIZE OF YOUR COMPANY. 10

Recruit the First Group Invite the employees via email and inform them they have been selected to assist with the launch of the program. In this message, let them know their feedback will influence the future direction of the program. The invite email should include a program overview, expectations and an explanation of how employees will benefit from participating. The invite should be sent or signed by an executive program sponsor. This information will empower them to participate and feel like they re part of something new and exciting. The invitation should be sent in tandem with an invitation to start training. 11

STEP 3 Train the Core Group of Advocates 12

Once your first group of advocates has been recruited, it s time to start training them. These training sessions can be in-person or through a webinar or video. Crucial to this step is to ensure the training is simple and straightforward. The initial training sessions will be centered on the program itself, how advocates will participate and compliance. Communicate the importance of employee advocacy, how to take part in the program and social media best practices, as well as FTC and employee guidelines. We provide video training that lasts six and a half minutes and focuses on the fundamentals around how to be an advocate. We also provide supplementary tools and one-page resources so that as our employee advocates want to learn more about social media on their own, they have resources available. Lee Diaz, Senior Manager of Emerging Communications at AT&T 13

Be sure employees understand the value of their contributions, both on personal and company-wide levels. Their participation in the program can help them build new skills and boost the company s visibility at the same time. The next step is to teach employee advocates to be advocates for their company. Give your advocates tips about what kinds of content to share, how to expand their personal networks and how to keep their followers engaged. Even the most socially savvy staff members can learn some new pointers. When designing training methods, keep in mind that participants may have different levels of knowledge you will need to accommodate. Be sure employees understand the value of their contributions, both on personal and company-wide levels. Ensure advocates sign terms & conditions. Before allowing your advocates to post freely, you should draft a list of terms and conditions regarding what type of brand-related content is permissible to post on social media. Make sure employees sign off on this document before moving forward. It s important to trust your employees, but also to verify they are staying within guidelines you ve established by tracking the materials they are sharing. 14

STEP 4 Launch the Program and Engage Your Advocates 15

After the core group understands the goals of the program and how to make it work, it s time to begin sharing content. Start out by providing approved messages and content for the advocates to share, and make sure to update these materials at least once a week to keep advocates and their followers fully engaged. Send regular content update emails highlighting the latest content. Think of this like any other social network. If there s nothing new to see or share, people will stop coming back. Think of this like any other social network. If there s nothing new to see or share, people will stop coming back. Grow the program slowly. Start out with prewritten messages that employees can tweak to match their personal styles. After an initial period, you can start letting employees write their own unique content. Giving employees creative license helps let their individuality shine and gives them a certain amount of ownership over the materials they create. 16

To ensure the success of this new project, make working on the employee Advocate Marketing program part of your routine. Check in every day to see how your advocates are doing. Keep in touch with them and make sure you act on the feedback they give you, including providing follow-up training when they need it. Once you ve launched, keeping advocates engaged will be the primary goal. Asking for feedback from employees is a good way to ensure they still feel a sense of ownership and creative contribution. Find out what they would like to see in the program and its content. Utilize their ideas and add fresh material to share on a regular basis. Encourage advocates to create content to share with their audience using the program hashtag. Put the best advocate-created content in the program for other advocates to share. Demonstrate appreciation Demonstrating your appreciation for the participation of your employee advocates can help them stay engaged in the program. Be sure to thank your advocates, using specific thank-you messages on internal networks and in emails. Providing increased access to executives, as well as other perks, is an additional way to thank employees for their involvement. Ongoing training is another important part of the continued success of an Advocate Marketing program. Hold office hours to provide support for employees to come in and discuss any issues they may have. Once you start inviting more employees to the program, you may need to increase certain training initiatives. 17

STEP 5 Raise Internal Awareness About the Program 18

Once you ve been up and running with a small group of advocates for two to three months, you should have a pretty good handle on what works well for your goals and employees. You ve likely figured out the kind of content employees are most interested in sharing and what their audiences are engaging with the most frequently. You ve got the basics down and you re ready to grow, which means it s time to start raising internal awareness about the program to scale it. Promote the program using internal social channels, email newsletters and at department- or company-wide meetings. Don t wait for the word to get out on its own; continue to push it internally. As the first group of employees become champions of the program, allow them to encourage and even help train others. The next step is to put together a small team to champion the program in their departments. These members should cover a range of departments in your company, including public relations, marketing, internal communications and human resources. 19

STEP 6 Measure Success 20

As with any marketing initiative, it s vital that you find a way to measure the ROI of your program. Use a social listening system and your program hashtag to measure advocate participation and determine how these individuals are engaging their audiences. The key metrics to monitor for employee programs are the number of active advocates, total engagements and reach. The number of active advocates is a vital metric for the ongoing success of your program. This number will rise month-overmonth in a successful program, as employees participate on an ongoing basis. The total number of engagements will equal the total number of shares plus the total number of audience engagements, such as comments and shares. This number will equate to overall advocate and audience engagement. The final metric to measure is reach, which represents the total possible audience reached. Once baseline metrics are in place, brands can start monitoring their performance against these benchmarks. Continuous improvement is key. TOTAL ENGAGEMENTS = TOTAL SHARES + TOTAL AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENTS 21

There are also a series of soft benefits that you should be paying attention to, including employees feeling more engaged, sales people having better conversations with customers, better quality of candidates being recruited and increased overall company and employee alignment. Find stakeholders and departments that are looking to improve goals like these, include them in your program, and talk with employees and managers about ways to measure the impact of employee advocacy based on these goals. Review these metrics and soft benefits biweekly to assess progress and implement necessary optimizations. Report success monthly. Meet with key stakeholders for a detailed review quarterly to discuss success, key learnings, optimizations and planning for the next three months. HOW OFTEN TO ASSESS PERFORMANCE Review Metrics & Soft Benefits Report Success Detailed Review with Key Stakeholders WEEKLY MONTHLY QUARTERLY In short, always make sure the numbers are growing and employees remain engaged in the program. Consistently check to determine that the program is still meeting the goals outlined by the company. 22

STEP 7 Grow the Advocate Marketing Program 23

Eventually, you may appoint a manager who is fully responsible for the success of the employee Advocate Marketing program. As the program begins to expand, keep revamping and revising the training for new advocates as they come on board. Continue to leverage feedback and integrate new ideas as employees join to keep the program fresh and exciting. After a while, you will be able to segment employee advocates based on the topics they are most interested in. Keep in mind that different employee segments will respond to different content. Keep in mind that different employee segments will respond to different content. While other employees may be aware of the program, they may need additional information before they want to join in. Leverage internal champions to host social hours to answer frequently asked questions about participating. Hosting mythbuster sessions is a fun way to dispel myths about participating in the program. For instance, employees may think the company can post on their behalf if they choose to participate. Assure them this is not the case. 24

Here are some additional strategies for growing the program and gaining more advocates: Incentivize sign ups. For instance, give the first 100 people who sign up free T-shirts with their sign-up numbers on them. Define a part of your program that has a positive impact on the advocates community and aligns with the company s stance on corporate responsibility, for which employees can feel they are making an impact through their participation. Public service campaigns work well for this, such as spreading awareness about the dangers of texting and driving. Promote the program on employee communication channels and include quotes and success stories from current advocates. Continue reminding employees about the benefits of participation. You can also call out weekly top advocates in these communications. Grow awareness with LinkedIn ads that target company employees. Put up signs about the program around the office, at employee events and in break areas. Talk about the program s success metrics and participation during company meetings and events. Keeping advocates engaged is a key part of maintaining the program. Ask for feedback from participants to make the program the best it can possibly be. Leverage employee focus groups or conduct surveys to determine which content and thank yous resonate best with employees. Ask advocates what they would change about the program if they could. Your employees may have some great ideas for expanding content and goals. 25

Employee Advocate Marketing Program Launch Checklist 1. Make Your Plan Week 1 Create a Social Media Policy Identify Goals Get Executive Buy-in Find a Champion Create a Content and Engagement Plan Determine type of content Align with marketing calendar Determine communication strategy Plan how to thank advocates Create a program hashtag 2. Identify and Invite Your Most Social-Savvy Employees Week 4 Determine size of select group Recruit the first group 3. Train the Core Group of Advocates Week 5 Determine how you will conduct training Communicate the program goals Convey the value of participating to your advocates Establish guidelines for sharing Ensure advocates sign terms & conditions 4. Launch the Program and Engage Your Advocates Week 6 Provide approved messages and content Refresh content weekly Grow the program slowly Encourage message creativity and content creation Add advocate-created content in the program Demonstrate appreciation Hold office hours for ongoing training 5. Raise Internal Awareness About the Program Week 10 Promote the program on internal channels Empower advocates to spread the word Assemble a team to champion program 6. Measure Success Week 11 Identify key metrics Analyze participation and engagement Review metrics and soft benefits (weekly) Report success (monthly) Detailed review with stakeholders (quarterly) Make sure numbers are growing 7. Grow the Advocate Marketing Program Week 15 Continually revamp program and training Segment advocates based on interest Leverage champions to inspire and educate others Leverage all internal channels to promote the program Employ additional strategies for growth Expand goals Date: Date: Date: Date: Date: Date: Date: 26

Conclusion Using this step-by-step guide, you can create employee Advocate Marketing program that successfully accomplishes your outlined goals. If you start with an in-depth plan and follow each step, the result will be a growing employee Advocate Marketing program that will inspire with the results and direction it goes in. If you re ready to start empowering your employees to speak out for your company, don t wait. Get started today! SocialChorus powers tens of thousands of brand advocates employees, consumers and bloggers to experience, create and share authentic content about brands they love. We call this new marketing category Advocate Marketing. Our award-winning Advocate Experience solution makes Advocate Marketing easy. We combine a comprehensive SaaS platform with a dedicated, expert team and best practices to deliver measurable social engagement with millions of people every month. Leaders in every industry, including consumer packaged goods, retail, technology, telecommunications, travel, automotive and financial services have chosen SocialChorus, the recognized leader in Advocate Marketing. Learn more at socialchorus.com. 415.655.2700 info@socialchorus.com socialchorus.com blog.socialchorus.com copyright 2014 SocialChorus, Inc. All rights reserved. 27