EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY TRANSFORMING ENTERPRISE MARKETING MIX IN 2020

When we talk about the competition, it creates lots of noise between you and your potential customer as a modern marketing leader. Either you are planning out the year’s strategy or about to launch a new product or service, you always ask a single question: How to stay apart and get cut through this noise?

Dedicating your time, you have your hand in many business priorities. To sustain the company’s growth, you will have to make difficult decisions regarding investment on where to go ahead and what to prioritize. The right hand at the top of the list is cutting off the noise and focusing on being closer to the customer.

To assist your organization, a vast array of marketing techniques are available like marketing automation, social listening, employee advocacy, programmatic platforms, sales enablement, and content management.

To get your attention with all this promising technology, why should you prioritize time and capital investment for employee advocacy in 2020? Let’s find out:

Employee advocacy comes with robust and amplified voice:

Some days ago, LinkedIn reported that only 3 percent of employees share company content; but this 3 percent increased social media engagement by 30 percent.

Implementing employee advocacy never mean that you start marketing campaigns, just by focusing on employees. But this means that you can enhance the voice of your brand in a uniquely organic way through employer-aided efforts.

Ultimately, it can increase the visibility of the brand and awareness among the people, which is an impact of your share of voice.

By building the authentic and trustworthy voice of the employees, you can create brand credibility and image. Enabling your employees to share, engage, and comment on the brand messages helps in creating transparency that connects with the customer.

True, employee advocacy for digital marketing has three broad goals: It is strategic, sustainable, and organic.

Three of these combined tools of employee advocacy can give marketing mix a unique transformation in 2020.

Employee Advocacy Creates Customer Confidence:

Every enterprise has a social media presence these days, but not every company has an employee engagement strategy on social media.

From research on social advocacy in the workplace, we can see several compelling figures that speak for profit.

1. The company’s branded messages reach five times when shared by employees vs. branded channels.
2. For social media posts, people are almost three times more likely to trust the recommendations of friends and family than companies.
3. Organizations with high employee engagement perform better with unused employees by 200 percent.
4. Employee advocacy specifically takes advantage to break through the noise on social media.

Trust in B2B marketing is essential, more than ever. Creating trust with the help of customer experience is a critical strategy for 2020. However, the way companies entice and engage their employees will go a long way. Similarly, TrustRadius reports that buyers trust a seller’s website and market the collateral out of the available market. Referrals, forums, and independent media have all been considered more reliable in the procurement process – and, therefore, more effective.

It is time to get away from focusing on specific social media and downloadable content. By emphasizing employee engagement through marketing efforts, you can create trust both inside and outside the organization.

Employee advocacy changes engagement into ROI:

Employee advocacy as a program strategically helps in attributing market the resources and dollars to change it in-effective output, such as qualified leads and new customers.

Through the right technology in place, you can repeatedly change the metrics associated with employee advocacy programs to ROI numbers.

Few essential metrics are given below:

1. Growth of Audience: Is investment in thought leadership translated into unique ideas?
2. The traffic of Website: How many unique visitors have come to the website through shared content?
3. Conversion of Potential Lead: More than the number of leads sees how many leads generated are converted into potential customers. This will tell you the program quality.
4. Click Through: Does employee content have higher CTR?

Summing up:

There is not a distinct line between recruitment and branding, marketing and sales, customer experience, and marketing. A robust and efficient employee advocacy program will meet the goals of marketing, but it should not stop there.

Especially in B2B, the most efficient and effective CMO’s work with customer experience managers, brand leaders, and sales for creating a consistent, positive, and lasting image of their enterprises.

Taking the break from the noise in a limited budget or investment is what we call as taking an overall view of the brand. This is what the employee advocacy platform helps with, for CMOS.