The art of integrating Employee Advocacy into B2B communication: Boost your visibility and engagement without overloading your team

The importance of Employee Advocacy in B2B communication

Employee advocacy is a communication strategy for companies that aims to mobilize and empower employees to advocate for their company and its brands on social networks and other online platforms. By posting positive content, employees can help increase their company's visibility and build customer trust.

Employee advocacy programs are designed to encourage employee engagement in their employer's social media communications. The benefits are immense as they allow employers to improve their efficiency, increase their audience and generate more excitement for their brand and products.

Benefits of Employee Advocacy for B2B companies

• Increased visibility for the company : by sharing positive information about the company and its products, employees can strengthen its online presence and enhance its reputation.
• Customer trust : by encouraging employees to share company content, it makes customers feel more comfortable buying its products.
• Reduced advertising costs : the cost will be significantly reduced if all members of the organization are involved in the promotion and distribution of the content.

Impact of Employee Advocacy on brand trust and visibility

For several years, companies have been implementing Employee Advocacy strategies to improve their visibility on social networks and strengthen their online reputation. Thanks to this approach, brands can build a relationship of trust with their customers thanks to authentic content delivered by a diverse team.

Studies show that active employee participation positively influences the overall perception of brands. A post on an employee's personal page will get 100 times more impressions than the same post on a company page.

Employee content creation is important for several reasons:

• Authenticity: Content created by employees is often considered more authentic than content created by the brand itself. Employees can share their own experiences and insights, which can help build brand credibility.
• Reach: Employees may have a wider network of contacts than the brand itself. By sharing content on their own social media accounts, employees can help reach new audiences and extend the brand's reach.
• Cost: Employee content creation can be less expensive than branded content creation. Employees can create content using their own devices and software, which can reduce production costs.
• Engagement: Employee content creation can help build employee engagement with the brand. By involving employees in content creation, the brand can strengthen their sense of belonging to the company and their motivation to represent it.

Why are social networks essential for Employee Advocacy?

Social networks are a powerful tool to promote a brand as well as its products and services. The fact that a large number of people are present on them every day offers companies a great opportunity to increase their visibility and reach.

A well-designed employee advocacy strategy can help companies reach a wider audience and engage their customers.

Strategies for integrating Employee Advocacy into your business

Implementing an employee advocacy strategy requires a significant investment of time and effort, but it is worth it because the benefits could be significant. Companies should start by looking for brand ambassadors among their employees.

These people will then need to be able to share the appropriate content on social networks.

Identify your brand ambassadors among employees

Finding reliable ambassadors and mobilizing the whole organization around your Employer Advocacy strategy is the first step. These are generally members with a good knowledge of the company's products, services or procedures.

They also often have an excellent grasp of the social network in which they operate and understand how to use its features to maximize brand exposure.

Implement an effective Employee Advocacy program

• Choosing the right employee advocacy platform : An employee advocacy platform allows companies to effectively implement an employee advocacy strategy that can be easily executed and monitored. It also offers practical tools such as detailed dashboards, customizable action plans and an automated system for creating, publishing and sharing content with your employees. The main players in the market, including Limber and Sharee, to mention only the French solutions, are an excellent base to work from.
• Create quality content for employees to share : It is important to provide your employees with high quality content to post on social networks so that they can promote your company through their own personal accounts. Articles about your industry, attractive images related to the product/service, etc., can serve this purpose.

Encourage employee engagement in the Employee Advocacy program

• Motivate employees to actively participate: Employers should actively encourage and motivate their employees to join and participate in the Employee Advocacy program by giving them incentives such as bonuses or rewards for their efforts. It is also important to constantly remind them of the importance and benefits of participating in this initiative, as well as their roles and responsibilities.
• Train and support ambassadors : Companies need to provide adequate training and support to their employees so that they can better understand the Employee Advocacy strategy and how to effectively share content on social networks.

The 3 levers on which employee advocacy can act :

• The development of the employer brand: You are in a period of strong growth and want to recruit new talent, who better than your current employees are the best placed to praise the merits of your company. By encouraging them to speak out on social networks, you can give credibility to your employer brand and develop strong links with your target audience.
• Social selling: Your sales teams are in the best position to talk about your products and services. By providing them with the right content, you give them the opportunity to humanize the sales act and make it more credible.
• Content marketing: Producing quality content remains the best way to establish your brand's business expertise. This leverage effect is multiplied tenfold when this content is directly shared by the company's employees. By making it their own, they give credibility to your message and make it more permeable to your target market.

Measure the success of your Employee Advocacy strategy

To ensure that your employee advocacy program is working as intended, you will need to evaluate its effectiveness and track key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs can include the visibility and reach of shared posts, the number of clicks, the time spent by a user on a website after clicking on a link distributed via employee advocacy, etc.

These analyses will allow you tocontinually adjust and improve your Employee Advocacy strategy based on the results obtained.

Employee advocacy is an effective approach to increase visibility and strengthen the online reputation of companies. Employee advocacy programs can be designed to encourage employee engagement in the employer's social media communication.

By integrating employee advocacy into your B2B communication strategy, you can improve the effectiveness of your efforts, increase your audience and generate more excitement about your brand and products.

In summary, to integrate employee advocacy into your B2B communication, you must:

• Find reliable ambassadors among your employees
• Set up an effective employee advocacy program, using an adapted employee advocacy platform and providing quality content to your employees
• Encourage your employees' commitment to the program by motivating and training them appropriately
• Measure the success of your strategy by tracking relevant KPIs and using them to adjust and continuously improve your employee advocacy strategy.

By applying these tips, you can boost your company's visibility and reputation online, while increasing your customers' trust and reducing your advertising costs. You want to develop your visibility and are looking for an agency to help you? Let's take the time to discuss and develop the right answer.