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Brand Advocacy Training Done Right! 

Connect with an account specialist today to review examples of successful brand advocacy training programs in a live session or learn methodology and insights.
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Workplace Brand Advocacy Insights

LocalMasters offers a platform as well as strategic insights for your success. Connect with us today for a free personal consultation or if you are interested in implementing Brand Advocacy Training into your workplace. If you need more information first, below are some frequently asked questions that address brand advocacy so you have a better understanding of what it is and how it can benefit your work environment.

Fundamentals

Objectives

Implementation

Tracking

Management

Reference

Methodology
For Success

Step 1

Defining Brand Advocacy

Step 2

Importance of Brand Advocacy

Step 3

Implementing Brand Advocacy

Step 4

Measuring Brand Advocacy Success

Step 5

Sustaining Brand Advocacy Efforts

Fundamentals

Fundamentals

What is Brand Advocacy?

Anyone who enjoys your product or service who supports your business by continuously promoting it to others is participating in brand advocacy. They believe in your product, service, mission – so much so that they will go the extra mile to help your business grow by bringing in new customers and prospects.

What Are Brand Advocates?

If someone is promoting your brand, then they are considered a brand advocate. They generally fall into common categories. 

 

  • Your Workforce. Who better to represent your brand than the people who have the most knowledge about your products and services? Employees have by far the most potential to be your best assets for brand advocacy. Bigger companies have even more potential due to their enormous audience and ability to encourage and promote their internal advocacy programs. 
  • Business Partners. Relationships with businesses, partnerships and affiliate programs provide a deep well of opportunity that can be tapped for diversifying the customer base while strengthening brand recognition. 
  • Ambassadors. Ambassadors in modern times that have the most impact are digital influencers, usually consisting of people in the public eye who are very popular and have a substantial number of followers, subscribers and fans. Their ability to provide instant visibility in the social media and online landscape can impact sales in real time, providing real value to organizations. 
  • Customers. Loyal customers who write glowing reviews and 5 out of 5 star ratings about your product or service online are extremely beneficial for all lines of business. They enthusiastically inform all of their friends and family about your brand. In addition to all of the added customers and sales they provide, they will perform all of this action without needing compensation. To demonstrate appreciation for such loyalty and advocacy, companies are smart to offer their customer brand advocate incentives to strengthen the relationship.

Internal Stakeholder Potential?

Employees have the most leverage when it comes to the success of any brand advocacy program. A recent LinkedIn study uncovered that employees of a company usually have up to ten times more followers on social media than the company itself. Additionally, only around two percent of employees reshare the organization’s social media content, while accounting for up to twenty percent of the overall engagement. The challenge companies face is their ability to get their workforce enthusiastic and engaged when it comes to supporting brand advocacy initiatives.  

Objectives

Objectives

Why Focus on Brand Advocacy Training?

When companies focus on brand advocacy training, they put success in their way. If a company can achieve buy-in from it’s employee base, it boosts numbers in brand awareness, creates new sales leads, improves recruitment due to positive word of mouth and reputation, and much more.

Critical for Success in the US Business World?

  • Marketing Department Impact: Properly directed brand advocacy programs can tap into the near unlimited potential that a companies’ workforce can provide. Remember, the social networks of employees are on average up to ten times greater than the company’s account. Through their reach, a company’s marketing department can expand its reach and brand awareness far greater than it ever could by traditional advertising means. Recent data from EveryoneSocial found that employee advocacy programs cost just one tenth of paid advertising. Furthermore, posts and shares that come from employees are better received and are rated as more genuine versus the same content put forth through a corporation’s social media – thus having a much higher engagement and share rate. 

 

  • Sales Department Impact: Brand Advocacy can have a profound impact on sales in many facets.  Generation of new leads and new business, closing deals improves, and sales performance overall can see it’s KPIs rise. According to research conducted by Marketing Advisory Network, leads developed through employee social marketing convert seven times more often versus other leads. Survey results by McKinsey revealed that peer-to-peer marketing is the leading driver behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions. Eye popping metrics discovered by Kredible showed that on average, an employee advocacy program involving one thousand active participants can generate $1.9 million in advertising value. Talk about great ROI! 

 

  • Human Resources Impact: How much value does a company’s reputation factor when it comes to attracting top talent? Nine out of ten employers report that they use social media and professional networking sites for recruiting purposes. Brand recognition increases when employees are engaged and participate by sharing and posting on social media platforms.

Pitfalls to avoid?

There has been a lot of surveys and research conducted to help identify why employers struggle with brand advocacy, and why employees do not participate or generate the desired results. Let’s take a look at some of the most common issues that both companies and employees struggle with.

 

  • Work Related Digital Content Doesn’t Interest Employees

    According to research by The Marketing Advisory Network, up to 30 percent of employees surveyed reported they didn’t share any information about their company on social media because they don’t use social media for business reasons. Additionally, 15 percent reported they don’t wish to inundate their personal accounts with posts about their company, and another 15 percent stated they don’t want to sound like a company spam message or bot. A good way to deal with this is to give employees options. Companies should allow employees to edit their information, instead of only being able to just share it outright. This will help them personalize the message, using their own language, increasing it’s authenticity. Companies would be wise to allow their workforce options of choosing what they post, when and how often. These two options will alleviate concerns of spamming and robotic messaging. 

 

  • Address Those Who Don’t Use Social Media

    While social media has seen an incredible rise in usage and popularity, there are still large segments of the workforce that don’t use it. There is opportunity here, and it shouldn’t go unnoticed. The more employees you get onboard your brand advocacy initiative, the more success you’ll have. Therefore, providing some incentivization that will galvanize people to sign up and try out social media is worth looking into. Providing some training will also help remove stigma and reduce feelings of embarrassment of those who aren’t inherently savvy with social media. Keep in mind that these types of employees won’t turn into top tier influencers overnight, so some patience will be needed!

 

  • Curating Content Is a Must

    So you have the buy-in from your employees, great! Now, what are they going to be sharing and posting? What about consistent content? If your employees are only sharing content about your company at all times, then most people will tune out, or worse, unfollow. Remember, people don’t want to feel like they are being force fed content. Brand Advocacy is similar to Goldilocks and the Three Bears: you want to find the right “temperature” for your social media content – not too hot, not too cold, but just right. Third party content is often a popular choice for companies to invest in, because it makes finding content much easier and less laborious.

Implementation

Implementation

How Do You Build a Brand Advocacy Program?

Since employees have the greatest influence and potential to drive success in your brand advocacy program, then the initial focus must be gaining internal ownership from within. 

 

  • What Are the Goals?

What are the objectives for your advocacy program? Do you want to increase sales? Perhaps you can incentivize employees to advocate for sales deals that lead to higher quality referrals and leads? As with any program launched inside a business, what resources are available and what is your budget?

 

  • Build Trust Internally

How will your organization get your workforce to buy-in? What messaging and internal communication methods will you use? You will have to be creative in your approach. What would help answer an employee’s question of “what’s in it for me?” Well, what if you said advocating for the company can also expand your personal brand as well as helping the company’s? Framing the initiative as a win-win is always a good idea to build strength amongst the workforce.

 

  • Train Your People

While it’s true that younger generations in the workforce will have a much better grasp on how brand advocacy through social media works, the fact remains that there still may be confusion as to what is appropriate to share, and how to do it. Policies must be clear, easy to follow guidelines must be created. Short, bite sized training content that goes over best practices and pitfalls is a great way to build awareness.  

 

  • Create Interesting Content

This seems obvious but it’s really important! The last thing you want to have happen is gain buy-in from your workforce only to have poor quality and lackluster content for them to share and post. Content should be fun, catchy, relevant and interesting – this is what will drive engagement for your brand after all. What strategies for content will you utilize? It’s a great idea to pilot test the content out with your workforce first and ask for feedback before going live. 

 

  • Easy To Access and Use

Another pitfall that can derail brand advocacy is ease of access. Employees will need a fluid method for easy sharing internal content with external partners and networks. Integration is key. The more accessible and easy to connect, the better the results. Today’s social media competition is about speed. Think seconds, not minutes. Employees need the ability to share things quickly and without too much effort. Clunky interfacing and incompatible media will suffocate brand advocacy quickly. 

 

  • Incentivize

It’s in your best interest to provide some sort of reward and recognition system in place in order to motivate your advocates. Remember, you want your employees to perform specific behaviors and take action on behalf of the company – so show them you appreciate their effort.

What are the Benefits of Brand Advocacy Training?

  • High ROI

When companies tap into the power of their workforce’s ability to advocate through a coordinated and well planned effort? The success can be staggering. Social selling can drastically improve sales teams efforts, expanding their reach to far greater levels. New customers, new leads, deals executed and revenue generated. All due to the sharing and posting of engaging curated content.

 

  • Grow Culture and Brand Image

If your employees love what your product or service does, then give them an opportunity to share it! Create a campaign that allows your workforce to share their stories on how the company has had a positive impact on not only their lives, but the lives of the customers they’ve helped. Showcase these stories internally and externally, making the content easy to share. How many advocates do you have in your company right now that aren’t being given this opportunity?

 

  • Savings

Your employees and customers will advocate for your product or service if it brings value to them. Oftentimes doing so without even offering additional incentive. When they share positive reviews and testimonials they are engaging in natural marketing, which comes at no additional cost to businesses.  Investment can be minimal if the messaging is done well and the product or service is valuable. Most brand advocacy is born from good experiences had with the brand, and it’s human nature to want to recommend and share that experience to and with others. 

 

  • Authentic Experiences

Advertising can be hit or miss. It’s also inherently biased, because it’s being released and produced by the company trying to sell the product or service to potential customers. Brand advocacy, however, is more effective in building trust and converting customers than most paid advertising. When employees and customers alike share authentic lived experiences with a brand, the marketing aspect will take care of itself.

Tracking

Tracking

How Do You Know a Brand Advocacy Program is Working?

Identifying who your brand advocates are and which ones are generating the greatest impact for your brand is absolutely critical for brand advocacy to be successful. There are specific brand advocacy solutions that are designed to provide system and program administrators with metrics and data that will help them improve and optimize their brand advocacy program. If you aren’t able to measure the effectiveness of their engagement, you won’t be able to reward top performers which is a main component of keeping brand advocates motivated and feeling important. Keeping constant track of everything in the media landscape is not possible without the help of computer software. Companies that utilize cutting edge tech to help them analyze the business data of their customers who post and interact via millions of messages each day will be the ones who reach elevated levels of success.

General Metrics?

Data sectors that are considered general brand advocacy metrics that help businesses understand the actions and behaviors of their brand advocates include number of (social media) stories, active user shares per account, total shares by network type, shares separated by the day of the week and what hour, and total impressions. Tracking these metrics will give a business a real time snapshot to see if their content is having the desired impact.

Content Metrics?

Metrics that keep track of specific content, such as shares per article or shares per day per article, or views per video since release, time of video viewership of user, click rates – these metrics help brands determine what type of content hits, and what doesn’t.

User Metrics?

Data that is assigned to specific users is also a fantastic way to determine who top brand advocates are, the customers responsible for generating the most business for you. This can include shares per team member and impressions per team member

Management

Management

The Power of Choice?

Customers appreciate the power of choice. Once companies realize that they aren’t able to have strict control on this type of marketing outcome they will have greater success with brand advocacy. The fact that brand advocacy is not as structured as other marketing strategies can lead to stagnation or potential setbacks inside marketing departments. You can’t force consumer behavior, but you can guide it.

Is Your Product Worthy?

There’s an old saying in business that rings true: product success comes before customer success. How will you know if your product or service has the ability to gain brand advocates? Businesses have to analyze the adequacy of what they offer. Before launching a brand advocacy program, your product has to be solid – that is how you will win over advocates to not only buy what you are selling, but love it so much that they will want to share it with everyone they know.

Exceptional Customer Relations?

The manner in which your business approaches and participates in customer interaction also plays a key role in the potential of a brand advocacy program. Is your current customer experience impressive? From searching and selecting, to purchasing, to customizing or adding on, to the support team – there should be a seamless customer experience from start to finish. If these areas need to be worked on, address them. This will give a brand advocacy initiative it’s greatest chance for success.

Are Customers Informed?

Customer education is paramount if you want fantastic brand advocates. Customer training is also a key aspect of building a dynamic brand advocacy program. If information is not readily available and easily accessible – it will be difficult to attract advocates. People need to know your product to love it. Ensure your business has it’s educational tools and accessibility features up to spec.

Reference

Reference

Brand Advocacy Trends Gaining Attention in 2022

The world has gone through a major change in the past two years. From the COVID-19 pandemic, to global lockdown, remote working, economic recession, all these factors will continue to have a current and future impact on business. Here’s where brand advocacy programs are heading in 2022 and the coming years. 

Here are a few trends that companies should pay attention to while rethinking, updating, and developing their brand advocacy training initiatives. 

  1. Relevance – when it comes to brand advocacy one of the most consistent and key trends is the relevance of your content. Depending on your current following, the consensus or majority of customer type you have, that should be influencing what method of content and what topics of content your business should be focusing on. As Tech continues to evolve may change how it’s delivered, but relevance will remain a critical component of successful brand advocacy programs going forward.  
  2. Range – how many people are you able to reach? This number is a big indicator of success in brand advocacy. How can you increase the range of your campaign? Further, how many people are your current advocates able to reach? Are you targeting the right audience who are able to share and grow the advocacy network? 
  3. Resonance – how engaged are your advocates overall? Tracking this and adjusting content and tone accordingly are also very impactful metrics for the health of a brand advocacy initiative. Is the relationship with advocates formalized? The more effort you put into the brand advocacy campaign the more success you will get out of it. Additionally, formalization can improve the mission and any security or requirements your initiative may require.

Successful Brand Advocacy Campaigns

  • IBM – Years ago IBM was able to harness the power of internal employee advocacy to boost social selling. They empowered their employees to take to social media to help drive sales. First, they had their 1,700 inside salespeople create sales rep pages online, serving as an “virtual business card” that contained seller contact info, area of focus and client testimonials. This along with several other brand advocacy measures caused an enormous surge of 400 percent increase in sales that year. 

 

  • Cisco – Cisco incentivized their growing community of brand advocates by launching their Cisco Champions campaign. Advocates were encouraged to ‘talk about the brand’ in their social and professional networks and across channels. Not only did brand awareness skyrocket, it also gave professionals opportunities to learn and upgrade their skills – while offering a platform to spotlight achievements and rewards. Cisco was awarded the Best Social Engagement honors for this initiative. 

 

  • Apple – A few years ago in 2019, Apple unveiled one of their legendary brand advocacy initiatives. They encouraged all of their users to create and share a photo from their iphone products. After all entries were collected, they announced the top ten winners would be featured on giant billboards, inside Apple stores, and on their website. This announcement caused an unprecedented amount of social media attention and interactivity – which fed on itself needing no further marketing investment.

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