Employee Advocates - Your Untapped Marketing Resource
Social media is no longer a purely consumer medium – it should be as important to businesses as a marketing, sales, and customer engagement tool as any other. Why? Because there are nearly 12 billion active users across the more widely used social sites and applications globally.
The challenge for businesses has always been knowing where to engage customers, which means knowing where they spend their time. Location, location, location... has been the key to success. Today, that location is less about geography as it is about the medium and, based on statistics, 12 billion people regularly reside on social media. It’s one of the reasons social advertising has spiked as it has.
As a business, if you’re engaged on social channels with customers and prospects – and if you’re not, you should quickly examine your engagement strategy – why not also use an existing tool to further engage that same audience? Your employees are also active on these same social channels and offer a resource to tap into in the form of employee advocacy.
The benefits of word-of-mouth advertising are well documented, and the same benefits extend to social channels, where friends and followers often rely on their connections when making purchasing decisions. It’s why influencer marketing has become such a lucrative business for those with a significant social following or influencer status in their communities.
For B2B marketers with limited budgets, that’s not typically the most effective alternative. But, every business already has a host of potential influencers on staff who understand the business, products, services, and customers – employees. Why not tap into that existing resource and embrace the fact that employees are already active on social channels and can actively promote your business as employee advocates?
Countless executives are already leverage social media to talk about their business and engage their audiences. And why not, it’s part of our world, as Coriant CEO Shaygan Kheradpir recently told me when discussing the new age of telecom. Employee advocacy is the new age of marketing.
“We had the insight many years ago that corporate and personal experiences were intersecting, so years ago, I started using consumerized tools that are easy, make sense to everybody and allow us to get the message out,” Kheradpir said.
So, instead of relying solely on your current marketing tools, build on the successes your employees have helped create by making them part of your influencer strategy. While most businesses aren’t going to make major buying decisions on the basis of a single social interaction, your employee advocates provide an opportunity to get your brand in front of countless prospects to help grow your company.
Edited by Maurice Nagle