Letter #54: How to distribute content using employee advocacy
Expert interview on creating an employee advocacy program
Want your marketing leads to convert 7x better? Get your employees to talk about you — share content you produce (aka leverage employee advocacy).
Now, I’m not one to begin my emails with stats. But a stat like this? It damn well deserves a spotlight in the opening line!
Because:
a. It’s impressive
b. I know it’s true since I’ve never not wow-ed when I’ve seen content distributed using employee advocacy
If you’ve ever found value in the content that other companies’ employees share, you also probably have an idea of how effective employee advocacy is.
Think: Eli Weiss talking about what they’re cooking up at Jones Road Beauty or how they’re improving their customer experience (CX). Or ClickUp’s employees sharing uber-valuable content — even promptly responding to comments on the brand account’s tweet.
But the question now is: how can you encourage your employees to help you distribute content?
The first step is to educate them on the benefits of building a personal brand instead of simply copy-pasting posts you write and publishing them on their socials.
The second step: creating an employee advocacy plan. How? To answer that I got Haiilo’s Senior Content Marketing Specialist, Evgeniia Koptelova on the newsletter today.
Haiilo itself is an employee advocacy platform and their team drinks their own champagne to distribute content and, well, show how their platform works. This is how I came across Evgeniia too and I asked her our regular questions:
A mistake Evgeniia made with their employee advocacy program
An actionable tip to get you one step closer to distributing content with your team
And, a secret tip to using employee advocacy for better content distribution
Lezz go:
👉 Learn from Evgeniia’s mistake: Not educating employees on how the employee advocacy program works.
Evgeniia shares she recently learned from a mistake she didn’t realize she was making.
“We found out we didn’t give some of our employees' proper training on how to use the platform. The platform itself is pretty intuitive, but sometimes it’s still better to have guidelines. So now we have video tutorials that explain how to create and share posts.”
👉 Do this today: “Act!”
“You might have a great plan and great content, but if you don’t take the initiative of putting the content out there for your employees to share, you will never benefit from employee advocacy.”
👉 The secret tip to winning at distributing your content using employee advocacy: Respect and engage employees before you can get them to distribute content
“There’s no employee advocacy without employee engagement. You can’t force people into being brand ambassadors,” says Evgeniia.
“Employee advocacy is a result of healthy work culture that includes diversity, work-life balance, work benefits, transparency, qualified leadership and so much more. So I’d say investing in your employees comes before any employee advocacy initiatives.”
So today’s takeaways:
Document how your employee advocacy plan works. If you’re using a specific platform, create content to explain how to use it.
Start today. Great content is nothing without distribution so encourage employees to start sharing it.
Play your part in creating a great company culture.
That’s all for this week!
Catch you next Tuesday,
Masooma