Why Employee Advocacy is Essential For Your Ecommerce Marketing Strategy
Influencer marketing is big business. In a survey by Rakuten Marketing, they found that eight out of ten consumers have purchased something after seeing it recommended by an influencer. So, there’s no surprise in a similar report, Linqia found that 39% of surveyed marketers were planning on increasing their influencer marketing spend in the next year.
But among the millions of sponsored Instagram posts and Facebook adverts, there is often a subsection of influencers that get overlooked – and that’s your employees!
Yes, the very people that work right in your office.
Unless you have an unhappy workplace, the people that come to work and enjoy their job are often some of your biggest advocates. In most cases, they naturally recommend you without thinking about it, and are a hugely positive influence if they know and love the products or services you sell.
Most of these people are also on social media.
With research showing us that organic reach on social media is falling each year, your employees are some of the best avenues to keep it ticking over. Trust is essential for influencer marketing to work to its full potential, and what better to promote ultimate trust than by using the people that live and breathe your business.
Employee advocacy isn’t just useful for when you’re looking for people to come and work for you. So, check out some of the ways it can help your overall marketing goals:
The power of LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a professional social network that has been seeing impressive growth over the past few years. Hootsuite reported that it had 590 million users by the end of 2018, and people upload around 2 million posts, articles and videos a day. Although you may think this platform is just about professionals connecting about business opportunities and jobs, it is also an important promotional tool for your company news and content.
When your employees are sharing company updates and expert content, they’re basically endorsing you to a host of people that are just like them – other professionals who care about your industry.
Improving Authenticity
Authenticity is essential for influencer marketing, and employee advocacy naturally has strong relationships between your brand and the target audience. To improve those deep connections, getting feedback and input from employees is essential to ensure the right message is heard. Developing feedback and employee engagement surveys with the help of Inpulse.com could bolster your position, as you’ll have ideas and emotions behind your marketing efforts. It’s critical that businesses have an idea of how they make audiences feel, so starting with how you affect your employee points you in the right direction.
Key Points to Harness Beneficial Employee Advocacy:
- Not all employees will be suitable for employee advocacy, but most will be, so it’s essential to determine what you want to achieve with this type of influencing strategy.
- Ongoing feedback is essential to drive positive promotion forward.
- Create an employee community to help promote your products and services.
- Don’t expect results for every single piece of content you try and promote; however, learn what could work better next time!
