How Can an Effective Employee Advocacy Tool Help Businesses Enhance Their Brand Presence Online?
According to the 2022 Global Overview report by Datareportal, 4.62 billion individuals actively use social media worldwide. At 58.4%, that represents more than half of the world’s population.
Therefore, in this digital age, businesses must be active on social media to stay relevant. A well-maintained social media page is an effective marketing tool that can help companies to connect with their target audience and promote their brand effectively.
However, managing multiple social media accounts can be highly time-consuming for most companies that do not have a dedicated marketing team at their disposal. This article will explain how an employee advocacy tool can help enhance the online brand presence of a Business:
Why Do Businesses Need an Effective Employee Advocacy Tool?
Employee advocacy entails empowering staff to share thought leadership generated by your business, greatly increasing your brand’s visibility. This category encompasses initiatives that motivate staff members to distribute corporate materials or promote your business. Employee advocacy comes in many forms, including corporate events, testimonials, and seminars. However, using social media to enhance awareness significantly is the quickest and most economical way to promote employee advocacy.
Employee advocacy tools help businesses to enhance and improve their brand presence online. Word-of-mouth marketing’s effectiveness has proven itself time and again. With only a few clicks in the correct direction, you can reach millions of prospective consumers in this modern-day digital world. Employee advocacy is one such path to follow in the proper order.
Employee advocacy tools also help companies build trust among consumers. When consumers see that other people have good experiences with your company’s products or services, they tend not to hesitate before buying them themselves. In addition, it helps you reach out to a new audience segment. If someone already knows about your brand, they will recommend it when there are opportunities for doing so, like through social media groups.
Promotion of the Brand on Social Media
Employee advocacy is a marketing strategy involving employees expressing their opinions about your business on social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. Employee advocates can also write blog posts about the company or create videos. Employee advocacy aims to help enterprises to promote their brand through these platforms and organically attract more customers.
For example, if one of your employees tweets about how great working at your company is, other users who follow them will notice this tweet. They may then be interested in knowing more about what makes it unique. It could lead them to visit your website or contact you directly for more information on job openings at the organization.
Therefore, it’s important to note that not all companies have the capacity, or desire, to invest in employee advocacy programs right now. However, if yours lacks online presence and brand awareness, then now might be a perfect time.
Building Trust
In today’s world, people are more likely to trust a brand that has employees who are passionate about it. It is because they have been able to feel the company culture and understand what makes it unique. The best employee advocacy tools allow businesses to build relationships with their audience. They enable employees to share behind-the-scenes information about their company and their experiences with the product or service. With such an approach, consumers will see how much effort is put into creating products or services that meet their needs. But, of course, they would then want for themselves or someone else too.
Addressing the New Audience Segment
Employees are the first point of contact for customers, so they have the opportunity to build trust and confidence with them. With the help of employees, you can also promote the brand and create more awareness among customers.
By leveraging employee advocacy tools, businesses can address a new audience segment that other marketing channels have ignored. Employees can share content directly with their followers through platforms like Instagram and Twitter.
Additionally, these tools allow businesses to customize branding for each department or location within their organization. They also use custom hashtags in posts that promote brand awareness.
Gaining Credibility
Regarding using social media, in 2022, it is anticipated that social media advertising spending will amount to 226.00 billion dollars. Employees are more credible than brands. Businesses should always consider their employees as the most influential advocates of their brand. The reason is that employees have a personal touch and can promote a brand in a way that is impossible for the brand itself. They also help companies gain credibility and build customer trust with genuine reviews and feedback on products, services, or events hosted by your business.
In contrast to ads that seem like propaganda or fake news, people tend to trust individuals more than corporations. They view them as unbiased sources that provide honest feedback about products/services offered by brands. Many consumers consider employee advocacy more valuable than traditional advertising methods, such as TV or print advertisements, in influencing buying decisions at the point of purchase (PoP).
Improving SEO
One of employee advocacy’s most significant benefits is improving SEO and visibility. This benefit is one of the main reasons businesses and brands adopt employee advocacy as a marketing tool.
Employee advocacy can help you to increase your brand visibility by increasing the number of relevant backlinks pointing to your website or blog. As a result, you will get more traffic from Google search results and improve your web presence.
It, in turn, leads to an improvement in brand awareness, trustworthiness, loyalty, and other factors critical for getting conversions from potential customers or leads on social media platforms. According to Hinge Marketing’s employee advocacy survey, 60.2% of businesses base their assessment of social media engagement on the increase in followers on social media.
Customized Branding
Branding is the act of creating a unique name, symbol, or design that represents your company. It would help if you made a brand for your business to stand out from competitors and differentiate yourself. Branding helps companies to develop a positive image for their products or services in the market. It also helps them establish themselves as industry leaders through an effective online presence.
To successfully create an effective employee advocacy tool, it is essential to understand branding and how it can help businesses enhance their online brand presence.
Engaging with Employees
Engaging with employees is an excellent way to improve the brand. It’s one of the most effective ways to help promote your business online. It can also help build customer trust and address new audience segments that may not have been your main focus before, like B2B.
Employee advocacy is also a great way to take advantage of Google’s search algorithm updates by improving SEO. In addition, when you engage with employees, they can share content more organically on their social media channels. Finally, it increases traffic back to your website or blog because of these contextual links.
An Employee Advocacy Tool Can Help Businesses Save Time
An employee advocacy tool can help businesses to save time and money. For example, when managing social media pages, you need to spend a lot of time creating engaging content, finding influencers, and responding to customer questions. But when you have an employee advocacy tool, all the work will be done by the assistant assigned to this task.
With an effective employee advocacy tool in place at your business, employees become brand advocates and share content across their profiles. As a result, it increases brand awareness and gets more leads from potential and existing customers.
