We all know about brand ambassadors or at least we’ve all heard about “influencers” on social media who are being paid to endorse or promote anything let it be a product or service. What about employer brand ambassadors? Are you aware of this term? This is a largely unused marketing opportunity just waiting to be tapped into.
Before we get into our list of top tips for converting your employees into brand ambassadors for your recruitment marketing efforts, a quick dive into the idea behind the title, Brand Ambassador. Great commercials, strong PR, vivid social media strategy all warrant effort when building your company’s brand. But you would definitely agree that an army of loyal employees living and breathing your brand are best PRs. You know the type – folks with enthusiasm bursting from their veins–talking about your products and services with their friends at every place possible.
Here are tips and strategies you can use to motivate your staffers to be positively vocal about your brand:
Encourage to use social media:
No one wants to feel like their employer is watching over their shoulder, waiting to catch them sharing something on social media that shouldn’t be shared. You need to create a culture within your company that is supportive of employee engagement on social media.
Organize employee events:
Events and company outings are a great way to treat employees to activities they might not experience otherwise. Unconventional team-building give employees the opportunity to get outside of their comfort zone, get to know each other and get invested in the company culture. And it’s quite obvious, fun work-sponsored events are incredibly the best to be posted on social media platforms like Instagram.
- Communicate: Once you have a handle on your reputation, it’s time to start recruiting those brand ambassadors. Do you have a product launch coming up? Be sure everyone knows all there is to know about the updates being released, or the newest feature set of your whizz-bang, world-changing widget. That way they’ll be ready to toot their own horns about the part they played in bringing it to fruition.
- Allow Them To Be The Hero: There’s nothing more frustrating to a frontline employee than when an executive swoops in and does EXACTLY what they would have done, but their hands were tied. Executives chalk this up to a common sense that apparently they think they have, but I’ve met many who question whether anyone they’ve hired to service their customers could possibly be that astute. Give your employees a few opportunities (at least) to do what you would do in such circumstances. Can you imagine what would happen if you could replicate that level of prudence and critical thinking?
- Encourage participation: One way to maintain a sustainable, meaningful employee advocacy program is on incentives. Perks or swag can certainly keep people interested. Try weekly or monthly contests or giveaways. These types of activities keep your employees engaged, informed, interested and motivated too. So make your contests fun and compelling.
- Make it easy to share: Create a weekly email that includes all shareable content (news, blog articles, photos, videos, etc.) that employees can share. This will ensure your employees are sharing the news that is timely and accurate. Encourage employees to follow, like and share the company’s social media updates.
- Identify Ambition and Ability: Social media is still a bit of a frontier field; its exact boundaries are undefined and professional progression within the industry has yet to calcify into anything resembling the predictable paths of more traditional careers. Its connoisseurs are not necessarily degrees holders, because degrees are often obsolete before graduation, due to the fast-changing nature of the industry.
Often times, the top experts in social media are not the ones who went out of their way to pursue that career, but rather those who sort of just discovered a talent and stumbled into it. For all you know, your business might be housing a social media megastar in the making. All that’s needed is to identify ambition and encourage engagement.
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