Content Strategy for Employee Advocacy Platforms

Why does a content strategy for employee advocacy platforms matter? Well, once you’ve enrolled your employees into your formal employee advocacy program, the next thing you’re usually looking for is content.

It’s obvious. A big reason why we’d add employee advocacy to our marketing strategy is to get our blogs, ebooks, etc, in front of more people. We’re banking on the people at our company to help us do exactly that by sharing on social networks, like LinkedIn.

But we shouldn’t look at employee advocacy as a content-sharing machine. In fact, having such a soulless view of employee advocacy cuts us off from its greatest benefits.

How so?

Audiences want to hear from other people, not brands.

Folks value the authenticity that comes from a candid word – they don’t want to see a scrubbed marketing message. They want to know what their colleagues and friends actually think about a product or service. Moreover, people also aspire to be like other people, especially the thought leaders, trailblazers and success stories in their industries.

When your employees reach high levels of influence, they’ll be able to carry your brand farther and in ways that are more impactful to your revenue. Why? Well, your employees would be the people your target audiences want to listen to, learn from, and emulate in their professions.

So, the key with a content strategy for employee advocacy platforms  is to provide content that elevates your employees.

When your employees reach high levels of influence, they’ll be able to carry your brand farther and in ways that are more impactful to your revenue. Why? Well, your employees would be the people your target audiences want to listen to, learn from, and emulate in their professions.

The key with a content strategy for employee advocacy platforms is to provide content that elevates your employees.

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Why Employee Advocacy Content Matters

On the surface, we often look at content as something to drive our employee advocacy. The blogs, ebooks, infographics, webinars, etc, are assets we want employees to share and our target audiences to see.

But if we return to the goal of elevating our employees, we need to start looking at our content as a currency, like the Dollar, so to speak. The more valuable the currency – i.e., your content – is, the more impactful and effective it’ll be in delivering on your employee advocacy goals.

Here’s why thinking of content as currency matters:

First, if your employees can personally relate to and speak to your content, then the chances of them sharing it on their networks goes up.

In fact, the more your employees can speak to your content, the easier it’ll be for them to provide unique commentary, engage in discussions, and show an active and visible interest in what they’re sharing!

Second, the energy your employees show on LinkedIn et.al moves audiences.

There’s a world of difference between a “hey check out this blog” type post versus someone who spends time to write a comment reflecting on the blog’s ideas.

People will scroll past the first, but they’ll want to comment – or at least engage – with the latter. In the LinkedIn algorithm, the latter pushes your employee’s post (and, in turn, your blog) to the surface of more feeds.

You might notice a subtle point. It’s not just about providing great content, but creating energy for your employee advocates to create content on top of your content. So, you provide the blog post, but you also want them to provide original commentary.

So, how do we do that, exactly?

How to Build an Employee Advocacy Content Strategy

In this mini-guide, we’ll run you through a few tried-and-tested steps to create the employee advocacy content that drives sharing and engagement.

1. Involve Your Employees in Content Creation

It’s always a good rule of thumb to get input from your employees, especially your advocates (as they’re the ones you’re leaning on to share).

Ultimately, you want content that’s authentic because your target audience values what actual people have to say, not brands. The neat thing is that it isn’t hard to create authentic content – you just have to approach content creation differently.

Encourage Employee-Generated Content (EGC)

EGC is the gold standard of authenticity because it comes directly from the minds of your employees and in the voices of your employees.

Start by encouraging employees to write their own original social media posts. This is as simple as providing an original comment whenever they share a blog post or promote a webinar.

In fact, you can make this process easier by leaning on your employees when you produce branded content. Spotlight your teammates as subject matter experts by quoting them and having them star in your webinars and podcasts.

Obviously, a challenge with producing EGC at scale is maintaining employee engagement, especially over the long-run. In the short-run, setting up contests and offering rewards can generate interest and early-stage energy.

But to sustain it over the long-term, you need to work at a deeper level. Employees need to personally feel invested in producing content. Answer the “what’s in it for me?” question by showing them to build their personal brands or reach departmental KPIs.

However, you also need to focus on your company’s underlying culture. You want people to genuinely enjoy working at your company and wanting to let other people know about it. So, when you have company news, your advocates should go out and share it on their own.

Make Employees the Protagonists of Your Stories

Writing a blog? Try focusing less on the technical topic and, instead, shift more towards how your teammates solved the problem. As we said earlier, people aspire to be like other people – let’s make your employees role-models. Setting up a webinar? Be less abstract and, instead, have your employees lead the conversation, answer audience questions, and provide tips.

Mobilize Customers

Your employees can also play a role in pushing your customers’ voices forward. When it comes to using your product and services, customers give the most valuable social proof. For prospects and buyers, they’ll see what the people using your offerings really think about the value you bring.

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2. Tailor Your Content for Each Social Media Platform & Community

If you’re working across different platforms – e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc – then you must make sure you’re matching the styles of each one specifically.

For most B2B marketers, LinkedIn is their go-to social platform. The good news there is that you can leverage several different types of content. For example, you can have long-form and short- form posts, native videos of different styles, and image-based stories, among others.

With the flexibility in content mediums, you can do a lot on LinkedIn. Unfortunately, we can’t go into every single one in this guide. But we have guides on producing content for LinkedIn and how to write LinkedIn posts for optimal reach and engagement.

Overall, the key is to make sure you’re designing your content for how the platform works.

In LinkedIn’s case, for example, native publishing matters. Even though you may be sharing a blog post, the real “meat” of your content from a LinkedIn sharing standpoint is the commentary that goes with it.

You can go even deeper by also understanding how your network responds to certain topics or aspects of personality. For example, some audiences resonate with those who show their “real” selves – i.e., their vulnerability, their personal challenges, and their true inner sentiments. While other networks are built on exchanging actionable, practical tips for problems shared by people who work in similar roles at their companies.

To conclude, there is the platform and the communities within the platform. The latter are going to take many different forms. You need to spend time understanding the ‘micro-communities,’ so to speak, your employees are part of to produce the content that resonates.

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3. Simplify Content Access, Distributing and Sharing

Creating content is only one part of the equation – the other is about making sure it gets into the hands of your advocates and that it’s easy for them to share it.

When starting an employee advocacy program, you can lean on manual processes because you’re working with fewer people and more focused goals. But as you grow and aim to drive wider impact, the manual processes will get cumbersome, and in time, totally ineffective.

It eats at your time to create spreadsheets with shareable links and, as your advocate roster grows, fewer people will actually use those assets. It’s also likely that your strongest thought leaders are also your busiest employees. So, they don’t have the time to manually download and re-upload videos, copy-paste links, and so on. And as you drive lots of activity, you’ll also need to track which of your content assets are driving the most impact.

These are all points of friction, and too much friction will slow your employee advocacy efforts.

The key to launching your employee advocacy content strategy at scale is to leverage a good employee advocacy platform.

The right platform will give your team members a central, easy-to-access library or hub to view, share and customize content. It also simplifies everyone’s ability to apply best practices on each target social media network. For example, it would let your advocates post native videos on their LinkedIn profiles from within the platform (without any tedious downloading, reuploading, etc).

It would equip your admins to post on behalf of your busiest employees while also giving the latter the ability to review content before it goes out. You also want to sustain momentum by keeping your advocates engaged through points and leaderboards.

Finally, a good employee advocacy platform gives you the tools to closely track the performance of each of your content assets on social. Let’s say there’s a LinkedIn post that helped your sales team knock their quarterly pipeline goals out of the park. You’ll want to know what that post was so you can model your future content on the formula that worked.

Resources for Launching an Employee Advocacy Platform:

 

 

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