Dear Gabi: Low Adoption For Employee Advocacy

Dear Gabi, 

I have been managing my employee advocacy for almost a year now and I do not see the adoption I want. I feel like I am putting a lot of effort into this and not getting the returns I was hoping for when I started. I am seriously losing interest in continuing even though I know how important it is for our employees to have easy access to our content. I need the motivation to keep going, but without the results, it’s hard! What can I do to make this better before I give up altogether?

Sincerely, 

Admin Seeking Adoption

Toronto, ON


Dear Admin Seeking Adoption,

First off, let me tell you that I see you and I appreciate your struggle! Our program administrators are often marketers and sales leaders who have a ton on their plate, including the day to day management of their Employee Advocacy program with PostBeyond. Even without your program’s full view, I can definitely help you diagnose some common issues that may impact your adoption. Managing programs is a delicate balance of tactics and strategy that help propel your program to success.

It goes without saying, you must recognize if your adoption goal is realistic. We typically see 15-20% of an overall organization leveraging PostBeyond, with specific use cases around marketing and sales garnering even higher results than that. On average, we see 53% adoption in programs that are targeting the right groups of employees. If your numbers are higher than that, you may want to adjust your expectations.

Okay, now that we’ve got some benchmarks out of the way, let me break down the equation I see for most of our programs. It’s all about foundation+pillars=success. The foundation is non-negotiable and required for any momentum. The pillars are what keep the program humming and moving towards predetermined KPIs.

Foundations

  1. Executive Support
    • It goes without saying your executives need to fully be behind the idea of Employee Advocacy and social overall. Suppose you receive any pushback or simply lack interest. In that case, I suggest you define suggested Business Objectives that will help illustrate how the program will move the needle for your organization overall (because that’s what the executive ultimately cares about). Once you have them on board, they should be regularly promoting the program to your employees and why it matters to help boost adoption.
  2. Team Lead Buy-In
    • I won’t lie. Geting buy-in is perhaps the most challenging part of the foundation to achieve. Leaders are busy and it can be challenging to engage them in a meaningful way. Ultimately you want to communicate the how’s and why’s of the program. Give them talking points for their team meetings so they can push the importance of the program. If they can wrap it into the team’s performance (this is particularly important for those in sales, even better).
  3. WIIFM (What’s In It For Me)
    • When I say me, I really mean what’s in it for your employees. You need to articulate exactly why they should be logging in, reading, and sharing. I can break this down pretty simply, depending on your use case. For sales and HR, it’s about building pipeline and relationships on social (a necessity in 2021). For any customer-facing team, it’s about building a reputation as an expert in their field and becoming trusted thought leaders. And finally, for everyone else interested in being active on social media, it makes it easy to become top of their game online without trying that hard.

Pillars

  1. Consistent Content Creation 
    • I hear the groans from across the room. We can’t talk about social without talking about content. The way I like to explain it is akin to logging into Facebook – if you logged into that app and the content was exactly the same as when you logged in 3 days prior, you’d think it’s broken. Now imagine your employees logging into the library. You want to make sure it’s robust enough that there’s always something new and relevant if they’re visiting once a week.
  2. Consistent Program Promotion 
    • There’s that word again, consistent. Your organization likely has many channels in which it communicates with employees. I suggest you tap into as many of those as possible to promote your Employee Advocacy program. For example, if you have a monthly newsletter that goes out company-wide, add a blurb each month about the top-performers. If you have Slack, leverage a slack integration like PostBeyond has to push content out. Finally, send out weekly or bi-weekly newsletters directly from the platform to let people know what’s most impactful to share.
  3. Gamification
    • Incentivization is another word for gamification. Sometimes organizations shy away from this tactic because they don’t want the sharing to be inauthentic – I get that. Let me tell you that by and large, it doesn’t happen all that often. This final pillar helps to convert those users that are on the fence about sharing and pushes those who already share to be even more invested in their performance. It’s beneficial at the start of any program to have monthly contests and incentives to help employees build the habit and learn best practices.

Now that you know what the foundation and pillars are, you can go out and build a program that has strong adoption. You can do it! And if you have any more questions, we have a team of strategic CSMs that will help you craft a plan.

Sincerely,

Gabi

Ready to get started with employee advocacy?

Request Demo