Employee advocacy in recent times has become one of the most influential marketing techniques for organizations. In the simplest terms, it takes place when your existing employees uphold the claim of your company being the best in its business.
It can also involve your employees vouching for your company to have an ideal workplace, so it may be able to recruit highly skilled individuals.
Employee advocacy can be your employees’ social media posts, tweets, video testimonials, to any form that involves the praise of an employer company by its employees.
As much as it’s worth it and brings many advantages, it, as with everything, comes with its little (insignificant) imperfections.
Pros of Employee Advocacy
Improved social media presence and reach
One of the notable advantages of employee advocacy is that it helps better your social media presence. As a result, you are able to reach a wider range of audiences. Meaning that not only your social media presence improves, but you are also able to make more people become familiar with your brand.
Usually, for an enhanced audience reach and improved presence on social media, it requires you to spend a portion of your marketing budget on social media advertisements.
However, with the videos of your employees vouching for your company, not only that it saves your money, but it comes with the same results, if not better, as in the case of social media adverts.
A related question that may come to your mind is how do videos of your employees skyrocketing your popularity across social media? Well, it’s simple math.
Say your employee makes a video of their advocacy for your brand. Sharing it on one of the social networks will make all their connections watch it. And, so, without having to spend a single penny, you are able to share your brand with people. Besides this, it enables you to build trust in the mind of the people, and that too through the words of your employees (and not your own!).
Helps increase the number of sales
An increase in the number of sales for any company is one of the best results that employee advocacy brings. But how so?
See, employees, just as the consumers, take value from any business. The difference only being that employees receive a value for their service, while customers pay for what they receive. So, the two are linked one way or the other.
When an employee tries to convince the target audience of a brand through its advocacy, it indeed proves helpful. Thus, with it, more sales conversions are achieved, taking a business to the success it desires.
Makes your company appear as honest
With employee advocacy, you can share with the masses a rather honest perspective of your company in the eyes of your workforce.
Mentioning one of your employees’ names at the end of a paragraph full of praise may not be much helpful. And why would it be when no one can tell if it is indeed the words of the person mentioned.
A video where one of your employees can be seen providing testimonials makes the people realize that it is an honest view. However, still, doubts may exist due to the fact that no serving employee bad mouths their company of bread and butter.
Yet, it is better than long and lengthy paragraphs that quote the saying of your employees about your company, since when the audience can actually view your employee reviewing your company, it makes it appear more honest than a random text full of praise.
As a consequence, you are able to build an image of your company as an honest one (even to some extent), and as a subsequence, your words are more likely to be believed by the consumers.
Lets you acquire the top-talent
An employee testimonial video where helps attract potential customers also lets you attract skilled candidates. Thus, another advantage that employee advocacy brings is that it makes the candidates with the sought-after skills to work for your company.
Understandably, candidates that possess the in-demand skills are choosy when it comes to working for an organization. The monetary value is not the only thing they are looking for. So, they consider other factors as well, such as work culture, appreciation, rewards, etc.
To sum up, offering only a lucrative salary is not sufficient to make such employees a part of your workforce. Instead, a workplace that is best as a whole is what makes the top employees work for any company.
In an employee video, your employees can also affirm that your company has an ideal workplace. It can also be used to share that working for it brings manifold benefits, including a well-balanced work-life environment, substantial career development opportunities, etc.
And with that, you’ll be able to attract and hire the top talent working for you in no time.
Increases employee engagement
Employee engagement is one of the (desired) consequences of employee advocacy. But how?
A workforce can only advocate its company, honestly, when it takes satisfaction from its work. And to become satisfied with one’s work first requires good levels of engagement and, so, performance.
In order to achieve genuine advocacy from your employees, it is absolutely essential that your employees are highly engaged so as to achieve greater results as a consequence and greater recognition as a subsequence. All this leads employees to have greater work satisfaction.
And with your employees satisfied with their job roles, honest employee advocacy becomes a matter of time for any company.
Read: What is Employee Advocacy? What are the Trends to Look Out
What puts employee advocacy at a little disadvantage?
Employee advocacy can’t be enforced (at least morally)
Not being able to make all your employees provide a video of their advocacy is not really a disadvantage but a limitation of employee advocacy.
Naturally, not every employee wants to become a part of your marketing strategy based on workforce advocacy. There could be different reasons for it.
For example, an employee’s camera shyness could be one reason, or one may not be comfortable with their personality on the camera.
As for the advocacy, such as social media posts, etc., there could also be some employees who are not very happy with the company, subsequently making them not advocate for the company.
Whatever the reason is, an organization cannot enforce employee advocacy. And if it does, then while it may achieve the short-term benefit, in the long run, however, it may do more harm than good.
May let loose employees on social media
The downside of having employees advocate for their company is that it allows anyone to post anything about their organization. It makes unhappy employees let loose on their say, which can prove detrimental to the public reputation of any company.
So, with all the great benefits that employees promoting their company brings, it also makes an organization vulnerable in terms of the social media use by their rather unsatisfied workers.
But don’t worry, it does not mean that you should avoid employee advocacy altogether. Instead, you can counter this downside by making and implementing a social media policy for your employees.
However, make sure that your employees understand that you are not policing them about their social media use in general but concerning the representation of the company only.
So it should not be considered a drawback but due diligence.
It may require you to incentivize the advocacy
There comes a time when a business direly needs its workforce to promote its brand. However, at the same time, they may not want to make it a compulsion if some employees are not happy to do it.
In such a scenario, a business may incentivize its employee advocacy approach. And this may incur a company a little expense. So, while, most often, making your employee promote your brand is penniless, a scenario explained before may become an exception to the no-monetary-expense aspect of employee advocacy.
That being said, employee-incentivized advocacy still remains considerably less expensive than paid campaigns.
So, it can be concluded that just as employee engagement or productivity can be incentivized, the advocacy of your employees can as well. Therefore, this is not really a disadvantage.
Read: How Can Managers Make Team Recognition Impactful?
Bottom-line
All in all, employee advocacy is very beneficial to any company.
Clearly, practicing it brings successful results for a company. And as far as its downsides are considered, they are not significant enough to make a harmful impact.
Lastly and relevantly, if your advocacy is video-based, then a video recording software is usually required. You can use BRAVO! to make excellent and compelling videos of your employees advocating for your company.
Book a demo here to learn its practical use.
