Why Your LinkedIn Strategy is Broken

In today's digital age, businesses are always searching for innovative ways to reach new customers and expand their brand presence. One powerful tool that is often overlooked is employee advocacy.

By leveraging the power of social media, businesses can tap into their own employee networks to reach potential customers, increase visibility, and build brand loyalty. In this article, we will explore the concept of organic amplification and how it can be used to create an effective employee advocacy program on LinkedIn.

Introduction

Employee advocacy is a powerful tool for any business. It involves empowering employees to promote the company's values, products, and services to their personal networks, thereby amplifying the reach and impact of the brand. In this article, we will focus on organic amplification, which is the process of amplifying marketing efforts through employees’ personal networks on social media.

Benefits of Organic Amplification

Organic amplification is a cost-effective way to leverage the relationships already established by employees, essentially turning them into brand ambassadors. This approach allows businesses to target specific audiences based on the interests and networks of their employee advocates. For example, if an employee advocate has a network made up of technology professionals, a business could target its content at that specific demographic.

Organic amplification also augments public relations and business development efforts. By having employees share company news across their networks, businesses can boost visibility with both current and potential customers or partners in one fell swoop. Additionally, organic amplification provides an avenue for employees to express what they think about a company—activating a positive sentiment among those who are connected to them.

IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION: Consider the following: if you’ve hired the right sales and business development people, they’re connected to partners, prospects, customers, and other decision makers on LinkedIn. As such, when they share company content like case studies, news, whitepapers, etc., the likelihood that it gets seen by your target audience grows exponentially. Also, first-person posts that aren’t ads or sponsored have an extra level of authenticity and credibility.

Creating an Effective Employee Advocacy Program on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network, making it an ideal platform for businesses to leverage the power of employee advocacy. Here are the key steps to creating an effective employee advocacy program on LinkedIn:

Step 1: Define your goals

Before you start your employee advocacy program, it's important to define your goals. What do you want to achieve through organic amplification? Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, generate leads, or something else? Defining your goals will help you create a targeted program that is aligned with your overall business objectives.

Step 2: Identify your employee advocates

The success of your employee advocacy program depends on the quality of your employee advocates. You should identify employees who are passionate about your brand, knowledgeable about your products and services, and have a strong social media presence. These employees will be the ones who are most likely to engage with your content and share it with their personal networks.

Step 3: Train and empower your employee advocates

Once you have identified your employee advocates, you need to train and empower them to become effective brand ambassadors. This involves providing them with the tools and resources they need to share your content on social media. You can create a content library that contains pre-approved content that employees can easily share with their networks. You can also provide training on how to write effective social media posts and engage with their audience.

Step 4. Make it easy and intuitive

For most enterprises, employees either don’t take the time to share on LinkedIn or they post content without adhering to best practices. Our platform CEI, which stands for connect-engage-influence, solves this problem by sending pre-populated posts that are optimized for maximum visibility.

KEY CONSIDERATION: Very important to note is that if your business operates in regulated markets like banking/finance, healthcare, or government, this ensures that the content they post has been vetted by compliance.

Step 5: Monitor and measure your program

To ensure the success of your employee advocacy program, you need to monitor and measure its effectiveness. This involves tracking metrics such as engagement rates, reach, and website traffic generated by your employee advocates. You can use LinkedIn analytics to track these metrics and adjust your program accordingly.

Conclusion

Organic amplification through employee advocacy on LinkedIn unlocks opportunities for businesses to grow and drive more sales by connecting with their audiences at scale in an efficient way that complements traditional public relations and business development efforts. By empowering employees to become brand ambassadors, businesses can tap into the power of social media to increase visibility, take content viral, build brand loyalty, and drive revenue growth.

Does your LinkedIn strategy need help?

Instead of wasting budget allocations on sponsored posts, let JMRConnect: Shaping Influence® PR deploy a customized instance of CEI, and watch your branding go viral.

Email [email protected] to set up a demo today!

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