Great employees and their personal stories, ambitions and output are what makes a brand successful. In his article in Forbes magazine, Scott Klinger, SVP - Human Resources & Marketing at Earthlink outlines that employees are your best brand ambassadors.
What is a Brand Ambassador?
A person who serves as a brand ambassador has the primary function to present a brand in public and bring it closer to potential customers and partners.
Building a diverse team is one part of shaping a company culture, the other one is hiring people who are “genuinely excited” about the work they do. Teams who are excited about their work push the company forward by becoming an extension of the sales and recruitment team.
Achieving this requires a shift towards being a customer-centric organization and grasping that every employee is important to promote your brand. This is done by getting the message out about exciting new items or offerings as well as open positions to their expert network. All employees ought to be in every way pursuing the all-encompassing objective of winning partners, clients and workers. Even more, this ought to be an objective they need to be proactive about themselves, they cannot be coerced into participation.
Customer-centric organizations set up structures for employees which provide guidelines and thus empower them to become advocates in their voice for their successes and growth. This needs to come organically, if forced on employees they can grow disillusioned, lose enthusiasm and their communication will not come across as genuine to future prospects.
It is core to the strategy to hire the right people who are engaged in achieving the company's vision and mission. Understanding what your firm stands for should guide managers in identifying additions to the team who cannot simply do their “job” but align with the values of the organization to build internal trust, setting standards internally and reflecting them externally to clients.
Invest in employees who have the potential to add value to your group and have the emotional intelligence to cooperate with other people.
Finding somebody who is a band-aid or is immediately recruited and rapidly leaves after a short while just costs businesses time and cash and can affect internal perception of the organization's quality filters. People are excited about working with the best talent. Having diverse points of view enhances the group dynamic and their potential to grow.
A group of inside-propelled brand advocates is more significant than a modest bunch of paid representatives.
They directly have an impact on the probability of finding new colleagues who are a superior cultural fit and prompts lower turnover and a more joyful, more useful labor force.
Empowered employees spread the word;
During the outreach planning stages, request team members to share their point of view and feedback. This is an effective method for them to feel significant and a piece of the process.
Share your vision with workers
Sharing your vision with your employees is significant. You want to ensure that everybody is in total agreement and pursuing a similar objective. However, it does not end there. Keep the channels of correspondence open, stay straightforward, assemble criticism, and guarantee the right 'voice' and 'message'.
Give representatives the instruments they need to make a buzz for your image.
In the event that, the right marketing collateral or equipment they can utilize to create and share content. This includes things like high res photographs, plan layouts, logos, hashtags, etc will make it more simple for them to get the news out about your business with an imaginative style (and in accordance with your corporate picture or brand details).
Enable Employees to shape your voice
Top performers will more often have the desire to develop and contribute in a significant manner, and offering them the chance to do so will probably be met with a positive reaction.
Encouraging them to compose posts for your organization’s blog puts them in a position to want to share the content with their family, companions, partners, and friends.
Give clear rules about sharing organization-related content
To avoid an aura of paranoia and micromanagement, define clear rules, especially with regards to sharing data about your organization. Setting clear rules about what representatives can and cannot share from the start will offer them the independence to share content without questioning whether it could get them into trouble. Again this is not something that can be coerced onto an employee, but they should feel empowered to share their experiences organically.
Reward your brand champions
Rewarding brand champions for enthusiastic participation is key to growing the culture. Again: they are going above and beyond. They however understand that these efforts benefit everyone. The last thing you need is for your representatives to feel burdened with being a brand diplomat, as this can affect their enthusiasm. Rewarding them could be done through facilitating group building events, offering them incentives & perks and by openly celebrating their achievements.
Employer Branding
Making the brand more attractive to employees and applicants is called employer branding. Concepts from marketing, such as employer branding, play a major role in today’s economy. Companies are increasingly striving to build their employee brand by valuing and respecting the employee's needs.
In our blog, you will find measures about how to build your employer branding. employees feel a strong connection with the company which is a new opportunity for companies to communicate their corporate culture to the outside world. One of them is to understand and promote employees as brand ambassadors.
After all, who can do the best marketing of the product authentically in the outside world than the employees who work with it every day?
First, it is important that employees actively help shape the brand so that they can better identify with it. It should also be important that the company and the employees share and follow the same vision. As a result, employees will automatically want to represent your brand positively, which makes them brand ambassadors for your company in their own right.
The benefits of employees as brand ambassadors
If every employee marketed the brand with conviction, it would be an excellent additional marketing channel. An example would be a company with 10 employees.
If each of these employees had a reach of 100 people, then with 10 employees, this would already be 1000 people being introduced to the product.
This can become a natural marketing channel in the long run and help the company in product marketing and employer branding. Customers and applicants can see how well the employees are doing in the company and that the conviction of the brand is so strong that you also use it in your spare time.
Here’s a quick summary of the benefits:
- Attract the attention of new talent
- Increase brand reach
- Strengthen employee loyalty
- Increase employee engagement
Last, there is the question of how to get the employee to take your brand public and how to design the process.
Practical examples
Examples of promoting the sub-brand would be social media posts, using the product or service independently, and recommending it to friends and family.
Social media marketing for employees
In the age of social media, any person can bring brands and products closer to a certain reach. Companies pay vast amounts of money to attract Instagram influencers as brand ambassadors. But what’s the point when it’s possible to use your resources to play on these channels? If the brand is a part of the employee’s life, he or she will also carry it to the outside world. Thus, a strong additional marketing channel can develop.
Social Media Training
Employee training on social media posts and brand communications can also help current employees, in particular, to get to grips with social media and pique your interest.
You can’t force your employees to share the brand, tell friends about it or show your daily work routine on social media. What you can do, however, is ask your employees what it would take to better identify with the brand. You could also provide incentives to market it, such as employee perks or product giveaways. Take automotive brands, for example, that allow employees to buy their brand cars at a discount price. This increases exposure on the road and the perception of others increases and employees market the product. Not only have you created new customers, but you’ve also created another active marketing channel. The company’s logo merch items are widely used to promote the company. This way you create public attention and potential customers and applicants can associate something with your brand.
Here’s a quick summary of sample measures:
- Offer employee deals
- Purchase employee merchandise
- Engage employees on social media
- Offer branding training
- Build a corporate culture
How can MoBerries help companies with this?
On our talent platform, we suggest companies suitable candidates based on their job postings. This enables the company to find candidates who share the same vision.
Employee retention is not a measure, but an ongoing process that needs to be nurtured. Of course, it is primarily up to companies to build a bond between the brand and the employees, but it starts in the recruitment process to find the right person who will drive the brand forward.
