eBook

A Guide for Brand Advocate Marketing Six stages on how to make your brand advocate marketing work successfully

Invosphere.com

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Overview

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Stage 1: Build your brand advocate marketing plan

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Stage 2: Identify and invite your employees

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Stage 3: Inform your brand Page 4 advocates of what content they will be posting Stage 4: Launch the program

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Stage 5: Gain feedback from your brand advocates on the success of the program

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Stage 6: Expand your program

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Summary

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Overview What is a brand advocate Brand advocates are client-facing employees who volunteer to work closely with the company’s marketing department to increase the brand of both themselves and that of the company while at the same time improving a company’s content distribution. These activities generate new awareness, engagement, and sales for financial services companies.

Marketing benefits Strategy

Content Reach

Content Distribution

Content Distribution Control

Thought Leaders Marketing Campaigns Content Is Expensive

Employee Advocates Drive Value

Brand advocates increase company brand credibility and trust while their engagement provides companies with a unified and humanized enterprise voice. There is an 8X view and share rate of content when shared by employees compared to the same content from the company page. Brand advocacy enables hundreds of employees to compliantly share content that will increase awareness, engagement, and sales. Most organizations don’t have the resources to trace employee activity on the key business networks. Invosphere provides your marketing and compliance departments with the controls to easily and compliantly distribute content via the key business networks. Companies operating brand advocates establish their key employees as thought leaders. Brand advocates increase marketing campaign effectiveness and drive website traffic. Brand advocacy increases your content distribution, improving your content effectiveness and return on marketing spend. Companies derive value by sharing company content on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Invosphere

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Stage 1: Build your brand advocate marketing plan Refer to your company’s social media policy To fully understand what controls are in place governing your employees, make sure you discuss your plans with your compliance department as well as discussing the compliance controls you have at your disposal to implement them.

Recognize your marketing objectives Discuss with your senior management and sales and marketing leaders their objectives for the brand advocacy program and what this should look like.

Examples of employee advocacy goals 1. Increase my content distribution, effectiveness, and the return on my marketing spend 2. Increase the perceived expertise of my sales team 3. Humanize my brand, facilitating an increase in trust in my company 4. Increase my brand and content reach to new audiences 5. Demonstrate my company’s thought leadership 6. Increase the integration of my brand and client-facing teams 7. Increase my brand reach to existing contacts, for example, LinkedIn connections of my sales staff 8. Boost my marketing campaigns 9. Increase turn out at my events 10. Increase my Public Relations department’s effectiveness.

Allocate someone to run your brand advocacy program Having someone there to run your program makes it easier to adjust your marketing as you go and to expand your program when the time is right. If possible, the person running the program should have senior management sponsorship.

Create a content and engagement plan Start to outline what type of content you wish to have distributed. As a rough rule of thumb, it is better to have the content relevant to your employees’ expertise. For example, if your business developer is selling equity funds, then you could use macro-economic or fund-specific thought leadership content as well as boosting the awareness of investment conferences where the company has a booth. Make sure you change and update your content at least twice weekly as this helps attract and keep followers. The content you will want employees to share will depend on the goals you identified. Align your brand advocacy program with your marketing diary and business plan, making sure you tie in with

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Stage 2: Identify and invite your employees Discuss who should be involved in the program with senior management of your client-facing staff. Ideally you would start small and increase your participation once you are comfortable with how the campaign is progressing. A good number to start with would be between 15 and 50, but this will be dependent on the size of the company and the brand footprint you wish to achieve.

Invite the first group This may be delivered by email or at a sales/marketing meeting and should outline what is expected when joining the brand advocacy program. The invitation should outline the benefits to them and the company and should include the compliant reasons why the administration of the program will be delivered by marketing and how it will have minimal interruption to their business day. Make sure you ask for continual feedback so you can fine-tune your marketing. Use the Invosphere fast-track system to upload all brand advocates to Invosphere. Once onboard, ask them to accept the invitation to become brand advocates via the Invosphere messaging system. The Invosphere compliant marketing system takes care of the rest.

Stage 3: Inform your brand advocates of what content they will be posting Keep in mind that employees should always know about agreed posts before they are distributed, so keep up weekly or monthly communications with them in order to facilitate this. This ensures increased brand integration with the employee. It is also a good idea to plan for communications to brand advocates that inform the success of the program. Communication can be by email or sales meeting.

Stage 4: Launch the program Start by providing approved messages that the compliance department is most comfortable with, and be sure to update these materials at least twice weekly to keep the advocate followers fully engaged. Think of this like any other business network. If there’s nothing new to see or share, people will stop coming. Don’t overdo it, but be constant and consistent with the objectives you are trying to achieve for the brand advocate.

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Stage 5: Gain feedback from your brand advocates on the success of the program Keep in touch with your employees and continually ask for feedback on what content would work more effectively. If they have a good idea for a post, ask them to send it to you via the Invosphere compliant posting system. If the post is approved, thank them and tell them whether you have used it with other brand advocates. This will help them become more involved and be a part of the marketing solution. The key metrics to monitor for employee programs are the number of active advocates, total engagements, and reach. The number of active advocates is a fundamental metric for the ongoing success of your program. You should see large increases in brand awareness for both the company and the employee as well as a substantial increase in your content usage. It’s worth paying attention to the other “soft benefits,” including employees feeling more engaged and sales personnel having better conversations with customers.

Stage 6: Expand your program Once you have your brand advocacy running successfully, you are now ready to increase brand advocacy across departments. It is time to appoint a brand advocacy marketing manager and communicate the benefits to other departments.

Summary You now have the tools to compliantly run a brand advocate marketing program successfully. Your compliance department is happy as they have the control they desire, marketing has increased its brand and content distribution exponentially, and your client-facing teams are delighted with the marketing support they are receiving.