Employee Advocacy: What’s In It For Me?

Employee advocacy is a two-way street. While B2B companies greatly benefit from their advocates through amplified reach, increased customer loyalty, and higher lead generation, the question that still remains unanswered is: what’s in it for the employees?

Although employees from every department gain value from participating in an advocacy program, customer-facing employees, usually those in sales, marketing, and customer success, find it most advantageous. In order to create a successful and sustainable advocacy plan, employees need to remain invested. And how do they remain invested? By clearly understanding and being sold on the value of advocacy.

Besides the tangible incentives and rewards you’re bound to receive for excelling an advocacy program, there are more valuable and long-term benefits to be excited about. To make it easier, you can skip straight to your department and finally understand the real perks of being an employee advocate:

Sales

As a salesperson, we understand that it’s in your nature to be ego-driven and enthusiastic about closing as many deals as possible. By becoming an advocate you’ll not only improve your social media skills, you’ll also transform into a better sales rep. In fact, 78% of sales people who utilize social media as part of their sales techniques outperformed their non-social media peers. And when it comes to achieving and exceeding quota, being a better social seller makes you 23% more successful. As a result, you can have a much greater impact on revenue, which in turn leaves more room for business growth.

While LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter serve as three more ways to communicate with your audience, they can also help you gain further control over lead generation with minimum effort. Moreover, social media will turn you into a thought-leader. By actively sharing quality content, you’ll progressively develop a trustworthy reputation among your audience, which means they’ll look up to you as an influencer in the industry. As a trustworthy voice, you’ll have the power to drive more traffic to your corporate website and convert them into customers.

Marketing & Customer Success

Even if you already have an excellent grasp on social media as a marketing or customer success manager, you’ll be given the extra tools to improve the way you sell yourself to others. Social media will not only serve as another channel for communicating with your audience, it will also establish your thought-leadership.

How? By sharing lots of amazing content throughout your networks, you will heighten your credibility and inspire others with your ideas. Findings show that a product or service recommended by an employee is 90% more trusted by customers. Not to mention an employee advocate is two times more trusted than his/her CEO – now that’s a huge confidence boost!

Marketing

If you’re a marketer, having an advocacy program creates a systematic way in which you can easily and consistently share content and measure its success on each network. Engaging a wider audience with great content will help you generate more leads through organic website traffic in order to make your company more recognizable.

Customer Success

As a customer success manager, becoming more proactive and sharing lots of content adds value to your audience and empowers your thought-leadership status. Having such a status will strengthen your ability to develop personal relationships and increase sales opportunities from existing customers.