Who should your first employee advocate marketing recruits be?
You’ve decided you want to get involved in employee advocacy but are you working out who to invite still? You wouldn’t be alone. Selecting your first employee advocate marketing recruits can be challenging, but we’ve put together a few tips below, so dive in.
Low hanging fruit
There will be colleagues across your organisation who are active on social media and already great supporters of your company online.
For the pilot phase, these people will be ‘early adopter’ employee advocates – those identified from within teams likely to be interested in joining the programme and becoming successful members.
You should consider a few points here as you organise your invite list:
- Interview managers about who would be a good fit
- Consult you HR and Marketing teams for potential recruits
- Run a survey to gauge interest and top recruits
- Explore a variety of recruits from different departments and locations
- Make contact with colleagues already sharing brand news on social media
- Include the new initiative in targeted internal newsletters
- Raise at team and departmental meetings
A top tip here is also to consider new starters as employee advocate marketing recruits. New colleagues will undergo a social media induction and this is a good point in their employment journey to introduce the advocacy programme.
Steps to get people involved
Email the early adopter employee advocates you have identified and invite them to:
- An introductory huddle with senior stakeholders
- To view an introduction video (e.g. Loom)
- Sign up for a Zoom/Teams presentation
The key here is to outline the benefits to the employee advocates. Why is it important to them? Ask yourself: ‘We have this new programme, but so what?’
Communicate the programme’s value proposition and personal relevance to employees.
How to develop engagement
Here’s a few things to keep in mind to engage your employee advocates:
- Personal contact with key people builds relationships
- Being clear on the benefits to them (personally) is crucial
- Qualifying who gets the final invite ensures you are recruiting people who are definitely on social media and interested in the programme
- Following up quickly to ensure employee advocates sign up
- Be on hand to solve any issues they may have