What do Zappos, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, and Virgin all have in common? They have encouraged their staff members to be a part of their respective brand’s marketing strategies. As Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite, writes in Fast Company:
A little math hints at the potential. Suppose you’re a mid-sized company with a total of 5,000 followers altogether on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Now, let’s say you have 100 employees, each with (a relatively modest) 250 followers of their own, for a total of 25,000 unique followers. By asking your employees to share messages, you can boost your audience (at least on paper) from 5,000 to 30,000 – Instantly.
Holmes adds, “It isn’t just a numbers game, of course. Word-of-mouth messages from friends and colleagues are widely seen as more relevant and trustworthy than social media blasts from corporate accounts.
In other words, employees can be an important role for spreading the word about your brand. But, how can you get your employees in on the fun? Give these tactics a try.
Gather ideas
Your employees are full of incredible ideas that they’re more than willing to share and initiate. Whether if it’s launching a new campaign on a trending social platform or creating a fresh content marketing strategy, don’t shut down any ideas that your team members have.
Frequently gather ideas from your team by sending out surveys or allowing time at the end of your weekly meetings for a round-table discussion.
Encourage everyone to blog
There’s no denying that blogging is one of the best ways to generate leads, spread brand awareness and prove that you’re an industry thought leader. The problem with blogging is that it can be difficult to handle the creating, writing, and publishing of daily blog posts. This is why you should get your employees involved.
Not only does this help decrease your workload, it also gives you the chance to showcase different viewpoints and allows employees to share their knowledge and expertise in their respective fields.
Most importantly, you can be certain that your employees are going to share their latest blog post with their friends and families.
Eventually, you could take all of this amazing written content and publish an eBook or Whitepaper that was composed entirely by your employees.
Let them be social
Besides writing blog posts, you can reach a new audience and strengthen your brand by allowing your team to create amazing content and share it on their social media channels.
If you need some inspiration, here are several ideas to get you started;
- Let employees make videos, such as behind-the-scenes clips or humorous music videos that show your brand’s quirky side and post them on YouTube.
- Have several employees start a weekly or monthly podcast where they discuss the latest industry trends.
- Ask employees to post pictures onto Instagram or Pinterest. This could be an image from the annual office Holiday party or a DIY project.
- Encourage employees to ask and answer questions on LinkedIn groups and forums, as well as Quora and Reddit.
- Have your most socially active employees share content like a relevant article related to your industry or converse with customers and influencers.
Besides social media, if there’re employees who are excellent public speakers then place them in front of a crowd. Whether it’s letting them host a webinar or sending them to a leading industry event to speak, this is a great way to improve your brand’s authority. As an added bonus, your employees can do a little networking when traveling.
The project X-rays series
This is an idea encouraged by Jay Acunzo at NextViewVC, but Jonathan Blank states on Marketing Land that project x-rays “ensure we’re producing content that consumers want to hear about and what we, as brands, want to talk about.” Blank adds:
We’re not talking directly about the awesomeness of our products and features. Instead, we’re talking about the awesome lessons we learned about what consumers need as we developed a product or feature.
If you want to use this technique, you need to do the following:
- Create a template that explains the case for the change.
- Create another template that describes what did and didn’t work.
- Establish guidelines for review.
Establish employee volunteer programs
You and your employees should decide on a volunteer program together. Whether it’s opening a soup kitchen or cleaning up a local park. This is a great opportunity for you and your employees to share your values, while giving back to the community at the same time.
Additionally, volunteer programs strengthens your ties to your employees, the community, allows you to work with potential customers, and gives you, your team, their friends and family a common goal to achieve.
How to get your employees on-board
Want to get all of your staff involved with your brand’s marketing efforts? Here are the best tactics that you should employ:
- Hire employees who are good fit with your brand and culture. This means that they should share the same values as you do.
- Encourage and reward employees who take initiative.
- Clearly define your brand to your employees by aligning the mission statement, core company values and key message of the company.
- Make sure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to goals.
- Launch an incentive program to show that you appreciate your employees hard work.
- Let your employees be themselves and capitalize on their personal brands.
- Provide them with the right tools and training.
- Create a positive work environment
- Evaluate and tweak the campaigns as needed
Back to you
What do you think? Please use the comment section below to share your thoughts.
The post The Role Of Employees In Brand Marketing appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Online Marketing Tips.
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