Paid social & PPC campaigns are a staple in today’s digital marketing strategies. It’s becoming a battle to get noticed and stand out in a saturated market, particularly for B2B marketers.
We’re doing everything we can to optimise our ads, landing pages and emails and trying to be one step ahead, but the problem is – our competitors are doing the exact same things!
Tough right?
If we look at that from a customer perspective, it’s a confusing place to be. Who should they choose or trust, when everyone is doing and saying the same thing and the options are endless?
When we think of it this way round, we have to think differently about our strategy and approach. How do we reach people in a different and more personal way?
Social Advocacy.
Let’s dive into some of the stand out reasons why social advocacy is one of the most successful and effective social media marketing strategies to cut through the noise and make an impact.
Why You Need To Use Social Advocacy
#1 Your employees are micro influencers
A study by Weber Shandwick found that more than 50% of the workforce is already voluntarily engaging positively on social media about their company.
Not only are your employees your most loyal advocates, but they’re also subject matter experts in what you do and your values. They have their own networks of people that don’t know much about your company and their networks small they may be, but they’re relevant and they’re listening to what your employee has to say.
#2 Expand your reach, easily
You have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, an Instagram and a LinkedIn company page. Those are currently your only sources of reaching out to people on social media.
Organically, your post is only going to reach those who are already connected to those accounts.
Not only that, organic reach is continuing to decline, making it difficult for even most of your followers to see your posts.
Recruiting advocates and connecting all of their personal networks automatically opens up your reach. Your posts are no longer sitting in one place on one profile, they’re being shared across multiple profiles and platforms, and according to LinkedIn, a company’s employees have 10x more connections than the company itself has in followers.
#3 Measurability
As we’ve seen in the first point, your employees are talking positively about your company on social media. If you’re not running a social advocacy program from one platform, then you can’t measure the impact your employees are making on your business.
Over time, and if done well, your advocacy program will generate a measurable ROI and you’ll also be able to track your reach, clicks and shares to see how that stacks up against your existing owned, earned and paid strategies.
#4 Employee empowerment & engagement
Investing in a social advocacy program isn’t just great for getting your content out there easier, the benefits internally can make a huge difference to how an individual feels within your company.
By giving them valuable content to share and allowing them to add their own voice and share it to their own network empowers them, making them feel more worthwhile and connected and engaging them to be active in learning about what it is that you do.
You’re also making their task of finding good quality content from your company a lot easier. They might visit your social media channels, website, a landing page to source the content they post about you, but with a social advocacy program – what you want them to share is right there in the platform ready to go with one click, in one place.
#5 Boost ROI
Fujitsu claims to have achieved a 360% ROI using employee advocacy.
They achieved this by crafting a broad mix of marketing content for their advocates to share tailored to each network and topic.
They also claim that it grew their social reach by 70% and achieved 3.6 x more ROI than their paid social efforts.
“Fujitsu’s global employee advocacy program is the epitome of how B2B marketing should be done in 2018,” said Daniel Kushner, CEO of Oktopost. “It doesn’t matter how great your content is, or how many connections your brand has, there’s nothing more powerful than having employees amplify your brand story with their professional networks. Above all, it’s those human connections that B2B buyers value and trust most.”
#6 Brand trust
84% of customers trust product or service recommendations from people they know
And the retention of that customer is going to be longer as well.
If it’s someone they know, psychologically they’re automatically going to feel like it’s a reputable source and it comes from a positive experience and honesty, rather than a brand selling directly to a customer and giving a sales pitch that is full of false promises and a message specially crafted to tell a customer what they want to hear.
