Gone are the days of ignoring your Glassdoor reviews and assuming your team members are posting about your brand on social. Customers want to work with brands they can trust – they’re checking you out on social media, reading reviews of your company, even browsing your executives’ LinkedIn pages. To demonstrate brand health and authenticity, “word of mouth” marketing is key. Enter: brand advocacy.
Here are four elements your company should focus on to boost brand advocacy.
Your company already has a powerful marketing tool right at its fingertips: your own team. Team members can be your biggest brand advocates and even stellar sales tools. But to motivate employees to post your company wins, news and insights on social media, you need to equip them with the resources – and the knowledge – to do so.
Employee advocacy platforms help lighten the load and encourage team members to get involved on social media. You can draft example posts, provide links for sharing and even gamify employee engagement (because who doesn’t love a friendly workplace competition).
Your executives need to be active on LinkedIn. It’s no longer optional; it’s mandatory to find success as a holistic brand. They’re the face of the company, and their social pages are often one of the first stops decision-makers make when deciding to work with your company.
Executives need to be sharing regular content, providing insightful commentary and engaging with their followers. Cultivating relatable connections and showing the humans behind your brand goes a long way toward increasing customer engagement.
Along with employee social advocacy, getting your team involved in drafting blogs is a great way to demonstrate brand health and advocacy. If every blog on your website is written by your CEO or your marketing manager, you’re not leveraging the collective knowledge and insight of your larger team.
Create a blog calendar and sign-up sheet for team members to get involved and pick topics they’re passionate about. This ensures a steady cadence of strong blogs written by subject matter experts at your own company.
Is your Glassdoor page collecting dust? Do you only respond to negative comments? Maybe you don’t even respond at all? It’s time to give Glassdoor the attention it deserves. Sure, it’s sometimes a place where unhappy employees go to air their grievances. But it’s also a place your prospective hires – and even prospective clients – visit before deciding to work with your brand. In fact, 86% of candidates look at a company’s Glassdoor page before applying.
You need a comprehensive Glassdoor management strategy to show you’re dedicated to employee satisfaction, listening to your team’s real concerns and responding with action. We’re not suggesting lip service, either – you should be noting any themes presented in these reviews and enacting real change to better your brand.
Customers increasingly want to work with brands they trust. By leveraging your best tools – your employees – and making sure your public presence is strong, accessible and authentic, your brand advocacy efforts will be key to company success in 2023 and beyond.