The potent power of employee brand advocates in B2B

With tight marketing budgets that are barely covering ambitious plans to engage your audience, it’s easy to overlook one of your most powerful brand advocacy assets when it comes to brand promotion

Value propositions have become far more customer-centric over the last few years with companies promising to deliver tailored, customised, and collaborative solutions. However, whilst this may be at the core of an external marketing message, this can quickly become a hollow promise if those values, attitudes, and behaviours don’t live inside the minds of the people who actually have to deliver this brand promise. This can be exacerbated if you don’t have employee buy-in or understanding on how you are building the company brand in the first place.

Building brand advocacy one employee at a time

There are significant benefits to be had by first turning attention inwards and defining a clear communications strategy to engage those who represent the business. Imagine a united team, driven by the same values, sharing the same language, motivated by the same ambitions as each other, all singing in harmony from the same hymn sheet, pushing the company forwards, and delivering that same message at every interaction with your customers.

Focus and improvement can go a long way to driving a new cultural brand energy. We’ve seen the positive impact first hand on well executed brand strategy projects which embraced employee input as a key part of the process.

Employees can bring your brand values to life in a way that other one or two dimensional forms simply can’t. Your people embody the authenticity at the heart of your business. So much so that esteemed marketing veteran Professor Don Schultz believes ‘internal marketing is more vital than external marketing.’

Where to start in building your brand advocates

So, what’s the key to building internal brand advocates? Here are a few starters to get you thinking about what may work for your organisation.

The waterfall effect

Start by creating advocates in the senior management team, especially across multiple locations. This way they can drive change in their own offices without disconnecting their region from the centre of the business. If your key movers and shakers aren’t well informed or don’t feel part of the bigger picture, it’s highly likely that this will influence those they manage. So, choose your core disciples strategically and involve them from the outset in your brand planning and thinking whenever it’s possible to do so.

Hand over the reins

The leadership and ownership of any internal advocacy-building projects don’t and shouldn’t just come from senior management. Creating advocates for specific values or elements of any internal project can really help to embed the message at all levels and give a sense of shared responsibility. Internal advocacy programmes shouldn’t be seen to be owned just by HR or marketing. Find those people in your business who have a strong or vocal opinion and get them onboard first. If nothing else, you’ll get genuine insight into negative issues that need to be addressed early on.

Don’t just define, do

It’s easy to create brand propositions and sets of brand values written on pieces of paper or in PowerPoint decks. But at every opportunity, employees at all levels need to feel like those are being brought to life in tangible ways they can engage with. Actions really do speak louder than words. Don’t wait until you have a neatly drafted plan – employee advocacy building needs to be a fluid process as you respond to feedback and valuable criticism. All successful employee advocacy programmes are built on 360-degree feedback loops with open communication and input supported at every level.

Let me in

Don’t make it feel like you’re imposing the law of the land on your employees – they need to feel like they are truly contributing to the business from its very core. From the beginning, your team should feel like they have had an input so they will ultimately feel like part of those values, ambitions, and messaging lives inside them. They need to understand ‘what’s in it for me’ as well as ‘what’s in it for us’ as a business.

Care for the environment

You already have plenty of space to communicate with your staff to create real engagement: your offices. From office walls and central spaces, to screensavers, SharePoint and systems, branded goods and online information portals, all of these help to reinforce and unite the message internally. Move away from clinical and uninspiring spaces and bring your workspace to life with a personality and relevancy that reflects the real heart of the business. Your aim is to get your communications noticed, so be bold in the way you choose to communicate your brand, or risk losing your messaging in the general business noise.

Platforms not platitudes

Whether it’s newsletters, intranets, online hubs, tools like Slack or Teams, or monthly get-togethers and Town Halls, having the right platforms in place for staff to share and contribute is crucial to your success. Contribution points need to be easily accessible and comments need to be responded to quickly or people will simple lose interest. Social media channels are great for customers, but do you really want your employees sharing their grievances in the public arena because they have nowhere else to direct these? Make your communication share points and processes clear and stay up-to-date and in-tune with key discussions – both positive and negative.

In to out

One of the strengths of a strong internal brand is that it gives you real credibility to support your external marketing messaging. Your proposition can be given real meaning and in fact, can itself be shaped and guided by the way the brand starts to take on a life of its own internally. Just be careful that your internal brand is constantly and consistently aligned with your external brand and doesn’t take on a path of its own.

Keeping regular

Like anything, frequency is key to making real and lasting change. Without a plan for the short- and long-term, you won’t get very far as enthusiasm can quickly dwindle when momentum begins to stagnate. Internal advocate engagement is a project that never ends, and it constantly needs feeding with fresh ideas. Drive forwards and constantly look for new perspectives across the business, as well as making sure you immerse new people as they join.

Smile

Business is business, but remember that whilst we all want to take our work seriously, the more it seems like fun and less like a chore, the more likely it is to succeed. Understanding personal value as much as business value can work to better ingrain the culture you want, so put this at the heart of your employee engagement planning.

This article was originally published on the UPPB2B website here.

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