2024 Is the Year of Brand and Employee Advocacy

Amid the clutter of seemingly infinite online content, delivering a message that cuts through the noise is no simple feat. The mass content creation (and consumption) of the digital world has long diluted the impact of brand experiences and messaging. A personal connection therefore is even more critical and powerful. As marketers, we need to shift to a more direct and meaningful way to reach our audiences.

The Shift to Personal Connection

Forget the days of broadcasting to the masses. The future of marketing is one-to-one, a place where every interaction is an opportunity for deep, meaningful connection. But how do you scale authenticity? How do you transform customers into loyal fans who will carry your brand’s narrative with personal conviction?

The answer lies in delivering your message in a way that people feel they can trust. And that is where brand advocacy comes into play.

In a world saturated with content, where every individual is a broadcaster and every brand a publisher, one voice rises above the noise—the voice of trust. It’s not the loudest, but it’s the most heard. This is the voice of your advocate, and it’s about to redefine your brand’s story.

What Is Brand Advocacy?

Brand advocacy is a powerful marketing strategy where individuals who love a brand–often customers, employees, or other partners–actively promote and support the brand to their own networks. (Note: When the advocates are within the company doing the marketing, this type of advocacy is called “employee advocacy.”)

Advocacy can happen organically or through organized programs initiated by the brand.

Whether you call it social influencer programs, employee advocacy groups, or brand ambassadorships, they all work to do the same thing: champion your brand through their personal social channels. The content that comes from brand advocacy is invaluable, and has transformed the traditional marketing paradigm on social media.

Here’s a few reasons why brand advocacy is so powerful:

1. It’s authentic

Brand advocates genuinely love the product or service and share their positive experiences with others.Their recommendations come across as more credible because they are rooted in real, personal experiences.

2. Brand advocacy reaches more people

Brand advocates extend the reach of a brand’s message by sharing it within their own social networks. This can exponentially increase a brand’s visibility and can often reach potential customers that the brand might not have been able to engage through traditional marketing channels.

“On average, word-of-mouth drives $6 trillion in annual global spending and is responsible for 13% of all sales.” (Semrush)

3. It’s trusted

Because brand advocates are real users who have no apparent incentive to promote the brand, their words carry more weight and can significantly enhance the brand’s credibility and trustworthiness. So when a friend shares a positive experience or a trusted colleague recommends a product on social media, their words carry a weight no billboard or banner ad could hope to match.

In fact, a Nielsen study reported that consumers are 92% more likely to trust their peers over advertising when it comes to purchasing decisions.

4. Employee advocacy and brand advocacy boosts customer loyalty

Just the act of advocating for a brand will reinforce the advocates loyalty to the brand. And a loyal customer spends more, stays longer, and increases profits.

Simply increasing a brand’s customer retention rate by 5% potentially leads to a profit increase of 25% to 95%, according to a Forbes study.

2024 will be the era of the advocate, where genuine experiences trump polished ads and personal stories overshadow corporate narratives. Here, trust is the currency, and every shared experience, every endorsement, is a deposit in the bank of brand loyalty.

This is the power of brand advocacy, a force so authentic and compelling that it doesn’t just capture attention, it commands it.

To help you seize this opportunity, Agorapulse introduces Advocacy—a powerful new feature designed to cultivate, manage, and amplify your brand’s organic voice through its most credible and trusted champions.

With the Advocacy tool, Agorapulse provides a seamless platform to:

• Design unlimited bespoke advocacy campaigns
• Organize and segment your advocates for precise messaging
• Offer a diverse array of copy options for authentic, genuine sharing
• Track and measure your campaigns with advanced analytics

We’re not talking about just marketing anymore, we’re talking about creating a movement. And it all starts with empowering these individuals and brand champions to share, engage, and amplify on your behalf.

If you need help getting started with employee advocacy on social media, check out agency owner and social media expert Charli Day’s tips on employee advocacy!

Getting Started With Agorapulse’s Advocacy Feature

Agorapulse’s Advocacy feature makes it really easy to share content for your advocates to share on social media and amplify your message.

Step 1: Import your advocates

Head over to the Advocacy feature and click Manage advocates. You may import each advocate individually or bulk import an entire list of advocates.

To import each advocate individually, select which type of advocate you want to import: Internal (a company’s employees) or External (a company’s brand ambassadors, partners, influencers etc). Then click Add Employee advocate or Add External advocate and add the following information for each advocate (email, first name, last name and language):

To bulk import an entire list of advocates, click Add Employee advocate or Add External advocate, then click Create in bulk and paste a list of email addresses separated by commas (you’ll be able to add detailed information for each advocate later on).

When you’re done importing advocates, you may create segments that you’ll use as distribution lists in your campaigns. Under Diffusion list, click the + sign to create a new list. Give it a name, click Add advocates to select all the advocates you want to include in it and save your list.

Step 2: Create your advocacy campaign

Click Create a new campaign and give your campaign a title and a description (to help your advocates understand the context and goals of your campaign). Optionally, you may also set an end date (to prevent your advocates from sharing suggested content past the deadline) and add internal notes (for you as the campaign manager and your team):

Paste a link to add in the content you want your advocates to share (e.g. a blog post, a landing page etc) and provide up to 5 copy suggestions for your advocates to pick from when sharing your content.

Select the appropriate segment to define the audience for your campaign.

Review your campaign details and when you’re ready, click Start campaign to set your campaign live! This is when your advocates will be notified by email about your campaign.

Step 3: Have your advocates share on social

Your advocates get an email informing them there’s a new piece of content you’d like them to share. Advocates can share your suggested copy on their own social media accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and Pinterest.

Step 4: Track and measure your campaign results

Click on your active campaign to track how it’s going. In the ‘Overview’ tab, you’ll find all your campaign information as well as useful metrics like the open rate, the clickthrough rate, the percentage of shares and the number of visits.

Click the ‘Performance’ tab to visualize your conversion funnel and get more metrics like the number of visits per social network.

And that’s it, you’re done! You can launch unlimited campaigns so get ready to launch a new one!

Tips for Maximizing Advocacy’s Potential

Now that you know how to launch an advocacy campaign on Agorapulse, here are a few ways you can use Advocacy:

• Leverage your advocates’ authenticity to instill trust in your audience and acquire qualified leads by having your advocates share content on your offerings and why they trust your business.
• Use the network effect to ensure the success of key events, with advocates spreading the news about your new product launch, a location opening or a marketing event.
• Exploit your employees’ personal networks to spotlight job openings and have them share content on what they love about working at your company to attract exceptional candidates.
• Foster a sense of belonging among employees, bolstering loyalty and enhancing your employer brand by offering employee engagement opportunities.
• As a multi-location business, streamline communication across locations, guaranteeing a consistent message delivery by all local points of contact (like franchisees).
• As an agency, set a distinctive tone in a competitive market by offering comprehensive advocacy management to expand services while optimizing service costs.

If you need help getting started with employee advocacy on social media, check out agency owner and social media expert Charli Day’s tips on employee advocacy!

In Conclusion

Advocacy is perfect for all companies looking to expand social media reach beyond boundaries while controlling their brand messaging and minimizing reliance on paid advertising. Move beyond broadcasting and into engaging. Transform your brand from one of many to the one that matters. Sign up now for a free trial of Agorapulse.