Warren Buffet once said, “Invest in as much of yourself as you can, you are your own biggest asset by far.”
If this is the case, your next biggest asset would be your employees. And one of the best ways to enhance the value of this asset in particular is to create an employee advocacy program.
What is an employee advocacy program?
An employee advocacy program is a program that encourages your employees to advocate your business. Or, as Eric Roach, co-founder and CEO of EveryoneSocial, explains on iMedia, it is “the concept of leveraging your employees as ‘brand ambassadors’ for your company.”
One example of this is when an employee shares your social media post or blog on their own profile page or in their own news feed. They are essentially telling everyone they know that they support your business, which brings about a bunch of different advantages for you.
What are its benefits?
One study conducted by Nielsen found that “ninety-two percent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising.” Thus, when your employees advocate on your behalf, they are increasing the likelihood that their family and friends will choose to do business with you too due to a high trust factor.
Another benefit of employee advocacy programs is that they enable you to reach people you wouldn’t ordinarily be able reach. In fact, according to Kredible Research, “employee posts on social media receive 4.4 [times] more profile views than clicks, likes, or comments.” This makes it possible for you to engage with potential clients you wouldn’t have otherwise engaged with.
Creating an employee advocacy program can also save you money as it’s basically free advertising. To calculate how much you can save, Trap!t blog suggests that you compare how much you’d spend per click on the social media sites you use, subtract what your employee advocacy program costs you, and the difference is what you’ll save by having your employees spread your word versus paying Facebook, Twitter, or some of the other social media sites to do it for you.
How do you set one up?
If you’re ready to enjoy these types of benefits, then it’s time to create an employee advocacy program at your chiropractic practice. To do this, MultiBriefs suggests that you “start small” by only choosing a few employees to test your program out. However, if you have a smaller chiropractic office, you may be able to implement it office-wide as you likely have just a few staff.
The second step is to “make it easy.” This means posting often so your employees have a lot of material to choose from. Additionally, it’s helpful at this point to establish some guidelines and provide some ideas as to how to deal with different scenarios, such as if they receive a negative response to one of the shared posts. (If this occurs, Insight180 suggests contacting the poster privately and trying to resolve the issue while continuing to post because “efficiently good press can outweigh anything bad.”)
Finally, to encourage sharing, MultiBriefs recommends that you “provide employees goals and incentives.” You can do this by establishing rewards such as paid days off, longer lunch hours, or anything else that you think would motivate them if they make a certain number of shares per month.
Employees can be a huge business asset and creating an employee advocacy program is one way to enhance their value even more.
