Employee branding is a must in the marketing plan of big companies, whether they are B2C or B2B. For more than a decade, corporations, organisations, and companies with a certain number of employees in the United States have implemented an employee branding programme within their branding strategies.
In Europe, however, the implementation has been slower and it has consolidated in recent years as one of the main trends in marketing, sales, and human resources departments.
What is employee branding?
Employee branding is a corporate strategy with the objective of turning employees into brand ambassadors. Considering the employee as a key resource in brand building is a concept that has long been present in some offline forms. However, the digital revolution, specifically the expansion of social networks, has multiplied the impact and the influence that employees can have in increasing brand reach, attracting talent or generating business opportunities.
The creation of an ambassadors network is possible if we can assist the employees in internalising the image and values of the company’s brand. Only in this way, they will be able to project that image and value to customers, suppliers, investors and other stakeholders.
How to turn your employees and collaborators into brand ambassadors?
According to William Arruda, the personal branding “guru”, there are three steps to transform employees into brand ambassadors:
#1 Personal branding
Demonstrate interest in employees and ensure that they feel at home in the company. Support their potential and encourage their personal and professional growth. They will see the company as a workplace where they can progress and grow professionally.
#2 Brand awareness
The CEO and senior management of the company must educate the entire team on brand awareness and must live the brand with a passion to ensure trust. All employees must know exactly the positioning of the brand and what makes their brand special as opposed to their competitors.
#3 Connecting personal and corporate
This means reversing the usual scenario so that personal branding and the corporate brand cooperate rather than compete. This way, the company helps employees in building and projecting their personal brand by integrating both individual and corporate objectives.
Why do you need an Employee Branding programme in your company?
In the current digital world, different factors combine, making the company rely on its employees’ social networks. These factors are:
- The employee’s opinion has been established as the most reliable and credible internal voice to talk about the company, as demonstrated by Edelman Trust Barometer. Therefore, employees’ opinion on social networks about the company and its brand is extremely relevant.
- Decrease in the organic reach of posting on all social networks. Investing in paid advertising does not replace the need to generate organic posts to create non-commercial conversations with the community and thus position the company’s branding.
- Talented professionals consult the social networks of the company’s employees before applying for a job to evaluate their corporate culture and the employees satisfaction degree.
The easiest way: an employee branding platform
To implement this strategy effectively, the best solution is to use an employee branding platform.
The interface is ready for employees to assess the quality of the content, whether it is relevant to their community, whether the frequency of publication is adequate, etc., and to provide suggestions for improvements that may be taken into consideration. In addition, employees have access to their individual statistics, which allows them to be aware of the performance of their activity.
From a company’s point of view, they have control of the content and brand message that is shared by their ambassadors via a library of content created internally and approved by the company to complement the company strategy. The company can even control when this content is shared by the whole ambassador network and reward employees for sharing this content via rewards that can be redeemed in the platform.
The idea is to be able to professionally manage the whole process to make it as streamlined and productive as possible all managed from one platform.
