Employees can be more than workers; they can be ambassadors too. Using your employees as brand ambassadors can both improve satisfaction within the workforce and improve your brand from without. If genuinely happy employees promote the company they work for, this sends powerful signals to customers that your brand is authentic and worth buying from.
In this article, we look at why and how to use employees as brand ambassadors (with their consent) to further both your reach and engagement.
The Role of Brand Ambassadors
Brand ambassadors represent a company’s image, voice, and mission both online and offline. In the past, businesses sought to use predominantly, if not exclusively, celebrities and influencers as brand ambassadors. However, in recent years, more and more companies are turning to their own staff to communicate with the public. These individuals are more relatable to the target audience and therefore make a company seem more human and down to earth.
How Brand Ambassadors Work
Brand ambassadors work by promoting a company’s products, services, and values through various channels, such as social media, events, and word-of-mouth marketing. In practice, employee ambassadors share their genuine experiences of working at a company and/or using its products or services. In doing so, they provide reviews while also giving some insight into the inner workings of the company. Alongside this, they interact with the target audience to create a positive perception of the brand. This authenticity and enthusiasm can make a brand more relatable and trustworthy to consumers.
Social media has elevated the impact and importance of brand ambassadors to previously unknown levels, allowing these individuals to engage with a global and varied audience. When employees act as brand ambassadors, they bring a unique level of credibility because they have insider knowledge of a company’s values, culture, and offerings.
Brand ambassadors, including employees, represent and promote a company through their genuine experiences and interactions with the target audience, especially on social media.
What Is an Employee Ambassador Programme?
Employee ambassador programmes are strategies used by companies to encourage and support employees to actively support the brand in a range of ways, and on a range of different platforms. A good programme will provide employees with the resources, training, and incentives to share the brand’s content, values, and products through their personal networks.
As employees are already part of the company—you could even argue that they are the company—they know how it works, what its goals are, and generally what’s going on. As such, they are perfectly positioned to speak about it. To ensure an ambassador programme is effective, companies provide training and guidance on how to utilise different platforms, and also offer incentives to employees who act as ambassadors.
Implementing an employee ambassador programme can be particularly effective for reaching younger generations, such as Gen Z, who value authenticity and transparency in brand communications.
Employee ambassador programmes empower employees to represent the company, leveraging their insider knowledge and authentic experiences to build brand trust.
Why Are Employees the Best Brand Ambassadors?
Seeing as employees actually work for the brand they’re promoting, they’re seen as more authentic and more knowledgeable compared to, say, a celebrity influencer. Below, we’ll look at various other reasons that employees can make the best brand ambassadors.
Extra Marketing Power for Less
For newer businesses with lower budgets, using employees as brand ambassadors can be much cheaper. After all, they already work for you, so you’re not going to need to fork out huge sums of money for a little extra time. With that said, remember that just because your employees already work for you, you shouldn’t exploit them. If they act as brand ambassadors, this is likely to involve extra work outside of their original remit, and as such, you should reward them fairly for anything they do.
More Engaged Employees
If employees happily act as ambassadors, then they’re likely to become more engaged with the company as a whole. With a more interesting range of work that receives genuine feedback, work satisfaction is likely to increase, making them more motivated. What’s more, as they become more motivated, they’ll become even better brand ambassadors, promoting a positive feedback loop.
They Make Your Brand Human
Using real-life employees rather than celebrity influencers will humanise your brand and make it more appealing to the real people that make up your target audience. Authenticity is always appreciated, so instead of trying to find the most authentic-seeming influencers, why not enlist people you already know are authentic?
Bigger Reach
Employees, when considered together, are likely to have diverse networks both in person and online. As such, if you have various ambassadors, you’ll likely increase your reach dramatically and make contact with people you would otherwise miss.
More in Touch With Your Target Audience
As many employees already work or interface with their brand’s target audience to some degree, they’ll be able to provide valuable insight into what customers actually want. Indeed, your customer service staff might have a far better idea as to what your customers really want than your marketing team. So let your brand ambassadors follow their gut, and they’ll likely connect in new and beneficial ways.
They Create Trust
If you want to promote trust, then employees are a great way to do it. They’re seen as less false than influencers. After all, an influencer’s existence depends on promoting brands for money—an employee’s does not.
Increased Sales Leads
Employee advocacy can directly impact sales. When employees share product information, promotional offers, or success stories, they attract potential leads. Customers who hear about the brand from a knowledgeable and passionate employee are more likely to explore the products or services, increasing conversion rates.
Employees are authentic, engaged, and in direct touch with the target audience, making them ideal ambassadors who can humanise the brand, extend its reach, and build trust.
How to Implement an Employee Brand Ambassador Strategy
Letting your employees loose to promote your brand freely can be highly beneficial, but it’s likely to work even better if you create a coherent and directed strategy. The key is not to make it too rigid, else you’ll lose the authenticity. Find a comfortable middle ground.
Ensure Happy Employees
First and foremost, treat your employees well and keep them happy! Happy employees are more likely to have an authentically positive view of the company, and therefore their promotion will be willing and genuine. Without this, it will come across as inauthentic, and perhaps most unfortunately, you’ll alienate your employees and demotivate them.
Define Your Goals
Set clear goals and determine exactly what you want to achieve with your strategy, whether it’s increased brand awareness, lead generation, or improved social media engagement. These goals will help to guide the overall process and allow you to measure its success along the way.
Train Your Employees
Give employees light training and guidance to ensure everyone shares the same coherent overall message. This should help to prevent any unfortunate slip-ups that could be counterproductive. Don’t overtrain or restrict them, as you want their communication to be genuine. Rather, view training more as creating guidelines around how employees should promote your brand.
Choose the Right Platform(s)
Choose the right platforms for both the brand and the employee in question. If you have one who is great with social media, then utilise them there. If you have another who can write very well, then consider asking them to write some blogs. If you have another who’s great with film, then ask them to create some video content. Choosing the right platform for each employee also means they will probably enjoy these tasks rather than resent them, which has positive knock-on effects all around.
Reward Your Employees
You must reward employees for their work—both in terms of the extra hours they might work as a result, and for the extra labour of taking on a new role. Bear in mind that the nature of social media means many employees might find themselves engaging with this work at all hours. Even if the overall time spent isn’t very long, it can still infiltrate an employee’s “off-time” in a significant way.
So ensure your employees understand this and consent to it. Second, reward them in various ways to make sure they don’t get fed up with doing round-the-clock marketing.
Track and Monitor
By setting clear goals as mentioned above, you can then develop metrics to track the success of your efforts. This could include engagement on social media, blog visits, conversions, or something else entirely.
Use a Tool
Employee advocacy tools can help you track and monitor progress. One word of caution, though: only respond to positive developments. If your employees agree to start promoting your brand on their personal social media accounts and then feel you breathing down their neck if engagement isn’t high enough, they’re going to come to resent you very, very quickly. So reward positive success and accept when employees, for whatever reason, just don’t want to be ambassadors—they are not your property and they do not owe it to you.
Implementing an employee ambassador strategy involves setting clear goals, training employees, choosing the right platforms, rewarding participation, and monitoring results for ongoing success.
Employees as Brand Ambassadors: A Powerful Strategy
For businesses of all sizes, but especially smaller ones with smaller budgets, deploying employees as brand ambassadors can be extremely helpful. It can save money, provide greater outreach, and create marketing channels that you might otherwise never think of.
Throughout this process, always remember to treat your employees well, ensure they’re happy in these roles, and reward them fairly. You must avoid exploiting employees for marketing purposes!
