Inspired companies are switching the power of social media outside the boundaries of traditional marketing including advertising and engagement, as the foundation to build a powerful branding strategy.
Employee Engagement Is A Great Place To Start The Social Media Multiplier Effect
The most recent results of The CMO Survey marketers continue to prioritize social media to boost brand awareness with an expected growth in investment double that of the current percentage; 10.6%. So, by utilising your own employees to be brand ambassadors and marketing your rand to the outside world is the kick start of the brand multiplier. Now here are five ways to commence that process and implement the five suggestions: –
- Building Brand Ownership: Social media use inspires employees to manage the company’s brand as their own, through their publicly shared posts and content. By utilising Social Media, they are getting your message and their experiences of life with the brand to the outside world. So act; first step is to create a #yourcompanycommunity and share it with all your employees.
- Empowering Employees To Put Life To The brand: Sharing with your employee’s things like inspirational content including company articles, breaking news, new brand launches, photos and video from within the company or positive customer feedback that ordinarily they would not hear about. By engaging with your employees, you will naturally see the results of the social media multiplier and brand empathy grow. So act; more compelling information daily will do the trick.
- Promoting An Internal Community: Information is not the only benefit of a good community, internal social media has been proven to be successful in promoting improved communication, camaraderie and belonging within companies. For example, L’Oreal launched the #LorealCommunity to give employees the chance to collaborate and encouraged its employees to communicate their successes with one another both inside and outside of work through Instagram. So, by encouraging this form of internal community; it will bring you positive and for that matter possibly negative feedback (which ordinarily you may not have been aware of). However, you are maintaining the goal of exposing and marketing the brand to a wider target audience through your employees, but key to the success is careful management which is point 5 to follow.
- Enriched Company Culture: Social media investments that help employees and ignite their engagement helps build and strengthen a company’s culture. It’s worth noting at this point that the internet can be faceless when it comes to projecting Company culture, but good social media can drive positive talent acquisition and portrait your ethos to a wider audience encouraging them to engage with your brand.
- Manging The Branding Strategy: Employee Social media programs are not risk adverse. Sure enough, avoiding that one post which can be severely damaging to your branding strategy needs to be managed thoroughly. Successful branding strategies are based on solid training of its employees including social media policies to guide employees on what is and isn’t acceptable. Eliminating risk can be difficult to manage, but every aspect to achieve total success of a social media program needs careful consideration before you launch this initiative.
Social Media branding strategies through a natural source such as your own employees is proven to be a success for many companies not only in gaining, but more importantly engaging with customers who may not have been a strong brand advocate of yours in the first instance.
In turn, your employees gain huge confidence in the brand which will reflect in their improved productivity, retention, a sense of belonging and acceptance of your culture which can only mean positive gains for your company which through their social media activity will bring customers to your brand. There are plenty of services out there, such as www.digitalwebservices.co.uk, that will help you with your social media branding if you don’t know how to do it yourself.
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How Brands Truly Benefit From Social Media Marketing
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