Glenn is the founder and CEO of GaggleAMP, an employee advocacy and social media management platform.
The idea that every aspect of marketing must be measured to the nth degree has done companies a disservice. It stems, in part, from CMOs feeling the pressure from CEOs and board members to quantify their efforts and improve return on investment (ROI). With the average CMO tenure holding steady at 40 months, its lowest level in over a decade, marketers must use data-backed strategies to move the needle for the business. But over-focusing on measurement can cause marketers to miss the bigger picture.
Employee advocacy—the marketing initiative by which companies provide employees with the training and tools to engage prospects and customers digitally—drives both tangible and intangible benefits for the business. If you focus too much on the tangibles—the things you can measure rather easily—you could overlook important factors, many of which contribute to one of the most important data points of all: revenue growth.
What are the tangible and not-so-tangible benefits of employee advocacy, and how are they measured?
Companies invest in employee advocacy and other social-media-based marketing efforts to drive brand awareness, deepen customer relationships, improve brand reputation and increase trust and loyalty.
One way to measure the impact of employee advocacy is to calculate the earned media value of employees’ social media reach and compare that to other marketing and PR programs. Another metric is the engagement rate of the content your employees share; many also look at how this metric compares to posts from the brand. Research from 2018 found that brand messages shared by employees have a 561% greater reach and eight times more engagement than those shared on the brands’ social media channels.
Beyond engaging the market, employee advocacy and social media, in general, contribute to lead attribution in a way that is hard to fully capture. The goal of employee advocacy is to build trust and engage the market by sharing useful advice and information, as opposed to sharing sales plugs or coupon codes that lead to immediate purchases. This long-game approach is harder to quantify than, say, a performance marketing campaign.
One simple lead attribution strategy is to ask customers how they found you. But their answer may account for just part of the story—their most recent touchpoint or point of influence. For example, you might know a lead came from a Google search. But you don’t know all the other pieces of information that influenced the prospect before that search, such as conversations on dark social—channels like private messages or groups.
A 2019 study of 100 customers found that 77.5% of content shares took place on dark social channels that can’t be measured, like email, messenger apps and text. If you used social media shares as the sole benchmark for success, you might wrongly dub a campaign or content asset a failure and stop an initiative that was, in fact, benefiting your business.
Success leaves clues.
The more people out there in the marketplace who can validate a customer’s purchasing decision, humanize your brand and engage the market, the better. But fully measuring the impact of your employees’ digital efforts can be tricky. Brand reputation, trust and loyalty, for example, don’t map to a single data point. And if you try to pretend it does, you risk making wrong decisions about your digital marketing.
Rather than focusing only on what is easily measured, try softening your focus and considering all the information available to you. At the end of the day, success leaves clues. Look beyond spreadsheets and reports and notice the positive conversations taking place on social media and other digital “hangouts” or the prospects who say they heard about you on LinkedIn or from existing customers.
Let’s zero in on brand reputation. How do you measure that? You can invest in focus groups and surveys and analyze social media mentions. But how do you parse the myriad factors contributing to customer sentiment? Marketing, PR, company culture and your products all influence reputation. So do employees.
If people have a terrible experience with your support team or sales folks, they will think negatively about your business even if you have the greatest product on the planet. Employee advocacy can have a prodigious impact on reputation by connecting prospects and customers to multiple employees at your organization. The respect these prospects and customers feel for your employees—because your employees have fostered engaging and trustworthy digital presences—will extend to your brand.
Take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
We can’t put campaign measurement and attribution ahead of big-picture business objectives, such as customer retention and revenue. Are these KPIs increasing as your employee advocacy program takes off? That is worth taking note of, even though they are impacted by multiple factors.
Oftentimes, a company invests in employee advocacy to achieve a certain outcome, such as increasing share of voice. Six months in, they realize, wow, employee advocacy is affecting other things, too, like, say, employee engagement. Increasing engagement has a compounding effect because it can contribute to sales and employee retention. Research shows that “highly engaged business units realize an 81% difference in absenteeism.” Additionally, “In high-turnover organizations, highly engaged business units achieve an 18% difference in turnover. In low-turnover organizations, the gains are even more dramatic: Highly engaged business units achieve a 43% difference in turnover.”
Furthermore, when employees feel valued and part of the bigger picture, recruitment is often easier because employees are happy to promote their company as a great place to work and share openings with their social media audience.
This goes to show that if you are myopically focused on a limited set of metrics, you could miss out on other use cases and opportunities. Instead, let’s broaden our focus, even if that means considering elements that are harder to measure, and attempt to understand the comprehensive benefits of mobilizing your employees to engage the market digitally.
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