The success of any business depends heavily on its ability to get consumers excited about its brand and the number and quality of the leads it gets. However, lead generation and new B2B sales lead conversion is an extremely challenging task.
By Dwayne Charrington
There could be numerous reasons for this such as targeting the wrong audience, lack of automation, overlooking SEO, etc. On top of that, today’s consumers are extremely picky, sophisticated, and self-serving. They are rapidly turning to online platforms such as social media, product reviews, and blog posts to guide their research before choosing solutions.
It is getting extremely difficult for B2B companies to adapt to this changing scenario. The ones who think innovatively choose to take up employee advocacy not only to survive, but successfully take their lead generation game to a whole new level. But what exactly is employee advocacy, you might wonder? Read on to know more about it and how it can be an excellent marketing tool to generate more leads for your business.
Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy is a new age marketing concept that holds significant business potential. An employee advocate is someone who –
- Uses their social media/online influence to create an employee-generated customer experience for brands
- Recommends their company’s products or services to their social circle of friends and family
- Helps in building employee ownership of the company
To put it simply, employee advocacy refers to the promotion by its employees, who create positive branding for a company by advocating or sharing the details of products or services to their target audience. It is important to note here that apart from social media channels, other media such as emails, chat, discussion forums, and much more can also be highly influential online channels for employee advocacy.
How Can you Leverage Employee Advocacy for Lead-Generation?
Due to the rapidly evolving digital landscape, today’s lead generation plans demand constant innovation from businesses in order to be successful. Here we are discussing some of the creative ways that you can use to approach lead generation process for positive outcomes-
- Systematic social expansion
Employee advocates can hold immense power in drawing visibility to their company’s brands through their own personal social media channels. Thus, if you give brand-vetted content to your teams/employees that they can share on their social networks, you will surely reap the benefits of all their connections discovering and following your brand within no time.
This is an excellent way for you to increase your social footprint, increase your leads, and grow your demand. In fact, findings by the Marketing Advisory Network suggest that leads developed through employee advocacy marketing convert up to seven times more frequently than other leads. This kind of leads can help you establish a solid trust base before the sales process even begins, leading to better chances of lead conversion.
- Building personalized lead funnels
If you wish to generate leads from every member of your team, you need to be extremely strategic in your approach. An excellent way to do this is to build personalized lead funnels for your employees and help them upload quality content related to each of these funnels, along with a form to collect leads that are automatically integrated with the company’s CRM.
Social Media Today suggests the content shared by employees receives almost eight times more engagement when compared to the content shared by other brand channels. These statistics clearly indicate that through this you can not only amplify your lead funnel, but also give a positive boost to your overall lead generation process.
When your entire sales & marketing team share quality content offering value to their target audience, which includes their huge online circle of friends, family, previous employers, business partners etc., the end result would be more qualified lead generation.
- Content amplification
This is yet another brilliant and cost-effective way for you to generate more leads for your business using employee advocacy. It involves distributing brand-approved quality content among all your teams and individual employees. They can then share it on various online networks and social media platforms, leading to content amplification and subsequent lead generation in great numbers.
This is an ideal situation where companies can also use a knowledge base. A knowledge base consists of content in various forms, right from employee training to product information. Depending on the information, it can be highly useful for both internal as well as external purposes. Customer-oriented information like product manuals, user guides, FAQs and blogs can empower your target audience to acquire decision-making knowledge.
On an important note, a knowledge base is useful in a number of important aspects, majorly as an effective customer support tool. Moreover, it can even be integrated with other customer service tools like live chat and help desk software for enhanced benefits.
Last Thoughts
Advocacy marketing is a great medium to boost your marketing campaign. In today’s fiercely competitive environment, marketers need to collaborate with their teams/employees and get them to advocate their brand. It helps them market their product/brand in an engaging, fun, and customer-centric manner, which would allow them to gain maximum social attention.
Remember that employee advocacy is all about channeling the knowledge, loyalty, and passion of your own employees to grow revenue by enabling them to maximize their reach to social networks and help you amplify lead generation.
The future surely belongs to brand advocates, and all you need to do is help your employees position themselves as brand ambassadors as well as thought leaders by providing them with resources and great content to share with the industry.
Dwayne Charrington is a technical writer currently associated with ProProfs Help Desk. He possesses hands-on experience in writing for the customer service industry. Dwayne is insightful when it comes to industrial challenges, emerging customer service trends, and how businesses overcome related challenges. Dwayne likes drawing connections between different industries and entities while designing his blogs.
