Turn Employees into Brand Ambassadors with These 8 Quick Tips

Reaching your company’s audience is easy. Making your mark is not. No matter what industry you are in, your target market likely has a million other entities trying to get their attention. You need to approach your market from every possible angle, and that includes your employees. Turn them into brand ambassadors, and you have a mini-marketing team, right in your own roster. Here are 8 tips you can use to help accomplish that:

1) Give Them Approved Media They Can Share on Personal Accounts

One of the most basic ways your employees can act as brand ambassadors is to have them share materials on their personal social media accounts. However, you cannot have them just share anything. Whatever they post related to your business should be vetted and approved by your marketing and branding departments. That ensures unity to the brand bible and keeps the messaging consistent and effective.

2) Let Employees Speak for Your Brand on Company Time

Brand representation is a job-related task, which means it only makes sense to let your team fulfill those duties while on company time. Forcing them to only do brand-related posts or tasks off the clock can feel oppressive and abusive. Make being a brand ambassador part of the job, and people will do it.

 3) Give Incentives

Being a brand ambassador is work, and as work, you need to give incentives for employees performing that work. Those incentives are necessarily, largely because your team likely did not sign up for that kind of responsibility. Even small incentives such as a bonus or recognition can get people posting on their accounts.

4) Assign the Right Employees to Write Informative Content

Posting on social media is just the beginning. If you want to truly transform your employees into brand ambassadors, they need to make content. Get the experts on your team to write insightful content. You don’t need them to fill your business blog – only have them write when there’s a good topic to be discussed.

5) Ask Them to Review Your Company

One of the most effective ways employees can help your company is to simply have them leave reviews on employment websites, such as Glassdoor. More and more consumers are concerned with the working conditions of the companies they buy from. Having positive employees show off how they are treated will not only help your brand, it can make future hiring campaigns easier.

6) Treat Employees Well

If you want your employees to serve as proper brand ambassadors, you will want them to be happy. That does not mean sugarcoating their work or babying them. All that means is you treat them like human beings and as they deserve. The more fairly you treat them, the better brand ambassadors they will be.

7) Make Branding Part of the Company Culture

One of the best ways to get employees to represent your company is to bake branding into your company culture. That means everything, from who you hire to the gear you give your employees, should encourage them to represent your business in the best possible light. Make it easy and part of their daily life, and your employees will promote your company naturally.

8) Use the Best of Your Employees to Promote Your Company

Your employees are not limited to personally promoting your brand. They may have already given you copious promotional material through their work. Featuring the best work of your employees will promote your brand, as well as show people that the people behind your products as experts at their jobs.

While those are far from the only ways your employees can serve as brand ambassadors, those can get you off to a good start. Just don’t get stuck thinking that your employees as the primary method of spreading your brand. Consider them supplements that give your marketing campaigns a little more spice.