A robust content strategy is the backbone of a successful employee advocacy program. It's not enough to simply launch a platform; you need a continuous flow of engaging, relevant content to keep your brand ambassadors active and sharing.
An effective strategy ensures your content aligns with business objectives, reaches the right audience, and encourages consistent participation.
Defining Your Advocacy Content Strategy
Your content strategy should be a clear roadmap for what you publish and why.
| Know Your Audience |
Before creating content, think about what topics interest your brand ambassadors and what they love sharing with their networks. Consider what their followers are interested in, too. When you customize your content to match these interests, you'll see more engagement and people sharing your content happily. |
Why It Matters? Without this insight, your content will fall flat and be ignored. |
| Identify Core Content Themes |
Pinpoint recurring topics that align with your company's mission and marketing goals. These will act as your guiding stars, helping you create consistent and relevant content. For example, you might highlight industry trends, showcase your company culture, highlight product innovation, or feature employee spotlights. |
Why It Matters? Skip this step, and your content will be aimless, sporadic, and forgettable. |
| Use a Variety of Content Types | Mix up your content to keep things fresh and appeal to different audiences. Consider using a range of formats, such as short text updates, in-depth articles, videos, images, and quick tips. |
Why It Matters? Monotonous content leads directly to ambassador boredom and disengagement. |
| Embrace Authenticity | Feel free to be informal, show employee pride, or even share selfies. Being genuine and open can create stronger bonds with your audience than overly polished content. |
Why It Matters? Overly corporate or stiff content will fail to connect and be perceived as disingenuous. |
| Outline Content Sourcing |
Define clear processes for where your content will come from. Will it be primarily generated by marketing, curated from third-party industry sources, or heavily reliant on employee-generated content? Establish a process and guidelines for submitting, reviewing, and approving content to keep everything smooth and organized. |
Why It Matters? A lack of a clear sourcing plan means an empty content pipeline – a death knell for your program. |
| Set Content Cadence & Frequency | Determine how often new content will be published to the platform. A consistent schedule keeps ambassadors returning and ensures they always have fresh material to share. |
Why It Matters? Inconsistent content updates will quickly cause your program to lose momentum and relevance. |
| Analyze & Adapt | Check how your existing content is doing. Understand what worked for your audience—and what didn't—and use those insights to fine-tune your strategy and the types of content you create. |
Why It Matters? Ignoring data leaves you guessing; without adaptation, your strategy will become stale and ineffective. |
Creating Engaging Content
Great content isn't just about promoting your brand directly. Sometimes, sharing interesting insights with messages tailored to your audience can be a lot more engaging than you'd expect.
A few of the most popular posts tend to include industry insights, features on employees, job opportunities, and content focusing on diversity, sustainability, and innovation.
Company-Generated Content
| Offer official, polished content produced by your organization, designed to amplify your brand messaging and strategic initiatives. |
- Official Brand Assets: Choose and enhance your brand materials like press releases, blog posts, social media updates, and exclusive content for your advocacy program to make them shine.
- Localized Content: Collaborate with marketing teams and agencies to bring out the best in localized content, including copy and assets, making sure they resonate well with specific regions or audiences.
Third-Party & External Content
| By providing relevant third-party content, you demonstrate value beyond just self-promotion, which often encourages users to share your company's content as well. |
- Industry Insights: Enhance your content by including updates from other trusted sources to keep your material lively and interesting. Consider adding RSS feeds from blog partners or industry journals.
- Company Social Channels: Make sure to bring in content from your official social media profiles, like your LinkedIn page, to maintain a consistent voice.
Employee-Generated Content
| Involve your ambassadors to make your content truly special. Employee-generated content is authentic, relatable, and incredibly powerful because it comes directly from your people. |
- Showcasing Internal Life: Invite your team to share images and videos from external events like charity drives or conferences, as well as everyday moments at work. These genuine glimpses help everyone feel part of your culture.
- Boost Employee Voices: When some of your team members share insightful posts or tweets from other platforms, consider re-sharing these on your advocacy platform. It's a wonderful way to amplify their voices and expand their reach, making everyone feel appreciated.
Further Tips & Tricks
- "Post on Behalf" Feature: Use this feature to involve busy but essential stakeholders in the content publishing process. It's especially valuable for leadership voices, making sure diverse content is included with ease and minimal effort.
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Craft Compelling Posts:
- Third-Person for Shareability: Write posts in the third person to make them easily shareable.
- Strong Hooks: Grab readers' attention with the very first line.
- Concise Copy: Say more with fewer words; easy-to-read copy is more effective.
- Readability: Format and space your text well to improve readability.
- Storytelling: Include personal stories or anecdotes, always ending with a key learning or insight to make them memorable.
- Call to Action: Include a clear call to action or pose a question to encourage engagement.
- Visual Appeal: Always add images; square assets generally outperform horizontal ones on platforms like LinkedIn.
- Optimize Sharing Prompts: In the "Write something about the post" section, include a clear call to action to share and provide sharing message suggestions to help users get started.
- Track Performance: Include links to drive traffic to main pieces and add UTM Tags to original source URLs to analyze your social selling ROI (e.g., with Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce).
Check out this blog article to learn more about how to create a successful communication strategy.
Check out this blog article to learn more about how to create more engaging internal content.
Check out this blog article to learn more about the rise of employee-generated content.