It’s not just your company’s corporate brand that drives leads and opportunities to your organization. Today, the personal brands of your key people can also have a massive impact on your brand’s reputation.
Often, it’s the people behind a company that generates the most engagement and interest from potential customers. Just look at Elon Musk, for instance; he attracts millions of followers to his personal brand from around the world. His posts drive more excitement and word-of-mouth opportunities than most of the branded content created by companies like Tesla.
Leveraging your employee’s personal brands in your marketing tactics can help you humanize your business, earn consumer trust, and attract more top-tier talent. Plus, encouraging team members to actively advocate for your brand can increase your profitability by 23%!
The question is, how do you leverage employee personal brands to unlock new business opportunities?
Step 1: Identify Your Brand Ambassadors
The first step in making the most of the employee branding efforts your team members are already implementing on social media channels, is figuring out which of your staff members have the most impact on your brand image.
While all of your team members can act as advocates for your brand, providing insights into company culture and brand achievements, some will be more valuable to your marketing strategies than others. For instance, your CEO, and other members of the C-Suite are likely to be some of the first people customers research when they want to learn about your business values.
Alongside your leaders, heads of departments and similar employees can also use their social channels to boost your company’s LinkedIn visibility, and share authentic content about your company.
Step 2: Provide Training and Guidance
While it’s important to give your team members some creative freedom when it comes to employee branding, it’s also helpful to offer them plenty of guidance and direction. Many of your employees might not know how to.
They may need help figuring out what kind of content they should be sharing, or determining what kind of hashtags to use, and which LinkedIn groups to follow.
Providing comprehensive training and access to useful resources will help you to make the most of your advocates. Provide guidelines on your brand’s values, tone of voice, and messaging structure they can follow to help boost your brand image.
Give them access to useful tools for scheduling and promoting social media posts, so they can increase their LinkedIn visibility with regular, consistent content.
Step 3: Set Goals and KPIs
Your employees will have their own metrics to monitor to determine if their personal brands are driving the right results for them on a professional level. If you want to combine their employee branding efforts with your strategy for building brand loyalty, you need specific goals and KPIs too.
Think about what you want to accomplish by helping your employees to become more active and influential on social media. Do you want to showcase the thought leadership and expertise your business has in your industry, so customers are more likely to trust you?
Are you hoping to boost your credibility with future employees, by encouraging current team members to share reviews and testimonials about their experiences working with you? Maybe you’re hoping to drive more attention back to your website and blog posts?
Whatever your goals might be, make sure you understand which metrics you need to be tracking to determine whether your efforts have been successful.
Step 4: Encourage Authenticity
Encouraging your team members to remain honest, authentic, and personable on their social media feeds is important for a couple of reasons. First, employees who build an authentic personal brand are more likely to earn the respect of their own followers.
Secondly, authenticity has a significant impact on your company’s reputation, and your levels of brand loyalty. When your team members are using LinkedIn for personal branding, ask them to share genuine insights and experiences. Allow them to add their own personality to their posts.
Studies show that social media posts from team members that are personalized and authentic earn about 64% more engagement than other types of content.
Step 5: Incentivize Participation
Building a strong personal brand will no doubt have natural benefits for your employees. A good professional brand can help anyone to attract new employers and clients, expand their network, and even improve their position in their industry.
However, while all these things are nice to have, they won’t always motivate your team members to stay active on social media channels. If you want to ensure you’re making the most out of your employees’ personal brands in your marketing, you need to ensure your team members have more reasons to get involved with your advocacy campaigns.
Simple things, like rewarding and thanking team members for their social activities can be enough to drive excellent results. One study found 39% of respondents said “company recognition” was important to them. You could also experiment with financial incentives, or monthly rewards for employees that drive the most visibility for your brand over a specific period.
Step 6: Highlight Employee Brands on Your Website
Finally, it’s important to remember that connecting your employee brands and your company brand is a two-way street. Just as your employees should be posting about your business and company culture on their social media feeds, you should be drawing attention to them on your website.
A LinkedIn Feed plugin to embed company page feed, such as Juicer Social, will allow you to draw attention to your most active employees and their accomplishments on your website. You can create customized social media feeds to add to your “About Us” pages, highlighting all of the incredible work your team members do.
You could also target specific employee hashtags with your feed, to make sure you’re sharing content relevant to your company culture. Not only will this make your website more interesting and engaging, but it will also demonstrate your commitment to supporting your employees and helping them boost their LinkedIn visibility.
Making the Most of your Employee’s Personal Brands
While your company’s brand can have a significant impact on the growth of your organisation, it’s important to remember there’s more to your business than just a logo and a corporate image. Today’s customers are more likely to look beyond the brand for your organisation, to learn about the people that drive your venture’s growth.
Helping your team members to build an effective personal brand and use it to highlight your brand’s values on their social media pages can have a huge impact on your business. You can make your website more engaging with a social feed full of your most influential employees, humanise your business with authentic insights, and showcase your company culture.
You might find that combining your employees’ personal branding efforts with your marketing strategies earns you more brand loyalty, and helps you to convert more customers in the long term.
Start shining a spotlight on your most valuable employees today. Learn how you can showcase your employees’ personal brands on your website and get started with Juicer today.
