Influencer marketing has a new core: Employees

In recent times, Influencer marketing has taken center stage in the digital strategies for brands. From a marketer's perspective, it is to look outside their organization on who to acquire as an influencer.

Once we embark on this journey of identifying the right influencers and their measurable metrics, thereby trying to arrive at a possible ROI structure, we rarely take notice of a possible pivot we could've made at the inception of this idea, i.e., look at our employees as potential influencers.

Employees are as a massively potent pool of ever-ready influencers, who, with a little help, could turn into passionate storytellers for the brand.

Here are three reasons why we need a content strategy that leverages this untapped potential of our employees.

Employees are twice more trusted:

In our world where we often talk about having human touch to every experience, employees of an organization are trusted more than the brand itself. Metrics like content, likes, comments mean a lot more if they are from actual people who work for that company. Now more than ever, people like to buy from people, not faceless brands. It is also not a surprise that employees receive eight times more engagement than your brand page.

Employees know people who are new to your brand:

A great way to exponentially connect with new audiences’ sets is by leveraging the collective social presence of your employees and whilst you may be overwhelming the same audiences by your messaging on social, your employees are sure to help you uncover new audiences.

Low cost:

Employee advocacy has shown itself as a low-cost model compared to Influencer campaigns. To begin with, if you were to subscribe to the theory of paid, owned, and earned media, you might be able to attribute a higher cost to the media currencies from an employee under your organization. Thus, your employee has a chance of having more content engagement compared to an influencer, who is considered a paid source.

What would also be glaringly evident is the quality of leads that an Employee advocacy platform generates as it will be higher in efficacy. Often paid media is widely ignored and associated with spam, employee advocacy gives you a chance to increase your reach organically while building a community and forming real-time relationships with a very new audience base.

Above three reasons are fundamental to why a large organization succeeds through advocacy programs for their employees. Nikhil Tiwari, CEO of Engagelyee, says that it's pretty evident that employee advocacy is essential to every organization, as it brings a host of benefits while making work culture fun and competitive.

(We got this information in a press release.)