An Inside Job: How to Maximize Distribution with Employee Advocacy

TL;DR:

• Spammy cold outbound and faceless corporate posts aren't enough to turn prospects into conversions
• People buy from people, which is why employee advocacy and social selling on LinkedIn are such important tactics for driving prospects down the sales funnel
• Implement advocacy top-down, and automate engagement with tools like Letterdrop to avoid having to chase down team members to engage online

Your content isn't getting in front of prospects as well as it should be. Meanwhile, your competitors are closing deals left, right, and center. You feel the panic set in. Why is this happening?!

Getting your sales team to spam prospects with "let's get on a call" isn't providing any value, which is why they're not answering. (And people answer cold emails — try giving them valuable sales enablement content. Trust us.)

Some of the best companies build trust with customers because of how much their employees authentically market the company themselves.

Employees are the natural ambassadors of your brand, especially the folks on your GTM market team, like Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success. Qualified leads from employee advocacy are seven times more likely to convert — and the pool of reach is so much bigger. It's time to leverage your team and get in front of prospects.

The right way to do employee advocacy online is to turn your team into thought leaders sharing educational information, case studies, and how they're helping existing customers. We'll show you what employee advocacy done right looks like and how you can implement it yourself.

What is Employee Advocacy?

Most companies do employee advocacy wrong. There, we said it.

Cheesy holiday posts and sharing pics of a recent charity run are feel-good, but they don't sell your product or provide value to customers. None of your customers care about your faceless corporate brand or self-serving posts. They selfishly want to make their life easier.

You should give employees a voice to talk about their work in a way that leaves a positive impression on customers.

For example, Chelsea Castle, who runs Content at Lavender, shows what she has learned at work about subject lines in cold emails in a LinkedIn post. Her company is a cold email tool, so she's educating her audience, who might be qualified prospects.

Rachel Shi from Metadata shares a customer case study. This shows prospects that the company can help them boost ROAS.

Employees can share a recent blog post to drive traffic from their own networks. For example, our writer, Keelyn, shared her first-ever Letterdrop blog post on LinkedIn.

Another important way to get your content in front of prospects is to get your employees to like and comment on your LinkedIn posts. You'll get your posts to their networks this way.

So, what's the true definition of employee advocacy? When a company comes together to sell their mission, their product, and what they can do for customers.

Why Does Employee Advocacy Matter For B2B Sales?

Nobody trusts your faceless corporate brand. Employee posts receive 561% more engagement than the same post shared by corporate accounts.

Why? People trust people and buy from people.

Employees, particularly those in Sales and Customer Success, are connected to prospects and customers. Get them to share content and participate on social media to get your product and content in front of more prospects.

This is particularly effective on LinkedIn, which has network effects. If one of your Sales Reps likes a company post, their network sees it.

If you just post content on your corporate page, none of your prospects will see it. You've left it to die.

How Many Impressions Could I Gain From Employee Advocacy?

It's important to educate your team on the advantages of employee advocacy, which can extend beyond just enhancing brand awareness and also positively impacts revenue. 45% of advocates in an organized program credited employee advocacy for new revenue streams.

You can see why. Let's say you have 200 employees. Suppose each has an average of 500 connections or followers who are potential prospects, and they engage with or share company posts 20 times a month. That's 2 million impressions you could be getting for free every month.

LinkedIn charges about $7 per 1000 impressions on average, so that's the equivalent of $14,000 per month in LinkedIn ad spend. You can use our calculator to figure out what these numbers might look like for your company.

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How do I Practice Employee Advocacy at My Company?

People hate change. It's not easy to implement an employee advocacy program.

Most employees are very content not selling online — it's more work, after all. But no employee advocacy means fewer sales, less revenue, and everyone's job on the line, so you need to make that apparent. Step 1 is to get buy-in from your exec team.

We have an extensive playbook on turning LinkedIn into an acquisition channel, which includes setting up a business case for LinkedIn.

Step 1: Get Buy-in From Leadership for Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy has to be implemented top-down, with leadership practicing it themselves. If they don't do it, their employees aren't going to do it either.

If you're a Content Marketing Manager, Sales Rep, or Head of Marketing, here's a template covering some talking points to get buy-in from the leadership team:

Hey team,
I wanted to share a quick idea that can get us in front of more customers that doesn't cost anything — investing in employee advocacy on LinkedIn.
We're paying $X per impression right now. I did some quick calculations and think we could get Y impressions with prospects without more ad spend by encouraging social engagement (likes, comments, shares) on company content from our Sales, Marketing, and CS teams. I've seen this work for companies like Metadata, Lavendar, and Letterdrop. Here's a good read that goes in-depth on the topic.
Let me know your thoughts.

One way to get the message across is to emphasize how you are losing hundreds of thousands or even millions of monthly impressions. That's a lot of damage.

Step 2: Create the Workflow for Employee Advocacy

So you've got buy-in from the big guns. It's time to set up a workflow and get posting.

1. Get Your CEO and Head of Sales to Oversee Participation From the Sales Team

They can make sure that participation is ongoing by incentivizing the team. This can be a competitive and fun way to increase engagement.

This could be an internal contest for the post with the highest overall engagement — likes, comments, and shares — at the end of each month. The winner gets a prize and company-wide recognition.

2. Create a Slack Channel

A simple way to get everyone engaging with content is to create a Slack channel for those who should be engaging, posting, and re-sharing content. Most companies will call this something like #social-boost or #promote-online.

Every time something goes out, post in the channel and ask for engagement.

3. Invest in Tools to Automate the Process

You can save a bunch of time chasing down employees for likes if you automate some of your employee advocacy. A tool like Letterdrop can automate engagement for you.

By making the process quicker and easier, your employees will be motivated to post more often. That means even more distribution. Let the machines do the heavy lifting.

How Does Employee Advocacy Fail?

Getting people to participate, even with a solid workflow, is easier said than done. Chasing down your team can be extremely frustrating.

This is because:

• Everyone is busy. Your Sales Team is on calls. Your Customer Success team is answering tickets. Marketers are running campaigns.
• Your requests to engage become repetitive and downright annoying.

Bottom line? People start ignoring your messages.

This means nobody's posting or engaging with company content. If nobody's engaging, you don't have distribution, your sales team is back to badgering people without adding value, and you lose to your competition.

Jordan Tennenbaum, Social Media Manager at Celigo, faced these problems and more.

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To prevent your hard work from going to waste and successfully implementing employee advocacy, invest in software that can automate engagement. This includes likes, requests to engage, and ghostwriting for your team. And all while being compliant with LinkedIn policies.

How to Automate Employee Amplification

Letterdrop can take the entirety of employee advocacy off your hands.

It's easy. Your team can connect their LinkedIn accounts to Letterdrop. You can then automate likes and comments to reach more networks.

That's free distribution to thousands of prospects without having to spam your Sales team on Slack.

Jordan saw LinkedIn engagement double and impressions triple after Celigo onboarded Letterdrop.

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And it gets better. Sometimes, your team is too busy to write their own posts. Letterdrop lets you ghostwrite from other accounts. Set up an approval workflow and get writing.‎

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Getting Buy-in for Letterdrop From Your GTM Team‎

Convincing your Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success team to contribute to distribution can be challenging. It involves some new learning — we know.

Here's a template you can send to the relevant GTM channel covering your bases:

Hey @channel!
We want leads As you know, we get more leads when we boost content on LinkedIn. It’s really important for us as a business, but I also understand how annoying it is to ask you to engage every time we post (over 20 times/mo).
Solution We’re setting up this tool called Letterdrop that automates likes from your account. Demo video here. Other companies that use it see a boost in impressions on average. We did the math and think we can possibly get X more impressions/mo. Here’s a guide from them on how to sell on LinkedIn and generate 1M impressions in a few months.
Safety As with any automation connecting to employee accounts, we want to make sure it’s safe. It’s a YC-backed company founded by an ex-Google PM, who we’ve talked to multiple times now. It’s all white hat through the LinkedIn API and used by dozens of VC-backed sales/marketing teams. It’s opt in and I’m ultimately in charge of deciding what gets liked or not.
How to get started Could you click on this link and connect your LinkedIns to Letterdrop here (most important for everyone in sales to participate since you’re the face of the company to our customers): {Connect link from Letterdrop Settings → Integrations → LinkedIn}

Let's be honest. Everyone will be relieved to get rid of that #social-boost spam fest.

Get Your Team to Sell Together

Forget what you're paying for every impression on LinkedIn, and forget flooding your prospects' DMs with spam that will get you nowhere. Leveraging your employees' social networks is free promotion and distribution.

People are posting about their jobs online anyway. Take the opportunity to create an organized employee advocacy program to provide value to prospects, increase your brand visibility, and sell your product.

And don't sweat the manual stuff, like chasing people down to engage with a recent post and spamming your Slack channel. Nobody has time for that. Let Letterdrop automate your employee amplification.