Employees can be your strongest brand ambassadors. In essence, you have a captured audience that lives your brand and is often just waiting for a chance to effectively communicate their work to their family and friends. But how do you effectively engage that audience to expand your brand awareness?
Here are five steps for engaging employees as brand ambassadors:
Message training. As you develop your key messages for your brand, remember to provide training to all staff so they become comfortable with using them. Ask them to practice using the messages with their families and when out with friends.
Culture matters. Set the tone in internal communications on the importance of brand ambassadors. Encourage employees to become involved in external events to help expand brand awareness and to actively engage as ambassadors.
Provide tools. One way to start to engage employees as ambassadors is to create an intranet that is in effect a social media channel for staff to share their stories, brand ideas, promote events and to update their status on their latest projects and successes. This will help employees to learn the skills of a brand ambassador within the organization before expanding outwards.
Encourage social media engagement. Encourage staff to engage with your organization’s social media channels and to interact by commenting, sharing and re-tweeting information to their followers, friends and circles.
Make being a brand ambassador “cool”. Your employees take pride in what they do – encourage that by instilling the importance of their role as ambassadors of your company’s brand. Encourage leadership to reward those employees who engage and to include it as part of their overall assessment.
