First of all, what exactly is a brand ambassador? In the traditional sense, a brand ambassador is someone who is hired by a company to promote it to consumers in a positive light, thereby increasing brand awareness with the ultimate goal of boosting profits. Brand ambassadors use marketing and networking to influence others, both online and offline, across multiple media platforms, including social media, blogs, forums, magazines, etc. 

Companies can imitate the strategy in their own organizations to encourage employees to get the message out that the company is a great one to work for. Whether this type of program is incentivized or if it happens organically, it can yield phenomenal results for your campaigns.

Interestingly enough, a company’s best employer brand ambassadors are its actual employees. They are the most trusted source of truth about how your company works. If you want to tell the story of your company, they are your best storytellers. Learn how to encourage them to share a compelling story about your company and help you recruit top talent. You want to look for employees who bring their personalities to work with them, embrace and celebrate individuality, put their own ideas forward with confidence, and those who live and breathe brand values.

Know Your Employees 

One of the most important aspects of being a leader is knowing your employees or team members. To be a leader, you need people to follow you. Knowing your team members and showing a real appreciation for them and their personalities, wants, needs, and work styles will build a sense of trust and community within your organization. 

The organization must be employee-centric to produce employee brand ambassadors. After all, you are asking employees to promote your business authentically. If you want honesty and enthusiasm, focus on making the lives of the people who work hard for your company better every day.

Just as you spend time and energy getting to know your customers, you must get to know your internal advocates too. What are their long-term goals? What about their work excites them? Getting answers to questions like these helps you understand what will motivate your employees to speak up for your brand. Host team social events, coffee outings, and other less professional gatherings to get to know your employees in an environment outside of work. 

You might see a new side to your team members and discover new talents and traits that you can access back in the office. Seeing your team members in different environments might help you understand them and the way they make decisions and behave a little better, which will help both when it comes to disciplining and praising behavior.

In addition, Virtual groups like team chats and company social platforms can help employees bond personally. Away from the desk, sponsoring team-building activities such as board game marathons and go-kart racing gives employees more freedom to connect and, ideally, share their enthusiasm online.

Share the Company Vision

Your vision stands for a lot, but it essentially tells employees how your core values relate to your long-term goal definitions. Employees that understand this big picture feel more invested in their work and are more likely to talk about it. A few internally motivated brand advocates will always be more valuable than a larger team of paid spokespeople. 

One reason for this is that your employees are more genuine and authentic, which goes a long way toward connecting with your target market and building trust with the people who want to do business with you. When you communicate your company’s “why’s” to your employee advocates, you get them on board early and foster an environment of transparency which is essential to making all future content both shareable and realistic. 

Most leaders use jargon when conveying their vision. They might say, “We want to be world leaders in customer service” or “We want to capture the largest market share.” The result? Employees are left scratching their heads and feeling disconnected from the company’s purpose. To avoid this, explain your vision to employees using language and examples that tell employees what they can do to bring your vision to life. Over time, you’ll have truly passionate employees who understand and care about the vision of your brand.

Training

It’s hard to believe that an employee might not be social-media-ready in this day and age, but it can help to have training sessions to boost their marketing skills if their work doesn’t directly relate to it. For instance, you might hold a monthly social media workshop to highlight communities where your customers hang out and encourage employees to participate.

There are plenty of employees who are not as technologically advanced. Show them that you want them on your team by encouraging your employees to post positive or interesting experiences like this on social media can give customers a glimpse into your company culture. 

Social Sharing 

There are numerous benefits of social media in the workplace. This is why more and more companies are encouraging employees to share their day-to-day working experiences with a company-wide hashtag. When employees have to work very hard to promote your brand, it makes it less likely that they will do it consistently. 

So, to solve this problem, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to become advocates for your brand. One way to do this is by creating shareable content which your employees can then easily access and share on their respective social media profiles. 

For most companies, there is probably a lengthy section in the guidebook detailing social media policy, but if you want to start leveraging your employees even more online, it is probably best to give this another read-through. Clearly spelling out the dos and don’ts of your social media policy as succinctly as possible (bullet points are your friend) will help employees feel that they have the tools they need to make informed decisions when sharing their professional lives with their community. 

Many employees are often very well-connected via their social media networks and personal relationships. Because of that, they can influence others with very little upfront effort on their part. By allowing employees to post about their experiences at work (with some guidance, of course), positive word-of-mouth will spread across their networks, and you’ll be able to collect content to share the best photos on your company’s official accounts.

Brand Everything 

For your employees to really understand the brand, you have to envelop them with it. Brand every aspect of the work experience with the core values of your company, as well as the objectives, culture, and brand statements. Give employees brand elements to work with, like logos or imagery, or physical brand symbols like plenty of merch such as t-shirts, hats, magnets, water bottles, flash drives, etc. 

In addition, it is also a good idea to brand gifts you give your employees. The holidays are coming up, and many companies use this time of the year to send employees home with a little something extra. If you’re planning on purchasing company-wide gifts for employees, it might be a good opportunity to spread the brand. When employees unbox that awesome Bluetooth speaker and tell their friends about their company Christmas gift, your logo will make its way into the photo, too.