Empowering employees to be advocates of the business
For a business, there can be a lot of ways to market your product or create influence for your brand. Although the majority of current managerial studies are focused on just the advertising aspect of marketing but there can also be other ways through you can subtly create a persuading image in the minds of your customers.
The vastness of global market has created a unique saturation of products and services. The idea of product distinction has largely been made an “ideal” not “applied” as many of your competitors will be making the same product. The companies thus started to compete of other variables of sales; post-sale services, convenience of the customers, availability etc. but one major area that was overlooked was the concept of employee advocacy of the brand.
Think about the impression it would create in the minds of iPhone user who observes an apple employee using a Samsung device. Would he ever prefer iPhone over its competitor again? Most probably not. Your employees have the ability to add to your company’s reputation and can also cause destruction to it if they are not catered well. Employees need to develop a sense of belonging to the organization’s goals and its vision.
Employees committed to the organization’s goals are one feature that is hard to adopt by your competitor. In some cases, they can prove to be your most vital assets. So how will you go about creating these highly motivated and unique marketers for your company?
The first obvious step is simply to make them happy. But this is not just on the managerial ground, this also means that you should employee friendliness on the policy making level. The companies that are most successful in employee engagement are those who include them in their company’s vision and mission statements and function according to them. Then you need to make sure that your employees feel involved in the company’s operations; their opinions are included in your decisions and you give them as much space as possible to innovate and make the right decisions themselves without being forced to by the administration.
After an employee is happy and committed to fulfilling the company’s goals, you need to inculcate a sense of pride in them. They need to know themselves and should be able to show others that the job they do is important. This especially becomes important in the current period where the competition also consist of CSR and promotion of CSR. When your employee is sure of his function’s importance in bringing about greater good, he is bound to work more efficiently and be proud of himself.
On managerial levels, you need to make sure that the work of all the employees gets recognized. A good way to make them proud is by celebrating their success through social media, so that they can see that the company is doing efforts to recognize their efforts.
Having your own employees as advocates can be the most efficient, cost friendly and distinguished tool you can have for presentation. You need to have proper and recognizable scales to weigh the employees’ job performance and have rewards for efficiency and innovation. Through proper methods, you can provide the most influential P.R. force in the market.
