5 Ways to Nurture Brand Loyalty Among Employees

By Jessica Thiefels

Employee brand advocates are employees who share the messages of the business through their own networks. By using their personal networks, they expand the reach of your brand and bring greater credibility to your business.

To turn employees into loyal brand advocates, you need to get them on board with who you are, what you do, and what your unique brand voice has to say. This means they need to not only believe in what they’re doing but they also need to be willing to promote what you do above other competitors in the industry—just like a loyal customer.

The question is, how do you foster this loyalty among employees? Use these strategies to get employees excited to be part of your brand.

Prioritize Consistency

Before embarking on any other brand loyalty initiatives, it’s crucial to teach your employees about the brand. Your goal is to instill the brand’s message in the minds of every one of your employees and to do so, the messaging needs to be consistent. 

In, Why It’s Vital to Align Your Internal and External Brand Communication, company culture and communication experts at Hubgets recommend prioritizing consistency in three ways:

• Prioritize the onboarding process. The brand and its values should be explained to every employee in the same way. 
• Clearly define the value of the brand. Every employee should know how important their role is to the outcome. 
• Socialize. Whether it’s through an app or a daily meeting at the water cooler, make sure your team is getting to know one another. 

Understand the Issues

Most sales teams are expected to introduce new products regularly; every quarter, according to a recent survey from Medallia. At this pace, brand messaging and product value is bound to fall through the cracks, meaning your employees are both overwhelmed and under-educated on the value you’re providing. 

However, this isn’t a matter of more training sessions, according to Harvard Business Review, “employees don’t need more of the same information. They need leaders to provide them with tools and messaging that will help fill the gaps in their knowledge.” To build brand loyalty, ask your employees where they need the most support in terms of understanding your brand messaging and how to share that with customers.

Once you know the gaps in their knowledge, you’ll be able to conduct ‘bite-sized’ training sessions as needed—no more marathon meetings. This ensures employees understand your brand as it evolves, without wasting anyone’s time.

Build Employee Confidence

Confident employees can transform your workplace. Confident, competent employees come to work excited, believing that they can get the job done. More importantly, the more confident your employees are in their abilities, the more likely they are to spread that confidence to customers.

Make sure that your employees feel confident enough to do their job, and spread the word about your products, by creating a brand resource center. From here, they can access training materials, messaging and assets, allowing them to stay up-to-date while having direct access to shareable assets that can be used in emails and on social media.

Allow Employees to Contribute

In a recent article for Better Marketing, technical leadership guru William Anderson analyzed the reasons why people stop being loyal to their company. Time and time again, employees cited feeling that they were unable to contribute as the main reason for the loss of loyalty.

Your employees are working on the frontlines every single day and it’s your job to actively encourage them to come to you with solutions when they find a problem. If they feel empowered to improve the business and the brand, they’re more likely to feel attached to the result, and therefore proud to share about it.

Develop a Brand Advocacy Program

For brand strategy expert Paul Zobel, the secret to employee advocacy is all in the brand advocacy program. According to Zobel, “The goal of this type of program is to develop different ways employees can show their loyalty by helping the employees promote their company.” According to Zobel, the most effective plans include the following:

• An employee brand advocacy team. An effective brand advocacy program should include employees from across the business that meets regularly to discuss the strategy, efficacy, and implementation of the brand advocacy plan. 
• Encourage the sharing of branded social media content. Incentivize your team to share the company’s social media content by offering a small reward to the employees who share the most content. 
• Encourage social media collaboration. Social media is the place where employee brand advocacy will really shine. Encourage your team to send in their ideas for social media and other content. 
• Encourage posting on employer review sites. Positive reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed can make all the difference when it comes to attracting new talent to your business. Just as you’ve incentivized sharing branded social media content, you can incentivize website reviews, too. 

Nurture Brand Loyalty Among Employees

Employee brand advocates help your business, but remember: employees benefit from brand advocacy, too. An employee advocate can increase their own credibility and position themselves as an expert in their field. In the end, developing brand loyalty among employees is all about investing in their learning, providing them the right resources, and empowering them to make the brand one that they’re proud to promote. 

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