Employee Influencers: Creating Internal Brand Ambassadors

When most brands think of influencer marketing, they think of searching out the perfect brand partnerships with established creators on popular social media platforms.

While that is true for many influencer marketing campaigns, your brand may have a host of potential influencers already on the payroll.

We’re talking about turning your employees into influencers. This growing trend among brands has many upsides and helps to create a cost-effective stream of content to keep your customers engaged and aware of the latest news surrounding your company.

Using employees as influencers can work whether you’re a small company or a large multinational firm. It’s also relatively easy to set up and your own internal influencer program can work synergistically with outside influencers and brand ambassadors.

In this article, we’ll outline the full benefits that employee influencers can bring to your brand. We’ll also point out a few common missteps some companies make when going down this path.

Finally, we’ll outline how to build your employee influencer program and get it off the ground so you start seeing positive results as fast as possible.

What Is An Employee Influencer?

An employee influencer is a team member who already has a position with your company. Generally, this is a person with a deep knowledge of your products, company product direction, or another specific aspect of your firm that customers can gain insights from.

For larger companies, this can span across several employees. For example, a fashion brand may have one employee influencer that focuses on their role in fabric procurement from around the world. Another influencer may cover upcoming seasonal releases or styles they’re currently developing.

The distinction is that these are real employees with direct insights into your brand. These aren’t people hired for the specific purpose of being influencers.

If you’re hiring new people in general, it’s fine to have an idea of which candidate will work well as an influencer once they’re brought on board. But they aren’t necessarily dedicated spokespeople.

Instead, the goal is to create direct connections to the internal workings of your brand that can help give customers and audiences an insider view that keeps them engaged and interested in your offerings.

Benefits Of Employees As Influencers

If you’re not sure if starting an employee influencer program is worth it, below are some of the benefits that such a program can bring to your marketing efforts.

If these benefits align with any of your current goals, it’s worth considering starting an influencer program with a small number of employees and then starting to build from there.

Immediacy

With influencer marketing and just about every other type of marketing campaign, there will be a lead time. Sometimes this can be relatively short depending on your internal workflow. But there’s always a delay between when you identify a message or audience you want to reach and the time it takes to get the message to them.

With employee influencers, there is an immediacy to all of your messaging. You can go from ideation to creation, to execution in a very short time.

If you were using paid influencers, you would generally have several weeks or more to find the right partnerships, work out the contracts, and then wait for the campaign to begin.

Of course, paid influencers still play a vital role in influencer marketing and their overall reach and audience are well worth the time it takes to launch a campaign.

However, by maintaining your own employee influencers, you can maintain messaging between paid campaigns and stay in touch with your core audience.

Cost-effective

Influencer marketing already has one of the highest ROIs for most brands. The ability to target specific audiences with a message delivered by trusted creators puts it well above more traditional marketing channels in terms of value.

With employee influencers, you can increase ROI even further due to the reduced cost of using existing employees for this role.

You will have to balance any additional workload on employees with increased compensation, but in most cases, this will still result in a strong ROI that outperforms most paid marketing channels.

Another cost benefit of employee influencers is that they can continue if budget cuts force you to scale back other marketing efforts.

One of the first things to get cut when there’s an economic slowdown is marketing. Unfortunately, this can create a downward spiral where you start to lose customers and market position in an already slowing economic environment.

Internal, cost-effective marketing channels like an employee influencer program help you weather economic storms and temporary marketing budget cuts.

More Control

Another benefit of employee influencers is that you have complete control over the timing, messaging, and content. 

When working with outside influencers, they often put their own spin on content to match their channel’s tone and voice. This does provide a lot of benefits so that your paid partnership can resonate with the influencer’s audience. However, it does mean you give up a certain amount of control over the content and style.

With employee influencers, everything put out matches your brand’s voice and aligns with your values and goals.

Employee influencers are similar to other types of business vertical integration in that they give additional control over the workflow and the end results.

For certain brands that specifically nurture a very specific image, this is a very appealing aspect of running part of their influencer strategy in-house.

Channel Ownership

Similar to the control that employee influencers offer, you also have complete ownership of the channel and assets you create with your in-house influencer program.

With outside influence partnerships, contracts can help you retain ownership of content and the campaign after it’s over. But this can depend on various factors and it’s not always a guarantee depending on who you work with and how the partnership is formulated.

With employee influencers, you can control the entire process along with the social media accounts and all related content.

Depending on how you utilize and grow these channels, you can create a valuable business asset with a built-in audience and reach. Besides marketing, there are many other creative ways to monetize these assets if your business model changes or if you plan on selling the business.

If you’re a startup, having a strong social media presence that you control can also help with securing funding and investments.

Team Building

You likely already have dedicated team members who are driven and want their initiatives to succeed. Giving them a chance to work as brand influencers to an audience of tens of thousands helps expand their professional presence as well as help the brand grow and reach new markets.

It also provides a powerful conduit for employees to interact with customers in ways they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. This provides a more seamless connection between customers and your brand to help respond to their needs faster and more efficiently.

Authority & Industry Expertise

One common goal with influencer marketing is to build brand authority through a trusted creator within the industry. By having a trusted creator showcase your product, you can immediately build trust and authority within the space.

You can start to build this same type of authority yourself through an internal influencer program. As your campaign and accounts grow, you become more of an authority as do your employee influencers.

This adds incredible intrinsic value to your brand and similar to the other benefits, you have complete ownership of these assets and can leverage them as needed.

Potential Problems With Employee Influencers 

There are plenty of benefits to employee influencer marketing. But there are a few areas where problems could arise. Understanding these possible missteps will help you avoid them and set up your program in a way that succeeds without any trial and error.

Employee Turnover

As we all know, team members do sometimes leave. If an employee has become a staple of your social media influence, their departure can cause a problem.

One way to address this is through ensuring you have a protocol for dealing with an employee influencer who may be leaving.

Before the departure, you may want to announce it in advance and then start to feature a new employee in that role. This helps introduce them to your existing customers and audience and helps to smooth the transition.

The last thing you want is for an employee influencer to simply disappear and leave their audience wondering what happened.

Depending on your brand and the nature of the work the employee performed, there may be contractual issues to consider. Things such as NDAs, non-disparagement agreements, or other similar agreements ensure both your brand and the employee are legally protected as you move on.

Overall, this potential problem can be addressed through careful planning and developing a way to deal with employees who move on to new opportunities.

Dealing With Feedback

Most influencer interactions on social media are positive, especially when they revolve around topics the audience enjoys. However, sometimes comments and feedback can turn negative or toxic on social media.

As employee influencers, your team members may be subjected to this type of feedback. 

Just make sure your employee influencers are comfortable with social media and how the various platforms operate. If an employee feels uncomfortable, make sure they can step down from their role and hand the duties to someone else.

This is a rare situation, but it can make things uncomfortable for a certain number of people. So having a system to deal with it in advance is helpful.

Abandoning The Employee Influencer Program

Before starting an employee influencer program, you want to allocate the time and resources needed to stick with it. Like most organic marketing methods, this will take time to grow to its full potential.

If you abandon the program, it could cause some negative perceptions surrounding your brand. If the rate of content you produce slows down or comes to a stop, that can make your audience think your business is slowing down or not moving forward.

Even if that’s not true and your business is thriving, an abandoned social media presence can create the image that you’re brand is pulling back.

Most brand’s social media influencer campaigns create a return on investment. Just make sure you can dedicate the necessary attention before starting so you can enjoy the benefits before having to move on to another initiative.

Account Ownership Issues

One potential problem with employee influencer programs comes from ownership regarding social media channels and content.

This problem mostly arises due to a lack of planning before starting. Sometimes, an employee will use a personal social account to start or create a new account on their own.

This can become a problem if the account grows popular and the employee decides to leave the company for whatever reason. 

An easy fix for this is simply to set up company social media accounts that the employees can manage, but ownership stays with the company.

That way different employees can manage the account if there is turnover or if employees are promoted to new roles.

Overall, this is all part of the planning stage of an employee influencer program which we’ll outline in greater detail in the final sections of this guide.

Should You Still Use Outside Influencers For Brand Partnerships? 

After hearing about the benefits of employee influencers, you may wonder if you should still consider using outside influencers for social media marketing campaigns.

While employee influencers do bring a lot to a brand’s marketing efforts when done right, they still can’t have the immediate reach that outside influencers can bring.

Outside influencers can give you instant access to new audiences that you need to target. When launching a product or entering a new market, this is crucial for fast growth and market penetration.

The best way to look at employee influencers is that they complement all of your existing influencer marketing strategies. It’s very similar to other forms of marketing that will leverage several channels during the same campaign or promotion.

However, there will be times when smaller initiatives can be handled solely by your employee influencers. 

Another way that employee influencers help synergize with external influencer campaigns is that they help to promote a constant signal.

Running a few influencer campaigns per year or quarter can create a surge in brand awareness or sales, but then there is a low point between campaigns.

An employee influencer program can help fill this gap and keep a more steady messaging schedule between larger campaigns. This keeps your brand mentions and other social listening indicators up even if you’re not running paid influencer campaigns at that particular moment.

How To Get Started With Employee Influencers

In this section, we’ll cover how to start your employee influencer program. We’ll cover some of the key areas you need to consider before starting. We’ll also cover some areas to avoid any potential problems that are common when launching this type of initiative.

Just remember that every brand is unique and these are general guidelines for how to create a successful employee influencer program. You can adjust various aspects to fit your brand, culture, and team.

Step 1: Select Your Employee Influencers

To begin, you want to identify which employees can be potential influencers for your brand.

This should be a mix between those who are willing to perform those duties, are social media savvy, and are in a position to offer insights to customers.

It’s likely you already have employees like this and they are active on social media discussing topics related to your industry. 

If you’re starting from scratch, you may want to start with only one employee influencer. This makes it easier to plan and design your program while keeping tabs on everything.

As you start to produce more content with one employee influencer, you can add more as needed. Your early influencers can also help manage and onboard any new employee influencers you add later. This lessens the managerial burden of the program on the rest of the organization.

Step 2: Create Your Brand’s Social Media Policy

Some brands may already have a basic social media policy. But it’s not uncommon for many companies to just “wing it” when it comes to what they post and what is off-limits.

Before launching an employee influencer program, you want a detailed policy as to how you want your brand to be seen on social media.

The extent of this policy will depend on your brand and the number of employees. Below, we’ll explain key areas all policies should include. Use these as a starting point and then add any necessary points related to your industry or specific brand.

Tone & Voice

Determine how you want your brand to communicate via social media posts. For some brands, this can be formal, informational, and very business-like. For others, you may want a conversational and casual quality. While other brands may choose a snarky or sarcastic tone if it fits their messaging.

Clearly outline your brand voice so your employee influencers know what to aim for when creating posts or replying to other content across various platforms.

Disclosure Policy

Depending on your industry, there may be certain regulatory disclosures you have to make regarding various claims. In addition, most platforms have disclosure requirements depending on content.

Make sure to create a disclosure policy that suits your industry and also takes into consideration the social media platforms you’re active on.

For general social media posts, this usually isn’t an issue. But giveaways, promotions, and other content can have requirements that need to be adhered to for legal reasons as well as the platform’s TOS.

Dealing With Feedback From Your Audience

Determine how you want your employee influencers to respond to feedback.

Some brands have their influencers only respond to more positive feedback or general questions regarding the product. 

You can run into problems if your influencers “defend” the brand or otherwise engage in that type of back-and-forth.

Finally, decide if influencers can respond to customer support questions or if those are forwarded to appropriate personnel within your organization for a follow-up.

Security

A majority of this article is related to marketing concepts, but cybersecurity is a top issue for any modern brand regardless of where they reach their audience.

Always use security best practices to protect your social media accounts. Since employees may be accessing these from various devices and locations, security becomes an even bigger concern.

A hacked social media account can really damage a brand and cause you a PR nightmare.

Make sure you are using 2-factor or multi-factor authorization on all accounts. Also, use unique passwords for each account and platform.

As an added step, have a detailed plan if a security breach or suspected breach occurs so you can act fast to lock down the account and prevent further damage.

To help with this, consult with your IT department or technology specialist within your organization.

Step 3: Create A Content Schedule

With most of your plan in place, you can start to focus on a content schedule along with dates for posting each piece of content.

The purpose of a content schedule is so your social media strategy aligns with our brand’s other objectives. For example, if you have a new product line releasing in the fall, you want to start scheduling your content in advance to prepare for the pre-launch and any associated messaging.

A content schedule also ensures there are no bottlenecks in your content creation process that need to be addressed.

Various tools and platforms can help with content scheduling and posting. Hootsuite, Later, and Sprout Social are popular social media scheduling options, but many more exist to fit specific needs and budgets.

Step 4: Track Performance

It’s important to look at your employee influencer program exactly as you would any other marketing initiative. This means you want to carefully analyze and track results.

We have a full guide on how to measure influencer marketing KPIs here. 

Just remember that an employee influencer program is a long-term effort designed to grow over time. So don’t expect immediate results.

Of course, a huge success right to the gate can be a big win, but slow and steady growth is also acceptable.

Step 5: Feedback From Employees

Once your employees are posting regularly on social media and interacting with their audience, ask them for regular feedback.

Your employees and the content they post will now be touch points for customers as they interact with your brand. These employees can have valuable insights into what customers are asking for and what they are responding to the most.

Some of this will be apparent within the engagement metrics. But intangibles are important and these can be offered by your employees who now interact with your customers regularly.

Step 6: Optimize & Improve

With a solid flow of feedback from your employee influencers and through the tracking of KPIs, you can work on optimizing your strategy.

You’ll likely notice that certain content performs better than other content. This can be based on overall views or engagement. So this is something to keep an eye on when setting up your content schedule.

You’ll likely also notice certain times or other factors where content performs better on specific social media platforms. This is something to consider for optimizing your content schedule to work with the algorithms that control each platform.

You should try to remain flexible with your approach and use data and feedback as your guide. Influencer content is different from strictly promotional content, so you may find certain styles and content perform better than you expected. 

Employee Influencers For B2B Brands

While many B2B providers are now leveraging influencer marketing, its overall use still lags behind B2C brands.

Part of this is due to the lack of B2B-related influencers available within a certain niche that match a B2B brand’s voice and tone.

A perfect solution to this is to create your own employee influencers to help broaden your overall influencer reach.

For example, if you’re a SaaS brand in the B2B space, you can have an employee create tutorial content relevant to your industry and product niche. 

Every piece of content doesn’t have to feature your SaaS product. But you can quickly become an authority in the space by creating this type of informational content surrounding your product niche.

If you’re struggling to find B2B influencers for your brand, consider looking internally for a great solution that’s also cost-effective.

Final Thoughts On Employee Influencers

Overall, employee influencers can work as the perfect companion to your wider influencer and social media marketing efforts.

Regardless of your industry or niche, the overwhelming majority of your customers are likely on social media and that’s where they find key information related to what they buy and what they’re interested in.

Employee influencers help you reach these audiences where they are so your brand’s presence can always be front and center on any social media platform.