Brand Ambassadors: Do Your Employees Champion Your Brand?

In a time when many businesses are creating brand ambassador positions or partnerships, it’s important to remember that your best internal advocates are your employees. They know your business better than anyone else and each one of them can be your finest brand ambassador.

There are times when an employee’s behaviour impacts a company’s reputation. Whether it’s a private chat on work Slack or something bigger — that ended up in the news — it is important to clarify your expectations to mitigate risk and or avoid bring the business into disrepute.

How do you make sure that those expectations are met and at the minimum, communicated across the business efficiently?

Getting your employees on board

Finding employees who are genuinely passionate about what they do and where they do that work is a good place to start. By creating a team that’s excited about doing their best work, you’re on the path to creating a successful business filled with employees who are also your best brand ambassadors.

Every employee has the potential to be your best advocate and truly become part of your sales and recruiting team. It could be spreading the word about exciting new products, or sharing job opportunities with their professional network.

Questions to ask

Advocacy in a public forum can’t be mandated but employees that are genuinely engaged in their work will do this naturally.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you confident that your employees are working towards the fundamental goal of attracting people to your business?
• Does your business have a framework for employees that offers guidelines but allows them to advocate in their own voice and promote their favourite features and experiences?
• If you’re finding that your employees aren’t engaged with your brand, it may be an indication that there is a gap between what you want and what they understand. There are simple ways to fix the miscommunication and as an HR consulting company, we have done plenty of them with great results.

HR Health Checks

At LMHR we believe in the significance of a healthy workplace culture. We have been helping businesses achieve this by providing highly regarded, results-based LMHR Health Check to businesses who want to maximise the potential of their best asset – their people!

With expertise in this area, our consultants work with business leaders to help them identify the strengths and areas for improvement within their organisations. Our business leaders are more confident about truly knowing what’s needed next and what priorities need to be established and actioned.

From an HR perspective, two important policies— aside from the LMHR Health Check —are policies around social media and Code of Conduct. The policy acts as a guideline to ensure that your employees are not going to hurt your brand and tarnish your reputation.

Building the right team

Businesses and consumers recognise the importance of being genuine and authentic. Creating an authentic company culture means having clear policies to ensure that people know what is expected of them. In return, they are treated with integrity and respect.

Take time to search for candidates who add value to your team and have the chemistry to work well your current team members. Finding someone for the sake of filling in is a band aid fix that ends up costing more money and time. Recruiting employees with different perspectives will enrich your team in the long run.

Why Advocacy from Your Team Matters

A team of internally motivated brand advocates is more valuable than a handful of paid spokespeople. Why? Because it’s authentic.

That speaks volumes for anyone wanting to do business with you. In addition, recruiting efforts that come from current employees increase the likelihood of finding new people who are a great fit which leads to lower turnover and a happier, more productive work force. They may even be more likely to still advocate for your business even if they change jobs. That’s quite a win.

Happy, loyal customers and employees are naturally inclined to spread the good word and become an advocate and supporter for what you do. And, as any marketing professional or business owner knows, word-of-mouth is immeasurably valuable to your growing business. And your bottom line.

If you’re ready to take the next step in your business, we can help. HR can be painful. At LMHR, our team of HR experts do the heavy lifting, so you can focus on running the show. Get help now. Contact us today!