Episode Summary
Employee advocacy is a more recent marketing trend, but it’s here to stay. Increasingly, companies are relying on employee advocacy to improve their brand awareness, position their employees as industry experts, and humanize their brand.
But you can’t have employee advocacy without internal marketing.
In this episode of the Recorded Content podcast, host Tristan Pelligrino welcomes Kerry-Ann Betton Stimpson, the CMO of JMMB Group and a podcast host. They chat about the importance of internal marketing, why employee advocacy is the objective of internal marketing, and how to help your employees build their personal brands.
Podcast Expert
- Name: Kerry-Ann Betton Stimpson
- What she does: She's the CMO of JMMB Group.
- Company: JMMB Group
- Noteworthy: Kerry-Ann is the host of The Internal Marketing Podcast, where she talks about internal marketing and employee advocacy.
Key Insights
- We don't talk enough about internal marketing. Everybody talks about employee advocacy and using employees to promote the company's brand. But we need to talk about internal marketing instead. Kerry-Ann explains, "There are so many missed conversations I could have had. Is there a thing that says, 'Well, do we market to our people inside the company and Google internal marketing? It's a nomenclature that I think has been around since the 1970s, but certainly, a conversation that's not happening as often as it should. And I said, 'Hey, this is it. Is there a way that I can better leverage internal marketing in my own day-to-day job? And also, is there a way that I can support marketers in having a broader conversation?'"
- Employee advocacy is the objective of internal marketing. There's no true and authentic employee advocacy without internal marketing. You need to create a safe space for your employees, make them feel valued, and help them build their personal brands online. Kerry-Ann explains, "Why we call it advocacy and why internal marketing is so important is that what you're trying to drive is not so much making them aware of the vision, the mission, and the purpose of products and the services, but what you're also really trying to get to is onboarding them in what I call the emotional connection to the brand. Have they really bought into the brand and what the brand says it does and what it provides? That's what it comes down to because a lot of companies just believe that employees are like, 'Oh, they're robots, we pay them to do it, so they’ve got to do it.' At the end of the day, it's about authenticity."
- How to help your employees build their personal brands? If you want to humanize your brand and improve employee engagement, you need to invest in your employees. Help them position themselves as industry experts. Teach them how to promote their brands online. Create a safe and productive environment for your employees. Kerry-Ann says, "There are so many more benefits to employees building their personal brands than not, but it has to start from that safe space. Employees have to feel comfortable with being able to build those brands. [...] And we threw the net out there, and we said, 'Here's this opportunity. Come on board. We want to show you how we want to help you to do that.'"
Episode Highlights
You can’t have employee advocacy without internal marketing.
“How do we convert our employees into advocates of the company’s brand? So it’s internal marketing that spins out into employee advocacy. You can’t have employee advocacy without internal marketing. And what that does for marketing is it really puts the marketing function in a very powerful position because when you talk about empowering your people, you’re really talking about empowering them to deliver on the brand promise that you’re telling your customers that you can deliver on every day.”
A positive company culture is everyone’s responsibility.
“I’d like to think that my company actually does a very good job of that because the reality is that, as a CMO or even as a marketing function, you can’t do that on your own. If the CEO is not aligned, if the leadership team, if the people team, or if the HR team is not aligned, your efforts are going to be quite an uphill battle there. I’m not sure how successful you’ll be, but the culture has to be something that the entire leadership team and indeed the wider organization is totally bought into to get that to work.”
Test and tweak your podcast.
“If you’re convinced that a podcast is a way to do it — you have the nuts and bolts around getting it done. Put it out there to a few folks first. You want to test it; you want to concept test it. Have some employees listen to it — employees who are not connected to the process at all or employees who fall in the band of who it is you want to reach. So let’s say you want to engage your sales team or you want to engage folks in IT, or both, have some folks listen to it and get their honest feedback.”
