A global brand strategy helps your business reach people across the globe. But you may be missing a crucial piece to your strategy: your employees!
in this blog, you'll learn more about how employees can act as brand champions to increase brand awareness and expand your global audience reach.
What is a global brand strategy?
Global brand strategy is a plan for creating an image and identity for a brand and disseminating this plan to reach audiences around the world. When developing a global brand strategy, businesses keep their marketing and messaging mostly the same for each market, and make minor adjustments for language or cultural differences as needed.
Organizations use global brand development strategies to build brand awareness and reach larger, more diverse audiences. And there are a lot of ways to do this. You may optimize your website for search, place ads online or in print, host a podcast, speak at conferences, sponsor events or organizations... the list goes on.
Do you want to take your global brand strategy to the next level? Well, you might be overlooking an effective and inexpensive tool: brand champions.
What is a brand champion?
A brand champion is someone that shares about and promotes your brand. Brand champions are different from brand ambassadors because, unlike a brand ambassador, a brand champion is not paid to promote the company. Instead, they post simply because they have had good experiences with the organization, or its products and services.
Brand champions can be integral to a brand globalization strategy because they attract large, diverse audiences and build trust. So how do you find reliable brand champions to push forward your strategy? Look no further than your employees!
Benefits of employees as brand champions
There are many benefits of having employees act as brand champions. Employees are an integral part of your company. They understand both the products or services your organization offers, as well as the company values and culture.
Employees also have different experiences and skills that give them a unique perspective on the company. That unique perspective resonates more strongly with different audiences. When developing a global brand strategy, having brand champions in different cultures and locations across the world can help grow and diversify the company’s reach, allowing the brand to better find their target audience.
Here are just a few ways that employee brand champions can be an effective brand globalization strategy.
Build trust
Brand champions help companies build trust with their audience.
In one survey, 88% of respondents said they trust recommendations from people they know more than other advertising methods. This finding was echoed in another global survey, which found 92% of consumers said they trust earned media (i.e. recommendations from friends and family) more than all other advertising.
Bottom line: having real people promote a product or service — without being paid to do so — resonates with consumers.
Now, couldn’t you just have your C-suite post about the brand and call it a day?
That may be a good start, but it’s better to engage more employees in all levels and departments. Audiences are three times more likely to trust company information shared by an employee than shared by the CEO, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. And this translates to results - the click-through rate (CTR) for a piece of content is twice as high when an employee shares it than when the company shares it.
Having employees speak positively about the company is another way to build trust. People are becoming more conscientious about how businesses treat workers. They don’t want to support the Scrooge McDuck’s of the world.
In fact, 48% of consumers said they trust brands more when the brand takes care of their employees. When your employees share about the positive workplace culture and values that your organization holds, audiences notice.
Which brings us to our next point...
Expand your audience
When employees talk about their company on social media, others notice. A survey by MSL Group found that content shared by employees gets eight times more engagement than content shared by company pages, and that this employee advocacy can increase brand reach 561%. (Yup, you read that right...561%!)
One of the benefits of global brand strategy is expanded reach. Employees have on average 10 times more connections than a company has followers on LinkedIn, which is why it makes sense to have them champion your brand.
But the employee voice is being underutilized. Just 3% of employees share content about their company. But that tiny 3% is still responsible for a 30% increase in engagement for the company. Imagine what could happen if the employees that shared content jumped to 10, 20, or even 30%?
Improve sales
Not only can employee social media promotion improve brand awareness, but it can even help sales. An IDC survey found that 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make purchasing decisions. And sales teams that use social media to develop leads outsell their peers by up to 76%, and they convert these leads more frequently. It’s a win-win!
Brand globalization strategy: Developing employees as brand champions
You understand how developing a global brand strategy that uses employees as brand champions can benefit your organization. But how do you get started? Let’s walk through a few steps below.
1. Talk to your employees about being brand champions
When using employees in your brand globalization strategy, one of the first steps is to actually talk to your employees about it. This can help you gauge how many employees are interested in promoting the brand. Explain what a brand champion is, and share why you’re interested in having your employees help promote the organization. Some employees have probably never heard of brand champions, so a thorough but concise explanation can go a long way.
As a disclaimer, being a brand champion should not be mandatory. Forcing people to promote the company isn't good for anyone. Audiences notice insincerity. And you could quickly lose the trust and positive reputation that you’ve worked hard to gain.
2. Create content for your brand champions
You’ve got employees that are eager to champion your brand. But now what?
Having content for your employees to post is important.
Sure, some employees may be comfortable coming up with their own social media posts. But others won’t know where to start. And regardless of comfort with social media, promoting the organization shouldn’t be a time-consuming endeavor that detracts from their work.
Creating templates, graphics, pictures, sample copy, and ideas for social media posts sets your brand champions up for success. Maybe you would like your employees to promote a certain product or service, highlight a special offer, or show your company values in action. Brand champions need something to share, so make it easy for them.
3. Personalize and polish
Each employee is unique, so it makes sense if their posts reflect that. You may give them sample copy or a template to follow, but let each brand champion bring in their uniqueness to their post. They can add slang, emojis, quotes, pictures - whatever they feel helps them express themselves. This lets them connect authentically with their audience, which is a great goal to strive for when developing a global brand strategy.
Keep in mind, you can let employees be authentic while still having guidelines for them to follow. The tone and level of formality may vary, but encourage proofreading prior to posting. Some other guidelines to follow may include posting only publicly available information about products or services, not posting pictures of other employees without their consent, and an intolerance for discriminatory or hurtful language.
4. Share your work across platforms
The content is set. Now it's time to share. Social media is the go-to place for your brand champions to promote your organization.
For B2B organizations, LinkedIn is a good place to start. But some employees may look to other platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, or X (Twitter). There may also be more niche platforms that are great for specific employees to utilize.
Social media is going to be the best way to get fast results for brand champions. But some employees may choose to take it a step further. Other ways to share their thoughts and promote ideas may be writing a post for the company blog, writing a LinkedIn article, joining discussion groups, or speaking at an event or conference. These outlets can be a great way to share about the brand, but make sure you account for time and monetary resources to create this content when developing a global brand strategy.
5. Keep it consistent
Any promotional posts from brand champions are good for the organization. But where a one-time post may feel like a gimmick, consistent posts highlighting different aspects of the organization feel like a more representative reflection of the employee’s thoughts on the organization.
We’re not suggesting employees post daily, or even every week. Employees should post about things they truly care about or admire when promoting the brand, and it may feel too repetitive to stick to a set schedule. But multiple posts spread over a longer period of time can be helpful to reach new audiences, or add to the positive connotation of your brand for the existing audience.
Global branding strategies with examples of employee brand champions
Maybe you’re still on the fence about turning employees into brand champions. So let’s look at a few organizations that utilize employee brand champions in their brand globalization strategy.
- DLA Piper, a global law firm has used LinkedIn’s Elevate program to grow employee brands and increase awareness of the company. Since employees started sharing more about the company on LinkedIn, they’ve found that the company’s page has three times as many followers and four times as many views as before.
- Credit card and payment technology company Visa created an employee advocacy program to highlight new and interesting things being done in markets around the world. Since launching this brand globalization strategy, employees at Visa are sharing posts six times more frequently on LinkedIn than before, which has helped the company’s LinkedIn page get four times as many followers.
- Gainsight, a customer success software company, started a program to get employees to interact with and share more on social media. In the first five months of the program, they saw over 22,000 interactions and over 6,500 website visitors that found the website via content that employees shared.
Need help with your global brand strategy?
Employees are an underutilized asset in global brand development strategies. They can help bring your brand to a large, diverse audience and build trust in your organization.
We'll admit, though: building your global brand strategy can feel a little daunting. We get that.
Not sure where to start? Or don’t have time to develop this strategy yourself? Consider outsourcing this work. Conveyor Marketing Group offers a variety of services for B2B organizations, including developing a global brand strategy, content creation, and much more. Contact us to learn more.