How to successfully onboard new people to your ambassador program

There are three key pillars for onboarding: internal communication (building awareness), the onboarding itself (getting people on the platform), and finally, people's active participation on the platform (adoption). 

1.  Internal Communication

There is actually a step that precedes internal communication, which is aligning one’s narrative. This is an essential prerequisite to starting an employee advocacy program. 

Before you start internal communication on the employee advocacy program, ensure your employees are engaged in your company’s purpose, mission, and vision. This will help align your organization's goals with your employees' goals and, by extension, increase engagement because employees will feel more connected to the company. 

4 useful tips to improve your internal communication

• Reassure your employees that they will be provided with resources and content to appropriately talk about the company and that everything they see on the platform is safe for them to share on social media.
  
  
• Make sure that the social media policy is in place and that it is easy to find, so they will always have a place to go back to when in doubt about how to interact on social media. 
  
  
• Share with them why such a program is important for your company. This is often one of the most effective ways to convince your employees to become brand advocates. It’s about showing them the bigger picture and the platform's goals. Bear in mind that this is something you can (and should) do repeatedly, not just at the beginning when you first communicate about the platform. 
  
  
• Get support and buy-in from management. This will help give the program some weight and ensure that it is not just “another Marketing thing.” Leadership guidance and buy-in will help activate other employees, and if they are actively leading by example and participating on the platform, the impact will be even greater. Other employees will see that it’s important for the organization and be enticed to join, too.
  
  
• Discuss the key benefits for the employees themselves. Personal branding, professional development and thought leadership, generating more sales (social selling!), and having more opportunities to attend events are some of the key benefits the employees can draw from being a brand ambassador. Make sure they know about them to grow their interest in the program.

Some essential steps

1. Building awareness involves creating internal buzz around the program. 
   Start with the what and the why, and use different channels to spread the word — what is the program about, why is your company doing it, how is it going to be deployed, and why you chose this tech partner.
   
   
2. Don’t overlook training opportunities. Providing the right resources so employees can learn how to make an impact (platform training and social media training) is very important for the employees to grow and feel confident in being a brand ambassadors and posting their own content on social media.
   
   
3. Inviting the employees to join. This is the next step, asking your employees to become advocates for your brand. The more they know about your reasons, the more engaged they feel in the project and in your goals the more likely they will be to want to participate.

When we talk about internal comms, we talk about an ongoing process. It can’t be a one-off effort. You will have to communicate about the platform continuously to attract new advocates, retain the current ones, and increase overall activation. You can send several reminders, use different channels, and ultimately build that awareness. 

You can even involve current ambassadors who are engaged and active on the platform and ask them to share their experiences with other colleagues or even try a referral campaign to spread the word internally.

2. Onboarding 

After your internal communication is up and running, it’s time to get people to sign up in your community. 

How to get started

First, you need to know who you want to onboard on the platform. What makes sense from a strategic point of view? 

If your goal as a company is to attract more developers, it might make sense to get them onboarded on Ambassify so that they can share posts on their networks. 

How many people do you want to have on board? Our suggestion is that you create some milestones at this stage to work towards your onboarding goals. 

Another important aspect of the onboarding phase is training. If advocacy is new within your organization, people must know it, and they must be informed about what is expected of them, how they can fulfill those expectations, and so on. 

Providing sufficient guidance at this stage is crucial to ensure the success of your program from onboarding and beyond. For example, you can provide tips and tricks on how to use social media platforms in a smarter way, do’s and don’ts, tutorials on how to improve your personal LinkedIn accounts, etc. 

As an ambassador, you want to make sure that your profile on all social media platforms looks professional, but not everyone will know how to do that, so that’s where you have to step in and ensure that your employees feel comfortable enough being brand ambassadors. 

Something that might be useful for both employees and company is referring to a comprehensive social media policy or a set of social media guidelines. They will reassure employees of what’s allowed and what isn’t, give them a framework to follow and protect the company from being associated with any inappropriate content or behaviors.

What you can do inside Ambassify 

You can create specific campaigns to provide guidance to your employees:

• Share the company’s official social media policy
• Suggest tips and tricks to improve one’s presence on social media
• Show your employees how they can improve their LinkedIn profile
• Provide branded visuals for social media banners
• Explain the different target audiences for the social media platforms you’re active on
• Link external resources to provide extra info

 The list goes on, and you can also use custom tabs in Ambassify to group these campaigns into one specific tab, making them even more easily accessible. 

What you can do outside Ambassify

Outside of the platform, there are a lot of other options for fulfilling the training needs of your future ambassadors.

• Organize a training session to explain how the Ambassify platform works. This will create some internal buzz and encourage people to join.
• Create offline resources, such as a PDF guide or a slide deck, where you explain the company’s narrative, how it wants to position itself on social media, and how employees can help with that. 
• Explain the main advantages of being part of an employee advocacy program to the employees.
• Hold live workshops on how to use social media, write your own captions, and create your own content.
• Provide employees with a guide or video tutorial to fall back on when needed.

You can also really demonstrate to people how everything works and how easy it is for them to work with it so people can see it with their own eyes and register on the spot. 

Leverage real-life events 

Lastly, remember to leverage the already established live events and contact points in the company calendar. 

The meetings and moments where people are already gathered together are moments where you can typically take 10 minutes to talk about the platform and the program. This is a way to leverage those moments to get people to sign up on the spot and maybe even influence colleagues that are normally out of reach. 

3.  Adoption

Build a real community 

Community building is a crucial step in strengthening advocacy, adoption, activation, and engagement. It’s about more than just pushing your content via the platform, but rather combining different kinds of campaigns. 

It’s important to show your employees that you are available when they have any questions, that you value their opinions and feedback, and that you want them to become your collaborators. 

Leave room for personalization

Having a unique ambassador experience can trigger feeling of satisfaction and happiness making your employees feel like their efforts and input if valuable. 

Depending on what stage of addition you are, you might want to consider leaving increasingly more room for the ambassadors to personalize the content they repost on social media and the one they produce themselves. 

For example, consider putting some effort into providing different copy suggestions for your employees to use on the platform. This will ensure that people share different posts but also leave them enough room to be inspired by your suggestions and write their own captions and content. 

Post consistently 

Consistency is very important, especially in the early stages of adoption when people have to get used to the platform and weave it into their daily work habits. Try to post new content on the platform twice a week, preferably every week. 

A good idea to alleviate the burden of content creation is to repurpose content you already have, so you can maximize the reach and exposure of that content. Based on your ambassadors’ sharing behavior, you can get to know your audience better, understand what they react to the most.

After that, you could take it a step further and send every member a survey to let them communicate their content preferences so you can tailor the content you post to the interests of specific groups. 

Share success stories 

Why not nominate an advocate of the month? You can do this via Ambassify campaigns, which highlight the efforts of a specific ambassador. You could even, for example, share this recognition moment on your local intranet and thus motivate other employees to join the platform.

Highlighting success stories and recognizing employees for their efforts can be a powerful way to increase adoption and entice others to also come on board. As a bigger internal recruitment campaign, you can hold short interviews with some top advocates to highlight their reach or clicks and showcase their efforts as a testament to the great benefits the platform can bring.

Gamification

Gamification is a fun way to encourage your employees to be more active on the platform. Implementing a reward system will show your ambassadors recognition and appreciation for their work but also add that layer of fun that is essential in a voluntary tool such as Ambassify. 

There are different types of rewards, and before getting started, you should identify which ones work best for your company. You can use monetary or non-monetary rewards—the choice is yours, really. One of the most popular rewards is merchandise, but you can make it your own—so long as it suits your company model and culture.

Community Goals 

You can set community-wide objectives that employees have to work towards to achieve together as a community.

These can work in different ways, but they are all about generating a community feeling and building engagement. Teams can also compete with each other to achieve goals in the community, rivaling each other to gain the most points.

User Feedback 

Feedback is not only about receiving it from your members, but also giving it to them. Sharing the impact your advocates are making is another way to boost adoption, giving them a renewed sense of purpose and showing appreciation. 

Showing your employee ambassadors what the program is achieving gives your employees a feeling of accomplishment and appreciation, which are not to be underestimated when trying to increase adoption and activation. We are working with people in the end, so stories work best.