With Great Brand Culture Comes Great Employee Advocacy

During a visit to the NASA space centre in 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy noticed a janitor carrying a broom. He interrupted his tour, walked over to the man and said, “Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?” “Well, Mr. President,” the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” 

To most people, this janitor was just cleaning the building. But in the more mythic, larger story unfolding around him, he was helping to make history.

That a janitor is so well-aligned with the mission and vision of NASA is the result of a great brand culture.

What is a brand culture?

The e-book Telling Your Brand Story from Zoho Academy states:

Your brand’s story is much more than your “company bio.” It’s everything from the colors on your website to your packaging materials to the way your employees answer the phone and banter with your customers on social media. It includes your origins, your goals, your inspiration, your challenges, your target audience and their experiences with your company. It’s even the stuff you don’t have control over, including how your prospects and customers perceive what you do and interpret what you say. In short, it’s the sum total of who you are, all you do, and everything people believe about you based on the signals you send.

When your brand story is consistent and has been owned by every stakeholder of your company, it creates a solid brand culture.

Zappos is a good example of a brand that is very proud of its culture. Even the interview and hiring process at Zappos are designed to learn about the candidate's compatibility to fit in Zappo's organizational culture (50% weightage).

If a candidate is hired by Zappos, they can expect to spend their first three to four weeks manning phones in their call center learning how to respond to customer needs. This, in a way, is an introduction to the soul of the business. Upon completion of their time in the call center, Zappos employees are offered $3,000 to leave the company. If you haven't become a Zappos insider, committed to the goals and the culture, the company really prefers that you leave. Take the money, though, and you can never come back.

What happens when your employees are aligned with your brand culture?

They tell your story to the world.

When your employees share your story widely, it gives your brand a word of mouth boost, which is better than any form of marketing. [A report from Pew Research Centre found that word of mouth was the top point of influence for buyers.]

Let's do some quick math. I'll try to calculate the organic reach of your social media post with some assumptions. Say your brand has 300K fans on facebook while you have 200 employees who are active on social media and can share positively about your brand from their profile.

When you post from your brand page, your organic reach is this:

300,000 X 6.4% (average organic reach of an FB post) = 19,200 impressions

When your employees post about you:

200 advocates X 338 friends each (avg. number of friends) X 33% of friends seeing the post = 22,308 impressions

Remember, the average organic reach of a Facebook post is declining every year, so the posts from your brand page are going to fetch you less and less views in coming years.

Employee advocacy will be your positive word-of-mouth marketing that helps create a favorable brand image with larger organic reach. It will also help you fetch the right talent when you have a job opening.

How to convert employees into brand advocates

Sending a memo asking employees to be your brand advocates is a bad idea. Asking someone to write positively about you in public will always prompt a "what's-in-it-for-me?" attitude from the employee. Instead, win over them and trust them to post naturally.

Some employees will already be posting more about your business than others or have a more engaged audience. Identify your top socially active employees and give them the opportunity to build their thought leadership further by including them in your social media strategy.

Here are few actionable tips:

1. Brand culture: Like how the janitor at NASA, your employees—no matter their department—should own your brand's vision. Cultivate this by re-iterating the vision and goal in meetings, emails to employees, your own social media posts, posters around the office, and through your actions. For example, start office yoga classes if your vision is related to health or fitness. Don't let your folks forget what you're working to achieve.
   
2. SWAG: Who doesn't like a cool swag? Give your employees a t-shirt, a coffee mug, or even a cool hat with your logo on it. If they love your swag, there are two advantages: one, they will advocate about it in their social media space, and two, when they wear the swag in public, it's free advertising for you. Plus, swag increases the bonding between companies and employees.
   
3. Celebrations: Celebrate days like Employee Appreciation Day, which falls on the first Friday of every March. Make your team members feel important and appreciated.
   
4. Indirect campaign: Start a social media campaign with a hashtag and send a mailer inviting employees to participate. For example, "Best Selfie with colleague wins a prize. Use hashtag #(YourBrandName)Fun." You could also have them host a Twitter chat around a topic in your industry or perhaps help them create a longer piece of content like a blog post or video that you can then promote on both the employee’s Twitter account and on your brand account.
   
5. Surprises: Surprise and delight your employees by sending them gifts on their birthdays or anniversaries. They might spread the word. Worth a shot!
   

Once you organically convert your employees into brand advocates, they will begin posting positive things they experience in the workplace—whether morning yoga, team lunch, employee appreciation gifts, or an employee awards function. As they start sharing their experiences with the world, your brand will get the right kind of exposure—and hopefully increased traffic via genuine word-of-mouth marketing.

• Topic Participants

• Vinit Tibrewal

  

• Sticky Posts

• 10 simple e-commerce marketing tips to boost sales

  Congratulations! You've finally set up that e-commerce store you've been thinking about for a long time. Hopefully it wasn't too difficult. Even if it was, the effort will be totally worth it when you start seeing some orders come through. Now that the store is live, let's take a look at some marketing tips you can apply for sales growth. 1. Avoid cart abandonment If you've ever shopped online, you might have added a product to the cart but then decided not to purchase it. This is known as cart abandonment.

• Marketing in a post COVID-19 world!

  Consumers across countries are increasingly spending more time on a wide variety of digital activities, right from online grocery shopping, to video conferencing, to tele-medicine. There is a good chance that you performed one or more of the following activities during this lockdown, thanks to COVID 19: Cooked a meal Made a TikTok Video Signed up for a remote learning session Consulted a doctor online (or ordered medicines online) Shopped for groceries online A study by Hunter, a food and beverage

• Inbound Marketing 101: The Foundational Blocks of Inbound Marketing Strategy

  According to a behaviour survey, 68% of the buyers use sources such as blogs to evaluate the product even before considering it. Before buying a product, we do a lot of research to learn more about the product through communities, blogs, social media,

• How Zylker doubled their webinar registrations!

  Webinars are good educational resources to gather qualified leads for your product. But what if your visitors are dropping off from your webinar landing page without signing up? What more could you do to convert visitors into registrants? This is the

• The ideology behind why features tell, but benefits sell

  Do you think there's any truth to this? Do features only tell, and benefits sell?  Well, let's see why we should focus on benefits rather than features as the great marketing wizards, David Ogilvy and Steve Jobs proved to be the best examples leveraging

• Recent Topics

• Re-emitir facturas con nueva dirección de facturación

  Hola, necesito saber si es posible que las facturas ya emitidas, pueden ser re-emitidas con el cambio de dirección de facturación, realizado el día de hoy 02-01-2025, para efectos contables. Espero su ayuda, Gracias

• Zoho Learn vs. Trainer Central

  Hi, I'm currently using Zoho One with a WordPress-based website and WooCommerce to manage my online courses. I would like to know what is the difference between Zoho Learn and Trainer Central and if it's possible for these two platforms to replace WP

• Map Plan to Different Income Account for Some Subscriptions via API

  We have a plan that has a default Plan Account of "Sales". Can we override the account for a specific subscription via API? In some instances the same exact plan should map to a different income account. When we create stand-alone invoices in Zoho Books,

• Flow with CRM

  Hello, I have a simple flow that uses a web hook to enter data into a Sales Order. I have the web hook sending Flow data which has a PO field. If the PO has a special character like - or / or \ the task fails. How can I get the flow to be okay with the

• We've revised the pricing model of CRM portal user licenses

  Hello everyone, We’re making important updates to our pricing structure for portal user licenses, effective from the next payment cycle. The new slab-based pricing is as follows: Previously, these portal user licenses were priced at $5/ user/ month. As

• Chrome browser issues. Anyone else?

  I am suddenly having multiple issues with Chrome browser interpreting the Zoho Mail interface.  Anyone else?  Any known problems? Thanks, Todd

• Set another Layout as Standard

  We created a few layouts and we want to set another one to standard:

• Zoho Payroll US?

  Good morning, just reaching out today to see if there's any timeline, or if there's progress being made to bring Zoho Payroll out to be available to all states within the USA. Currently we're going through testing with zoho, and are having issues when

• Set up multiple IMAP email addresses

  Hi, I just started using CRM and its great, but I just found out I can only add one imap email address for incoming mail in the included salesinbox ...this is ridiculous. All companies have different email such as sales@domain, info@domain , personal@domain

• Function 58: Custom calculation in item table of invoices (2 fields)

  Hello everyone, and welcome back to our series! In Zoho Books, the Item Amount in invoices is calculated by multiplying the Quantity and Rate fields. Previously, we shared a function to include a custom field in this calculation. Today, we are taking

• Tracking new lead response time

  Hi, I have a team of Sales Development Reps, who have a KPI of responding to a lead within 20 mins or less once it hits the system.  I seem to recall that Zoho CRM had the capability to track this in a previous version, but don't see it anywhere.   It's

• Pushing Data from One CRM account to another.

  We have business partners that want to collaborate through the CRM. Other than pre-planned data migrations what are the options for Zoho Users to transfer data between the accounts. For instance, could I create a webhook that is sent from our CRM and then is picked up in the partner's Flow?

• Search function not working anymore

  Hi! The search function is not working anymore. How can we solve this problem?

• When converting a lead to an account, the custom mandatory fields in the account are not treated by zoho as mandatory

  In my Account module I have a number of custom fields that I have set as mandatory. When I enter a new customer as a new account they work, I can't save the record without populating them. However when I convert a lead, my CRM users are able to save the

• Expand Zia's Language Support and AI Capabilities

  Dear Zoho Desk Support, I would like to submit a feature request to improve Zia, the AI-driven support assistant in Zoho Desk. Currently, Zia only supports the English language, while other AI agents such as Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude can work with a

• get gettting the days number between two dates with deluge

  I am trying to calculate the days number between 2 specific dates but its not working. PLease help me.

• Limit excceding issue in zoho creator

  I am transferring data from Zoho Books to Zoho Creator using a Deluge script. However, I am frequently encountering a "limit exceeding error," which seems to be related to the Deluge statements limit. I reached out to Zoho Support, and they informed me

• How do I add more schedules to Zoho Creator?

  At the moment, the number of schedule calls we have in Zoho Creator are 1800 per month and I was wondering if it was possible to upgrade that amount to something higher. I'd like to know my options as well as the pricing.

• Conexion CREATOR x CRM

  Buenas tardes, Tengo un problema con un código que crea un registro en CRM. Revisé el CRM para eliminar los campos obligatorios, pero cuando ejecuto el programa, aparece el siguiente mensaje de error: {"code":"MANDATORY_NOT_FOUND","details":{"api_name":"data"},"message":"required

• Invoices with billable time and expenses

  I cannot seem to get a straight answer. We are looking to create an invoice to send to our clients, but it needs to have the following on it: 1. Billable hours for each employee. All hours for the pay period on one line, by employee. 2. Expenses for each

• Search Bar Improvement for Zoho Commerce

  Hey everyone, I've been using Zoho Commerce for a bit now, and I think the search bar could really use an upgrade. Right now, it doesn't show products in a dropdown as you type, which would make finding items a lot faster. On Shopify, for example, you

• Send Whatsapp with API including custom placeholders

  Is is possible to initiate a session on whatsapp IM channel with a template that includes params (placeholders) that are passed on the API call? This is very usefull to send a Utility message for a transactional notification including an order number

• Can't get form response to populate custom PDF template

  I've created a template and set it to default but can't figure out how to get the response to populate that template. It keeps giving me the default summary.

• Zoho Sheets not compatible with Excel/Google Sheets

  In order to share a copy of a Zoho sheet with someone that does not use Zoho, it must be downloaded as MS Excel format and then added to an email.  This is a labor intensive, and frankly confusing process.  I have forgotten to do this before, only to

• Zoho One not working

  I'm having several issues accessing Zoho One. Some pages don't load (for example, Zoho Directory) and the labels are all messed-up (oz.account.directory.display.shorname, oz.settings...., etc.)

• Add Ability to Designate Decision Branches as "Error Branches"

  Zoho Flow gives the ability to track down, troubleshoot, and fix errors with the Status and Filter dropdowns in the History tab. This works well for when a "normal" Flow action registers with an error. However, there are other times where it would be

• Visitors sending message via Whatsapp are not saving on contacts

  Visitors who sends me messages from Whatsapp when i finish the chat do not populate on contacts, how can I add them as contacts?

• ChatGPT only summarize in English

  Hello i' v enabled chatgpt in salesIQ, it works great inside conversation (revise, Rephrase etc) add tags works well with another language than English. But when I want to summarize it render only in English, despite sales IQ is set to another language.

• Brand with multiple facebooks pages

  HI, We are a small publisher that has different FaceBook pages for each of our product lines. All are within the same FB account.   Is it possible to add all of these pages to our one brand in zoho social so I orchestrate the posts between the different products?    Cheers, Joe

• How do I connect Sales IQ to Shopify

  How do I connect Sales IQ to Shopify.    

• DORA compliance

  For DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act) compliance, I’ll want to check if Zoho provides specific features or policies aligned with DORA requirements, particularly for managing ICT risk, incident reporting, and ensuring operational resilience in

• Free user licenses across all Portal user types

  Greetings everyone, We're here with some exciting and extensive changes to the availability of free user licenses in CRM Portals. This update provides users with access to all Portal user types for free to help them diversify their user licenses and explore

• Stock Count - Does it really work?

  We have been trying to use the new Zoho Inventory stock count feature. It seems great at first glance.. ..but what we can't get our heads around is if a count doesn't match you can't simply set up a recount of those that are unmatched, which just seems

• Create Ticket from Chat with Rest API

  Hi to everyone, is possible to create a ticket from Chat with Rest API? In user interface is possible by clicking on the button "Convert chat as a ticket". Anyone know how to do that? Thanks

• How to send binary data in invokeurl task?

  Hello, I am using Adobe's Protect PDF API. Source: https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/overview/pdf-services-api/ Everything works fine in Postman. But for some reason after encrypting the file, it is empty after password protecting the

• Address Grabber function for Zoho

  I converted from ACT to Zoho. With ACT, I used an add-on called AddressGrabber to scrape the contact information from leads that I buy and contact information contained on emails and websites and directly add it as a new lead or contact. Does anyone know

• How Can I Customize Sales Reports in Zoho CRM to Better Track Our Sales Team's Performance?

  Hello everyone, I'm new to using Zoho CRM and need some help with customizing our sales reports. We want to track our sales team's performance more effectively and visualize trends that can inform our strategy. What specific customizations or features

• Marketing Automation : Adding to existing Lead Score

  I want to be able to add a score to an existing ZMA lead however I can't find the field in the "Fetch Lead" action that contains the existing score. There is an action for Add lead score, but that's not clear if it overwrites the existing value or adds

• Items should display under specific warehouse

  I have configured the multi warehouse but it show all the items under all warehouse which is not correct according to our business logic, so i want that items should only display under that specific warehouse not under all the warehouses not even with zero quantity. Some items should be common but not all so is there any option for that purpose so i can specific the items to its warehouse. Regards

• Package Dimensions

  Packages need to have dimensions that are sent to carriers in addition to just the weight. Without the package dimensions being transmitted to carriers, the correct dimensional weight is not calculated for the label price, which results in corrections

• Next Page