With Great Brand Culture Comes Great Employee Advocacy

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.


    • 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

    • Input GST Reversal for damaged goods

      In our line of business, some items are damaged and we are doing inventory adjustments to remove them from stock. However, as per GST guidelines, there is a specific rule that we have to reverse Input GST availed for such items and needs to be reported

    • Introducing Record Summary: smarter insights at your fingertips

      Hello everyone, Building on the recent launch of Zoho's in-house Zia Large Language Model (Zia LLM)—a major milestone in Zoho CRM’s AI capabilities—we’re excited to introduce the Record Summary feature. This powerful addition makes use of Zia LLM to simplify

    • No longer get Cliq notifications on phone if app not started

      On Android, I used to get notifications on my phone whether I was in the app, or it was started. Then about a month ago, I stopped seeing notifications on my phone UNLESS I had already started the app. So if I reboot my phone, and never start the app,

    • Error AS101 when adding new email alias

      Hi, I am trying to add apple@(mydomain).com The error AS101 is shown while I try to add the alias.

    • Deluge script to add Mail Task

      Has anyone out there created a custom function to create a Zoho Mail task? I'd be interested in hearing how you accomplished it. Sample code is appreciated!

    • Tags with Zapier

      Maybe I'm missing something....I hope so... Using tags for triggers is a key need.  This prevents us from having a ton of different lists. I am trying to find out how to add a tag using zapier when someone makes a purchase....but it doesn't seem to be

    • Send Supervisor Rule Emails Within Ticket Context in Zoho Desk

      Dear Zoho Desk Team, I hope this message finds you well. Currently, emails sent via Supervisor Rules in Zoho Desk are sent outside of the ticket context. As a result, if a client replies to such emails, their response creates a new ticket instead of appending

    • How to apply blueprint on tickets that created from IM module

      Hello, I have an issue applying blueprint on tickets that created from WhatsApp conversation, the tickets matches with the blueprint criteria but still we are not able to put these tickets into the blueprint. I've tried with deferent type of tickets and

    • Function #4: Schedule Customer Statements

      Regularly sending statements to customers is an imperative part of many business processes as it helps foster strong customer relationships and provides timely guidance on payments. While you can generate the statement of accounts and have it sent over

    • Zoho Mail POP & IMAP Server Details

      Hello all! We have been receiving a number of requests regarding the errors while configuring or using Zoho Mail account in POP/ IMAP clients. The server details vary based on your account type and the Datacenter in which your account is setup. Ensure

    • Remove 30-Day Client Reply Restriction on Supervisor Rules in Zoho Desk

      Dear Zoho Desk Team, I hope you're doing well. Currently, Supervisor Rules in Zoho Desk run once every hour but only apply to tickets that have received a customer response within the past 30 days. This restriction creates challenges for us, as we have

    • Paid Support Plans with Automated Billing

      We (like many others, I'm sure) are designing or have paid support plans. Our design involves a given number of support hours in each plan. Here are my questions: 1) Are there any plans to add time-based plans in the Zoho Desk Support Plans feature? The

    • Contacts Don't Always Populate

      I've noticed that some contacts can easily be added to an email when I type their name. Other times, a contact doesn't appear even though I KNOW it is in my contact list. It is possible the ones I loaded from a spreadsheet are not an issue and the ones

    • How to get NSE/BSE Stock Prices in Zoho sheets?

      I've been looking for a function that provides me with the NSE/BSE listed stocks price in Zoho Sheets like GOOGLEFINANCE in Google sheets, but I found none. Please help if there is any way to het stock prices?

    • Tip #5: Setting access rights at the subfolder level

      Hello everyone, We hope you're finding our WorkDrive Tips and Tricks series useful. For today's tip, we'll teach you how to assign higher subfolder permissions to Team Folder members. Team Folders helps you avoid the drawbacks of traditional file sharing.

    • Cannot edit email text in Zoho Form rules

      I have a number of rules set up on a form depending on a user's submission. For some reason, I am no longer able to edit the content of the emails sent out based on those rules. I am invited to "use the advanced editor", but the original text of the email

    • Can multiple agents be assigned to one ticket on purpose?

      Is it possible to assign one ticket to two or more agents at a time? I would like the option to have multiple people working on one ticket so that the same ticket is viewable for those agents on their list of pending tickets. Is something like this currently

    • For security reasons your account has been blocked as you have exceeded the maximum number of requests per minute that can originate from one account.

      Hello Zoho Even if we open 10-15 windows in still we are getting our accounts locked with error " For security reasons your account has been blocked as you have exceeded the maximum number of requests per minute that can originate from one account. "

    • how can I hide this Module?

      Hi everyone, newbie question. how can I hide the "Sales Order" column? when I try I get this message: https://imghostr.com/86395c_p7j

    • Domain verification is in progress... (How long do I need to wait?)

      Trying to setup my first email domain by connecting with GoDaddy. Have been here for quite some time and the screen is not changing. How long should this take?Send DataSend Data

    • How to display profile picture for distribution list?

      I am Admin of a Zoho Mail server and we have distribution lists along with user accounts. I am able to set Profile picture for the users and it shows when the email is sent to another companies. The members of the groups can also send email from those

    • Mail Search Not Working

      Hello, Mail search is not working at all. I've tried Chrome and Mozilla. I can try and search for an exact term, or even an email that is 1st in my email list. All search does is sit and spin, or it comes up with no results. I've also tried it on my android

    • Password should not contain sequential characters

      How can I avoid this? How do I even disable it. On my password policy page, it's all blank, so I don't know why I'm even getting this error now.

    • Same phone number for more than one account.

      Hi there, I am a webdeveloper specialising in providing websites, webhosting and email solutions for my customers. I have signed up a number of my customers to Zoho Mail in the past, and a couple of these have grown into a paid package for Zoho CRM. As

    • Is there a live chat for Zoho mail?

      I am having a problem in Zoho mail and would love to live chat with someone instead of email and wait for a response. Is there a function for this? I know there is in CRM but I can't seem to find it in mail... Thank you!

    • Integrating Zoho Desk Instances from two separate organizations

      Is it possible to integrate Zoho Desk with an instance from another organization? For example, creating a ticket in one organization can cause the creation of a ticket in the second organization? Or certain tickets from one organization be viewable by

    • Why does incoming mail inconsistently bounce back from Zoho mail

      On testing our user accounts, we are having problems where mail sent to zoho mail bounces back with errors message that 'relay access denied'. On testing from various accounts (including outlook, gmail and yahoo) mail seems to get through on some occasions

    • Zoho email setup in office365

      When i am trying to setup zoho mail setup using my domain in office365 and it is not working and it says that we couldn't log on to the incoming (IMAP) server and please check your email address and password and try again. I was able to login using my

    • JunkMail rejected

      Hello, we are facing problems sending mails. The IP has been blacklisted. Please, fix it as soon as possible. JunkMail rejected - sender4-op-o12.zoho.com [136.143.188.12]:17291 is in an RBL on rbl.websitewelcome.com, see Blocked - see http://www.spa

    • My emails going to spam folder for hotmail or outlook

      My emails (not spam mails) are going into the spam folder for my customers using hotmail. Gmail and Yahoo users are receiving the emails in their inbox. can you please solve this problem. I read few articles but coudnt find any solution to it. I am testing it by sending a simple text email no pictures nothing at all still it is filtering my emails as spam. Please help I am really loosing time and clients due to this. Thanks

    • Capture hotkeys inside the remote session and allow file exchange via clipboard

      Hi guys, assist is a really good app, and to become great it would be nice to have some features other vendors have in place and we take them for granted. For example, ScreenConnect, TeamViewer and others allow you to send hotkeys via the remote connection,

    • Cannot fetch url with custom extension (sigma - javascript)

      Hello i try to make my first extension with API request, i have two cases 1) this a deluge code attach to a button --> this one works very well response = invokeurl [ url :"my_api_fetch_url" type :GET headers:{"api_key":"myapikey","accept":"application/json","content-type":"application/json"}

    • how to upload the picture and document

      i want to upload the picture and document,would you please told how to upload them?could you told it for each step?

    • Forgot my email management account

      Hello, I am the administrator of ihomemix.com. I can’t remember which email address I used to register the account and then opened the email service for ihomemix. I can’t see the subscription period of my email function when I log in with this account.

    • Add customer to account based on domain name.

      I generate reports based on a the account field, i.e. companyX.  In GoToAssist, my last provider, there was an option to automatically assign new ticket creators to a company (or account) based on their domain name. So for example, if a new employee creates a ticket from @companyx.com, for them to be automatically added to the companyx account would be a huge advantage.  As it stands right now, I have to remember to add them to the account manually.  Often I forget and when generating a report for

    • Facilitate business processes by mandating Kiosks in your Blueprint's transition settings

      Hello everyone, We've made a few enhancements to Kiosk Studio. Blueprints provide a structured and systematic approach to executing business processes, and you can use Kiosks to build custom capabilities to retrieve, collect, and execute actions on CRM

    • Response Violation - Zoho Desk

      Hi Team, I just need an information regarding the zoho desk - Response Violation and how can we avoid the tickets from getting the tickets response violated.

    • I need help in setting up a script that works for my calling service

      Please i need your guidance and expertise in how to go about a particular scripting. You see, we are a call service that assists companies to receive calls for them, i need to create a system in my Zoho CRM whereby i will receive call from my already

    • Zoho CRM Customer Portal Pricing Question

      Hello, I am trying to find out about the pricing for a portal that will be used for the contacts and a custom module. My client needs to use a customer portal for 15k users that will display the contact details and some informations to a linked custom

    • How to display Motivator components in Zoho CRM home page ?

      Hello, I created KPI's, games and so but I want to be able to see my KPI's and my tasks at the same time. Is this possible to display Motivator components in Zoho CRM home page ? Has someone any idea ? Thanks for your help.

    • Next Page