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

• Update Multi select field values to another form table as individual record

  Hi, I am new to coding and do basics within deluge. I need help with the deluge script to meet the following requirement. Form Student Attendance The fields are : Attendance Date Course (Lookup to Course Form) Class (Lookup to Class Form) Students (Multi

• Why Doesn't TrueSync Desktop App Have an Auto-Update Feature?

  I have to manually update the app myself. I think it's a big shortcoming.

• Link Zoho Inventory to Clover POS

  Is it possible to link zoho Inventory to Clover POS?

• How can I start trial version without any example data?

  I am lazy to manually delete each data in every section. Is there any button to fresh start my account from zero?

• 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

• Building a custom site

  do we have an option in Zoho to build custom sites like adding custom functionalities? want to make a site like https://trackscourier.com/jnt-tracking-ph/. Is it doable? Please assist.

• Free developer edition of Zoho CRM

  A question for Zoho and other developers: How can you set up a demonstration version of a Zoho CRM implementation to show employers/clients what can be achieved? Do you pay for Zoho CRM Enterprise/Zoho One for this purpose? Does Zoho offer a free version

• Confirmation prompt before a custom button action is triggered

  Have you ever created a custom button and just hoped that you/your users are prompted first to confirm the action? Well, Zoho knows this concept. For example, in blueprint, whenever we want to advance to the next state by clicking the transition, it is

• Selecting ZOHO Help Desk Plan for Startup

  Hello everyone, We at unisouk are setting up a Product support team for our platform. and probably we will be team of 3-5 people. Which plan would cater my needs to address customer technical queries and maintain the inflow of various channel queries

• Where do we manage tags?

  Where is the page where we can view all tags and manage them (like change a tag name to something else or merge tickets under a particular tag with another)?

• Possibilité de créer des boutons de raccourci dans les tickets Zoho Desk

  Bonjour, J'ai développé plusieurs automatisations avec Zoho Deluge pour optimiser la gestion des tickets. Je souhaiterais savoir s’il est possible de créer des boutons de raccourci directement accessibles dans l’interface des tickets afin de déclencher

• Update to the Merge Tickets Functionality

  This is to inform you about a significant update to the Merge Tickets functionality in Zoho Desk.  Until now, while merging tickets, a user could set one ticket as the master ticket and choose the final value for any field from any of the secondary tickets too. As a result of this provision, many a time, crucial details related to the master ticket faced the risk of being excluded in the final, merged ticket. To overcome this challenge, we have decided to make the value of some critical fields unchangeable,

• Setting up CRM for RFP workflow management

  This will be the first time our organization uses an off-the-shelf CRM, transitioning from our homegrown custom solution, and I would appreciate general thoughts on how to get started in general with our workflow using Zoho CRM. The main question: if

• Integrating Calendly with Zoho Calendar in Zoho Mail

  I moved my office into a business incubator space that uses Calendly for meeting management and events. Calendly doesn't have a integration with Zoho Calendar and vice versa. I was directed to Zapier for integration but it doesn't have an integration

• 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

• Unable to access Zoho Desk at all - has an extreme slow load and then just remains blank

  This is all I see:

• Demande : Épingler automatiquement un commentaire via Deluge

  Bonjour, Je suis utilisateur de Zoho Desk et j'ai développé une fonction avec Zoho Deluge permettant d'ajouter automatiquement un type de commentaire à chaque création de ticket. Cependant, j'aimerais pouvoir épingler ces commentaires directement depuis

• Unknown error occurred

  Hi, When we want to publish or edit a page in our website, we encounter with "Unknown error occurred" problem. I share a screenshot here. Our website is www.essoft.com. It happens every page. We want to solve this ASAP.

• Using Creator API access tokens in deluge script

  I am working on generating download urls for files that are uploaded via a creator form. I want to include these urls in record templates so they can be easily accessed. The goal is to make downloading multiple attachments in a record as quick and easy

• Option to Re-order from past orders

  Customers would like to place a repeat order with the business entity. Currently there is no option to support this and everytime the customer has to check out following the same process. Can a option be given to reorder from the past orders?

• Display your zoho contact name when they call your mobile number

  As per the title If a contact calls the office number, the contacts name shows on mobile as long as I have their contact details registered in my crm. Is there a way that if the contact calls my mobile, their name can be displayed? Currently just their number shows when they call.

• US to EU Data Migration done / Workflows and Custom Functions stopped working

  Hello, I need help to restore my workflow rules and custom functions to work. My data was transferred from the US to the EU (Data center migration). Now all Workflow Rules and Custom Functions not working. I have no idea how to restore them to work again.

• Custom view for Milestones

  Hi, Just an idea for the future... would it be possible to create custom views for the Milestones view under Work Overview ? I usually need to look at this view filtered by project group but the filter doesn't remain when navigating away. A custom view

• Zoho API Error Code 7019 when adding job.

  Hello, I am following the documentation found here. https://www.zoho.com/people/api/timesheet/adding-jobs.html Regardless of how I try and post the data (including just using the example requests), I receive back the response {'response': {'message':

• Getting error during inserting a record in form of zoho people using zoho api

  import requests import json # Set your access token and Zoho People API base URL access_token = '1000.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX' api_base_url = 'https://people.zoho.in/people/api/' # Set the form name and data to be inserted form_link_name

• Email an Invoice from API

  When calling the API to email an invoice, it seems it does not actually send it. Below is a screen shot where I used an API call for the bottom record, and it updated its' status to "Due Today", but no email was actually sent. The top record, I hit the

• How to delete Email Sent From CRM from Contact Records

  I can't figure out how to delete email sent form CRM from contact records. Can you please advise? 

• Recurring Events Not Appearing in "My Events" and therefore not syncing with Google Apps

  We use the Google Sync functionality for our events, and it appears to have been working fine except: I've created a set of recurring events that I noticed were missing from my Google Apps calendar. Upon further research, it appears this is occurring

• Is there a Kanban view of Tasks across all Projects?

  As the title indicates, I could use a Kanban view of my Tasks across my Projects. If it's there, I don't see it. If it isn't there, I'd like to submit this as a feature request. Thx.

• CRM Deluge how can link attach file with workdrive file.

  Hi, We have create file at workdrive and would like to link to attachment at crm module by deluge. Right now can only upload it to attachment but can not link the file from workdrive. Thank you

• Tropicalize Books

  Books is an incredibly powerful tool that works well in many countries. But I feel that it is a product that is not yet "tropicalized" for Brazil as we speak (this would be like adapting the local reality). We have many strong competitors who do more

• Refund of a check distribution fee...

  I use cashiers checks, from my local credit union, to pay some bills very occasionally. They charge me a 5.00 fee for this service, but then refund me that same amount at the end of the month on my statement. How would I record this transaction in Zoho

• Usuários do Zoho Recruit no Brasil

  Gostaríamos de interagir com outros usuários do Zoho Recruit. Acabamos de completar um ano de utilização. Quem mais usa? se usa outra qual é?

• Zoho Creator Upcoming Updates - December 2024

  Hi all, We're excited to be back with the latest updates and developments on the Creator platform. Here's what we're going over this month: Deluge AI assistance Rapid error messages in Deluge editor QR code & barcode generator Expandable RTF and multi

• Questions about To Do

  1. I created a To Do note on Android and there is a line sorting option in the options drop down menu. But I didn’t find such an option in the PC client. I really need this option. 2. Why is there no search in To Do on the PC client? 3. Why is there no

• Introducing Offer Details Sync to Zoho People

  We've introduced a new option for the Zoho People integration that allows you to push offer details when a candidate is converted to an employee. This simplifies your recruitment-to-onboarding process by seamlessly syncing critical offer information,

• Conversion of functions from Google Spreadsheets

  Hello! I use this formula "=QUERY(ResumoOrdemVencimento!A3:O38;"SELECT A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O WHERE C != '' ORDER BY C,G")" in Google Sheets but when importing my spreadsheet into Zoho Sheets the formula was not converted. The QUERY function brings data from another spreadsheet, and then I sort and apply conditional formatting. The order of data will change automatically as I update the source spreadsheet. What Zoho Sheets function is equivalent to QUERY? I have some other spreadsheets to

• Copy, Duplicate, or Clone a Custom View?

  I searched the forums and didn't see anything on the subject. Is there a way to copy, duplicate or clone a custom view? I want a custom view similar to one I've already created. I just want the columns in different order.

• Import from OneNote

  Is there a way to import notes from OneNote? 

• In Zoho Forms - adding a Zoho CRM field for Contact barely shows any fields.

  I'm making a Zoho Form and I want to add a CRM field for Contact. I was expecting to be able to match the contact on the email address provided in the form. My standard layout has lots of fields but for some reason on the dropdown list in Zoho Forms,

• Next Page