ebook: The Value of Employee Advocacy

Why is Social Media Marketing Becoming More Difficult?

social media marketing for automotive dealerships lack novelty. Over half of the global population is engaged on one or more social media platforms. From exploring content for entertainment to seeking product recommendations and even getting jobs, people spend over 2 hours every day on social media. So, if your social media game is not delivering results, you might need some introspection. This is virtually the golden age of social media marketing for the automotive industry.

The social media landscape is evolving. And, by design, it is becoming more challenging for auto dealerships that do not have an authentic, reliable, and adaptive presence.

Employee Advocacy: A Solution that Works

If you have been on LinkedIn, you might hear the term ‘employee advocacy‘ for the first time, but you might be already familiar with the approach. When you see an employee openly subscribe to the practices at her workplace, it is a form of employee advocacy. And LinkedIn is the primary example that shows why it works:

To put it in the simplest form – employee advocacy is the systematic practice of converting your employees into your authentic brand ambassadors across social media.

The Inrelay Employee Advocacy Survey

While designing features for Inrelay, we had a fundamental question: will employees be interested in talking about their employers, i.e. the auto dealerships, on social media platforms using their accounts? The answers were in line with our expectations. But, the more dealerships we engage with, the more we get to see an expression of complete ‘awe’ when they see the same results.

1. Over 73% of Employees are ready to engage with an employee advocacy programs

Our research included a comprehensive survey answered by 400 anonymous respondents. The most exciting insight was this – over 7 out of 10 employees were comfortable pushing the automotive social selling goals of their auto dealership employers on social media when nudged the right way.

2. Over 60% of employees were willing to share company content on social media

Let’s assume you have spent $10,000 producing a professional quality introductory video about your auto dealership. You post it on YouTube but have not optimized it with hashtags and descriptions. Eventually, you share the link to the video on your social media handles. You get about 200-300 views and a few generic comments. Then, you promote the post, and it gets 2x or 3x views, but the engagements are still not scaling up.

Imagine one of your employees, who is quite active on Facebook, shares the same video with his network. He gets a couple of comments and someone asking about the availability of a specific model at your dealership. Three comments on one post are not bad. But, it is nothing to celebrate. How about – 60% of your 50 employees sharing the same video across their networks. That comes to about 30 employees sharing the video.

Now you can see the potential of employee advocacy – it exponentially increases the number of eyeballs you can get in front of without having to pay for social media ads.

3. Over 93% of employees would recommend their employers on social media

A more surprising number was this – over 97% of the respondents were ready to give five stars to their employers on social media. To make this point drive home – look at the comments section in the post uploaded by any popular sports franchise. LA Lakers, New York Yankees, or New York Jets – the franchise does not matter. But, observe the passion with which people promote their posts and engage with them. These ‘fans’ are giving free boosts to such franchisees. Now imagine having 20-30 such fans for your auto dealership social media marketing initiatives. That is employee advocacy in its full force.

Why are Employers Not Running Employee Advocacy Programs Already?

An employee advocacy program can give you access to a private army of passionate brand advocates when done correctly. Then, why are employers not running such programs already?

Our survey covered some insights on what is stopping dealerships from integrating auto dealership social media marketing efforts with employee advocacy:

1. Over 50% of employees are never asked by their employers to post on social media

Close to 60% of employees stated they would ‘love’ to promote their employers on social media. However, every one out of two employees stated – their employers never asked them to post any content on social media.

The opportunity cost of doing this is painful and hurting your business’ bottom line. For every post that could have been promoted by your employees on social media but instead never goes, you are missing out on potential traction, engagement, and even sales.

2. Some employers have a ‘No Social Media Posting’ policy

Many auto dealerships practice a ‘no social media at work’ policy. The intent is to make employees more productive, but it often results in backfiring. By not harnessing the social networks their employees operate in, auto dealerships miss out on the benefits of automotive social selling.

3. There are no incentives to post on social media

Let’s assume you have not actively prohibited social media at the workplace. But you have not incentivized it either. Your employees can take the initiative and put out something in your favor
since they already like talking about your brand. However, most of them would not do this unless necessary because it puts the compliance risk on their head. They have to verify the information they are sharing, make sure it is accurate and does not breach your compliance policies, and then expect it to be aligned with your marketing efforts.

Now, let’s assume that 10% of your employees are active on social media and decide to take the risk of promoting your brand in their networks. They can choose a wide range of platforms – Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Clubhouse, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. Employees choose their preferred platform and content. That can do more damage to your brand than you can imagine! You might have different employees positioning a different brand perception on various platforms.

Social media marketing in automotive industry is based on targeting. Imagine having a lead interact with different brand personas on different social media platforms.

Inrelay for Strategic Employee Advocacy and Automotive Social Selling

One of the biggest reasons most automobile dealerships are not running an employee advocacy program is that their marketing teams have a perception that such initiatives will add more work. They might have to coordinate working with 50-60 employees, ensure they post the right content at the right time, and incentivize them to do so. In addition, between an email platform, social media performance tool, web analytics tool, graphic designing tool, and the social media platform itself – the marketing team might have to work across different platforms, even before a post is published.

We created Inrelay to remove this problem. With Inrelay at the centre of your employee advocacy program, you can shift your marketing efforts to automotive social selling:

1. Invite Employees for Your Employee Advocacy Program

You can integrate Inrelay with the enterprise tools you are using and send out an invite to your employees with a few clicks. This will ensure all your employees are delivered the same invite simultaneously, and there are no discrepancies in the operational side of onboarding your new brand ambassadors.

2. Incentivize and Track the Acceptance Rate

With Inrelay, you will have complete visibility in how many employees have accepted your employee advocacy program invites. If your marketing team has conducted a basic social media audit, it would not be challenging to locate the employees who have a considerable following on social media platforms. Once you have found them, you can incentivize them using the program invites. This also helps in calibrating your incentive structure to get the employee advocacy program running.

3. Create Content Categories

Now that you are visualizing an employee advocacy program in action, you might have understood – we cannot have each employee sending out all the posts being targeted by the marketing team. That would seem too coordinated and might render the employee advocacy program ineffective. Inrelay is designed to work around this challenge.

Automotive social media marketing is not just about pushing out how good your dealership’s offerings are. Instead, it often is a continuous exercise that requires creating a unique but relevant perception of your dealership. This might mean community participation, recruitment drives, etc., that your dealership is a part of.

Inrelay lets you create custom categories of content on the same platform. This way, you can empower specific brand advocates in your employee advocacy program with specific content. It helps you leverage the diverse expertise of your employees without losing grip on a unified marketing narrative.

4. Get Expert-Led Creative and Strategy Consultation

One latent reason why it might be daunting to run an employee advocacy program is this – who will manage the creative and monthly social media strategy? Inrelay takes care of this seamlessly. You should not be adding more workload on your marketing team with intelligent employee advocacy. When done well, you will experience how easy it can be to get results with Inrelay-driven employee advocacy initiatives

With the Inrelay Ultimate Subscription, you can avail all the benefits that come with the standard subscription. But, what makes Ultimate really ultimate is this – you get strategy & guidance and account execution services every month. And it costs less than the cost of acquiring two leads in a year.

How to Value the Benefit of Employee Advocacy?

While the benefits of having employee advocacy as a key strategy in your automotive social media marketing portfolio are manifold, here are two approaches you can take to measure its impact with Inrelay:

1. The Benefit Perspective

Inrelay Ultimate costs approximately $499 per month. However, the industry averages are calculated for dealerships with an army of influencers, an agency on a retainer, ad boosting budgets, and expensive advertising budgets for local TV, print, and radio. If, as a dealership, you use an optimal combination of Inrelay and only a few other marketing communication resources, your cost per acquisition would be lower, and your net margins would be higher than industry averages.

You might wonder – these are one-time sales. What happens next month? Well, we have used 665 as the reach for only one cycle of posts, assuming all your employee advocates post simultaneously. In reality, some employees will have a higher reach, and you will post multiple times in a month. If you optimally use hashtags and distribute them across different categories on Inrelay, you will witness exponentially higher reach in a month.

2. The Cost Perspective

Here are the costs you will incur if you choose to assemble a toolkit and run an employee advocacy program:

If you are running any special analytics tools, boosting posts, or adding incentives to your offers – the budget will increase. But, to keep it simple, this comes to approximately $15,204 for the year. The Inrelay Ultimate subscription is 60% more cost-effective than this budget and requires no significant additional expenses.

In Conclusion

Employee advocacy is all about using your most important marketing resources more effectively – your employee base. And Inrelay is designed with the idea to bring you in the shortest distance from realizing the impact of your employee advocacy program. Click here to connect with one of our experts and get a walkthrough on how Inrelay can transform your marketing strategy.