Employee advocacy remains one of the most effective but underutilized methods of building brand awareness. It leverages employee posting content on behalf of their employer on social media pages. This social media marketing method capitalizes on the fact that people trust the recommendations of their friends and acquaintances when purchasing a product or service. It also helps businesses add a human touch to their brands.

However, like any other marketing method, it's essential to measure the ROI of your employee advocacy to determine if this is bearing fruit or not. By understanding the ROI of your employee advocacy program, you also gain insight into the areas of the program that require improvement. In this article, we will look at how to measure the ROI of employee advocacy programs.

Measuring the Impact of the Employee Advocacy Program

To have an effective employee advocacy program, you need to look beyond the number of likes, comments, and shares. Instead, focus on key metrics of the employee advocacy program that will shed light on your social media and content performance. With a practical approach to measuring the ROI of your employee advocacy program, you can have a competitive edge over your competitors. 

However, the metrics to track may differ depending on your unique business goals. For some businesses, seeing engagement metrics such as shares, likes, and comments may be comfortable. These are critical metrics whose primary social media marketing goal is to increase brand awareness.

Other businesses may focus on lead generation metrics to convert their advocacy programs into key business opportunities. The most important thing would be to track the metrics that align with your broader business objectives, resulting in a more impactful and meaningful advocacy strategy. In the next section, we will discuss some key metrics that will help you get started.

Best Metrics to Measure Your ROI

To determine if you are getting a good ROI on your employee advocacy programs, check these metrics:

Conversion Rates

The conversion rate of your employee advocacy is a good metric to show if your advocacy programs are delivering the desired actions from the audience. If the content shared by your employees results in conversion, it will directly impact your company’s bottom line. This makes the conversion rate one of the most effective metrics for measuring return on investment (ROI). 

If your ROI is high, it's a sign that the advocacy program is resulting in higher brand awareness. The content shared also encourages the audience to take meaningful actions, such as signing up for a newsletter, filling out a demo form, and more. By analyzing the employee advocacy content that results in a higher conversion, you can get a clear idea of the kind of content that resonates well with your target audience. 

You can then use the information to optimize your employee advocacy program and focus on the right content that attracts conversions and prompts your audience to take the desired action. Therefore, you can maximize the ROI of your employee advocacy program.

You can also take a step to measure your ratio of posts to conversions. This illustrates the clicks on employee advocacy content and the number of those clicks that resulted in conversions. We recommend that you read our guide on increasing conversions.

Lead Generation

Another essential employee advocacy metric is lead generation. By sharing the company's content and endorsing its products, the audience’s reach is expanded. The good thing with lead generation is that it's easy to track and can be shared for a certain amount of dollars. 

You can measure the lead generation impact by attributing leads to specific employees' social media shares. Then, you can go further to leverage CRM tools to track the source of the lead and determine how many of them resulted from the employee advocacy programs. 

Brand Awareness Metrics to Track in Employee Advocacy

Even if your goal in employee advocacy is brand awareness, you can still measure the program's ROI by tracking these key metrics. 

Engagement and Reach

Engagement metrics, such as likes, comments, and shares, can provide valuable insights into whether your audience is genuinely interested in the content. The reach of your employee advocacy posts can be a good indicator of the content created by brands, reflecting their impact on the brand's visibility. When reach and engagement are combined, they can be a good indicator of whether the advocacy program resonates with your target audience. 

In the best-case scenario, your employee advocacy posts should yield higher reach and increased brand exposure. This should be combined with the creation of authentic connections that can help in building credibility and trust. However, it's important to note that engagement doesn't tell the whole story. 

For instance, you may receive a lot of negative comments, which indicates that the content isn't resonating with its target audience. Similarly, you can also gain engagement from people who aren't part of the target audience, indicating that you may need to reevaluate your content strategy to ensure it's best aligned with the people you are trying to reach. 

Content Performance

At times, your employee advocates can create content, but it results in negative responses from their audiences. This is why it is essential to measure the performance of each post to determine if it resonates with the target audience and leads to increased website traffic or conversions. To help you get an even clearer picture, you can use third-party tools to  measure other metrics such as: 

• Message performance. This will help you identify which captions are resonating most with your audience of brand advocates. This metric will help you plan for the overall content strategy. It can also help you refine your communication to ensure it aligns with the preferences of your content audience. 
• Performance breakdown. You can measure the effectiveness of the advocacy posts by categorizing them according to topics and tags. This will show you the content types and themes that are resonating with the audience of your brand advocates. You can measure the number of likes, comments, clicks, and click-through rates, and more for each tag or topic. This will provide insights into the content that drives positive responses and offer key insights for your future posts. 

Employee Participation

The active participation of your employees will provide insights into the success of the advocacy program. This is why you also want to measure the level of employee participation. If the participation rate is high, it is a clear indication of a strong advocacy culture in your organization, showing that your employees are enthusiastic about participating. Again, third-party tools can show you metrics such as: 

• Top advocates. This metric will display the top advocates and offer insights into their accomplishments. When you recognize and reward the top advocates, you can motivate them and even strengthen the entire advocacy program.
• Advocate edit ratio. This will show the caption percentage that your advocates are editing. With social media audiences preferring unique and authentic content, a higher edit ratio shows a stronger and more effective advocacy. 

Measuring the Impact on the Bottom Line

There is no doubt that the metric above will show key insights into your employee advocacy programs. However, the goal of any social media campaign is to improve the bottom line. It can be hard to tie the employee advocacy program to the revenue. To do that, you will need a comprehensive strategy that consists of: 

• Attribution modelling. You can utilize various advanced attribution models to gain a deeper understanding of the role of employee advocacy in the customer’s journey. You can also deploy your attribution models to different touchpoints, including the advocacy efforts. 
• Long-term analysis. Don't just focus on the short-term gains when tracking the impact of employee advocacy. Instead, perform long-term analysis to identify the patterns and trends in customer acquisition, retention, and overall brand growth. 
• Benchmarking. This tracks the performance of the employee advocacy program compared to other marketing methods. Start by establishing the benchmarks before analyzing how cost-effective each advocacy program is compared to other advertising programs, such as influencer marketing. 

Final Thoughts

To understand the effectiveness of your advocacy program, you must measure its impact. This will provide you with essential insights into its contributions toward your business goals, enhancing brand visibility and fostering genuine connections with your audience. 

It's essential to track the performance of posts done by advocacy, including engagement rate and data directly related to your audience. By following the steps outlined above, you can gain actionable insights into the advocacy program, enabling you to make informed decisions and fine-tune your employee advocacy program for the highest return on investment (ROI).