How to make your engaged employees become brand advocates in your multi-location wellness brand

When people are looking for a wellness brand that can give them a sense of belonging, they will typically be drawn to a company that fosters a strong sense of community. With word-of-mouth marketing playing such an important role in this sector, satisfied customers are increasingly looking to hear of others' positive experiences—including your staff!

The good news, then, is that your strongest brand advocates are your employees. If you're looking for motivated drivers of engagement, you need to look no further than the people who are leading your advocacy campaigns from a professional standpoint.

But how do you keep employee engagement levels high and promote advocacy at scale in a multi-location wellness brand?

Why you need an advocacy strategy

The link between customer satisfaction and engaged employees is simple—the workers who go the extra mile to deliver are potential advocates for your brand who can increase both your customer lifetime and your conversion rate by providing that crucial human interaction that is such a powerful tool in the wellness industry.

To an extent, keeping employees happy is the responsibility of the employer—as Harvard Business Review has suggested, expecting self-care from individual employees simply doesn't cut it when a community can work to console each other together to dispel negative sentiments.

This is especially important in this industry, as meeting your wellness goals is that much easier when you are having memorable interactions with friendly staff who embody the values of the brand.

How to create a successful brand advocacy program

Here are a few ideas for ways to create an effective brand advocacy program that makes the most of your best assets, the ones who have the biggest impact: your employees.

Prioritize employee satisfaction

The number one way to increase engagement levels within your staff is to focus on your employee experience, ensuring their job satisfaction is optimal.

To start this process, you can request employee feedback and set survey questions that are experiential with comment boxes to encourage deeper insights. This will give you valuable feedback directly from your frontline workers, who are the key to obtaining customer loyalty.

Once you have understood the reasons behind potential employee disengagement, you can use these valuable insights to have a real business impact by targeting your efforts on specific ideas produced by your employees. 

Offer educational content

Utilize the power of social media platforms by asking your employees to provide the face of the company, delivering educational information across your channels. This could be video content, offering tutorials, or even blog posts.

Always offer relevant content; for example, if your brand focuses on yogic practice, you could ask an employee to give tips on good breathing practices. This could then encourage user-generated content using your hashtags to create branded posts.

Loyal customers will enjoy the extra advice, and employee-shared content allows budding social media stars on your team to shine! This means those who enjoy it can help create a more organic advocacy network for wellness than could be achieved through other marketing strategies.

Engage your staff with reviews!

The surest way you can know how you are performing is if someone tells you. There are many ways to do this. For example, you could focus on customer feedback or opt for peer reviews of services or a mentorship program.

Opening two-way communication between your employees and others allows them to receive actionable insights on how to improve, as well as all-important positive feedback that reinforces employee satisfaction levels.

Connect staff between sites

To create a real sense of cohesion between your locations, you could look at ways of creating a strong community network between your teams to ensure your brand messaging is always consistent and to widen the scope of your employees.

One way you could achieve this is by Edge's sales contest leaderboards. Our platform collates real-time online reviews, with employees moving up the rankings the more they are mentioned on Google. With reviews being one of the key metrics in driving traffic to your site, it's a good idea to highlight them.

You can connect teams from multiple sites to observe who is performing well, creating a company culture of support through the comments function, which becomes almost like a social network centered around performance!

Upskill your employees

The key driver in employee retention is career progression, so if you are looking to build a team of superb customer service professionals, the most strategic initiative is to offer professional development. Team members who feel invested in you will be among your most powerful brand advocates.

You could focus on official qualifications or even soft skills such as employee communication.

A focus on upskilling can also help you meet your organizational goals by encouraging upward mobility that can incentivize your staff to focus on effective strategies for business growth.

Open up rewards programs for staff

If you are hoping for your staff to lead your advocacy initiatives, you need to give them access to all of the tools available! Any customer advocacy program can surely be enhanced by staff engagement.

If you have loyalty initiatives, personalized rewards, or referral programs open to your customers, you may find that staff being able to benefit from them can have the maximum impact, encouraging further community involvement.

And if you have high-quality, innovative products that require industry insights before you launch them, who better to test them than your own team of experts? They enjoy the benefit as a perk, and you get honest product reviews for your company content—it's a win-win.

Try Edge

Contact Edge today to arrange a platform demo to see how our software can enhance your employee engagement strategy.

Our real-time sales contests based on customer reviews create an ethos of client awareness that can result in a strong brand advocacy program while providing fun challenges for your staff, which you can reward.

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