Implementing an employee advocacy program at your organization is an excellent way to increase the organic visibility of your company’s content. But did you know that it can also offset the cost of your paid media programs too? Participating in an employee advocacy program can often result in clicks to content that would have otherwise been achieved through paid media efforts.
Setting up Your Estimated Ad Savings
Desktop
The Total Estimate Ad Savings widget appears on the Activities dashboard upon logging into the platform.
While there are default values set in the Estimated Ad Savings calculator, you can customize these settings to best represent your business and your industry.
To update these settings, you will need two values:
-
The CPM of your paid media efforts
-
The CPC of your paid media efforts
If you are unsure of these numbers, your marketing team or agency should be able to provide these values to you. If they cannot, or you do not have any active paid media campaigns, Wordstream provides excellent benchmarking data each year for both US-based teams and global cost-per-click rates.
Once you have your Cost Per Thousand (CPM) and your Cost Per Click (CPC), you’re ready to add your values. Simply click on the pencil that appears next to the cost and input your own values.
Now Save your values and you’ll see your savings automatically update.
While the default Ad Savings is ‘All Time,’ you can toggle between ‘Last Quarter,’ ‘Last Month,’ and ‘Last Week’ to better understand the ROI of your employee advocacy program.
Why Does the Total Estimated Ad Savings Matter?
As an organization participating in an employee advocacy program, explaining the ROI of the program to senior leadership as well as the offset it could provide to your paid media efforts is extremely valuable. In fact, many programs see that participation in an employee advocacy program pays for itself each year and it comes with the added benefit of increased employee engagement. Let’s take a look at how that works.
In this Gaggle, you see that there are 26 members in the program and a 25-seat program starts at $300 per month.
With the assumption that this program has 25 seats in their program and they are paying $300 per month, you can see that the same message reach on a paid program would cost between $689.54 and $869.77, depending on how your company leverages paid media efforts.
So, what does the ROI of your employee advocacy program look like?
-
On a CPM basis, to achieve the same message reach with your paid media efforts, you would have spent $689.54 in the last month, but you only spent $300 with your employee advocacy program seats, meaning you saved your company $389.54 in the last month.
-
On a CPC basis, to achieve the same message reach with your paid media efforts, you would have spent $869.77 in the last month, but you only spent $300 with your employee advocacy program seats, meaning you saved your company $569.77 in the last month.
Imagine what that could do on a yearly basis!
Also, keep in mind that your Member's social media networks often contain many of the same people your paid marketing efforts are targeting, but there is the added layer of trust and transparency with a personal connection that paid advertising cannot provide.
The Estimated Total Ad Savings calculator is not available to Members and is not available on Mobile.