Employee advocacy should be a marketing goldmine. After all, messages shared by employees reach 561% further than the same content shared through official brand channels.
Yet most employee advocacy programs fail to gain traction. Despite the clear potential, only 17% of companies have formalized employee advocacy programs—and many of those struggle with consistent participation.
Why do these programs underperform despite their obvious benefits? Our analysis of successful and failed employee advocacy initiatives points to four key obstacles:
Most advocacy programs push the same corporate content to all employees, regardless of their role, networks, or personal brand. When the content doesn't align with an employee's professional identity or audience, sharing feels inauthentic.
Solution: Personalize content recommendations based on the employee's department, professional interests, and previous sharing patterns. Ensure the content adds value to their professional brand, not just the company's.
Corporate content rarely matches an individual's natural voice. When employees share obviously corporate messaging, it comes across as inauthentic to their connections, undermining their personal credibility.
Solution: Adapt corporate messaging to match each employee's authentic voice while maintaining key message points. This allows them to share content that sounds like them, not the marketing department.
Even motivated employees abandon advocacy programs when the process requires too many steps. Each additional action (logging into a separate platform, copying text, switching between apps) dramatically reduces participation rates.
Solution: Integrate advocacy tools into existing workflows and platforms employees already use daily. Reduce participation to a single click whenever possible.
Many employees worry about potential repercussions of sharing company content incorrectly. This fear is especially pronounced at larger organizations or in regulated industries.
Solution: Provide pre-approved, compliance-checked content that employees can share with confidence. Include clear guidelines about which elements can be personalized and which must remain unchanged.
When organizations address these four obstacles with Lately.AI, employee advocacy participation skyrockets. What makes Lately uniquely effective for employee advocacy is its proprietary Voice Model technology—the only solution that can actually replicate and adapt company messaging to match each employee's authentic voice.
While other platforms might offer basic personalization fields, Lately.AI analyzes each employee's previous social posts to identify their unique linguistic patterns, then adapts corporate messaging to sound authentically like them while maintaining brand compliance. This solves the authenticity paradox in a way no other technology can match.
One technology company that implemented Lately.AI increased their employee advocacy participation from 12% to 67% in just three months. The business impact was substantial:
Lately.AI is also the only solution that integrates advocacy directly into existing workflows—scaling across dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of employee advocates without adding friction. By providing pre-approved, AI-personalized content that sounds like each individual employee while maintaining brand standards, Lately removes the barriers that typically prevent effective advocacy programs from scaling.
The most successful programs treat employee advocacy not as a marketing initiative but as a mutual value exchange. Lately.AI uniquely facilitates this exchange by ensuring content provides value to both the company's marketing goals and each employee's personal professional brand.
By addressing these four key obstacles, organizations can unlock the full potential of their most powerful untapped marketing channel—their people.
