Contemporary marketing practices are demonstrating the value of incorporating trust into strategies and developing campaigns around it. Many brands have yet to realize they have invaluable marketing assets—their employees—in their own backyards.  

According to Koen Stevens, co-founder and Word-of-Mouth Director of Ambassify, organizations leveraging employee voices for brand communications are achieving up to 20x return on investment compared to traditional advertising channels, where returns continue to diminish. This stark contrast has become the foundation of Ambassify’s business model.

“Don’t underestimate the power of your employees’ voices: people trust people, and they will trust what your employees say—about work conditions, values, culture, etc.—over what CEOs or corporate accounts share on social media any day,” says Koen.

What is Ambassify and Employee Advocacy?

Founded in 2017, Ambassify is an online employee advocacy platform that helps B2B organizations use their workforce to spread company messaging in a more authentic way. 

The platform enables organizations to activate employees as brand advocates, creating a systematic approach for staff to share company content on their personal networks while also providing mechanisms for employee feedback and community building.

“Ambassify is the platform of choice to develop and apply your employee engagement strategy. All the tools you need in a single platform,” Koen explains.

Koen leads a company serving major enterprises, including Capgemini, Bayer, Toyota, Bridgestone, Sodexo, Allianz, KPMG, and BNP Paribas—organizations that recognize the untapped potential of their employees’ voices in a space where traditional advertising delivers increasingly insufficient returns.

The Problem: Diminishing Returns on Traditional Marketing

The genesis of Ambassify comes from a clear market challenge that Koen identified. “When you look at paid advertising these days, it’s very hard to get a decent return on investment in paid advertising because the channels are becoming very saturated. More and more people are also using AI for their searching purposes,” Koen explains.

This saturation creates a significant problem for companies: “Companies would be spending the same or more, and the results would be less and less.”

The issue isn’t limited to paid advertising effectiveness. Koen’s previous venture revealed a fundamental flaw in external brand advocacy strategies. While running a platform that helped companies organize contests to engage potential brand ambassadors, Koen noticed a troubling pattern.

He explains, “We didn’t feel it to be 100% in line with how we typically would like to work, in the sense that our claim was to those organizations that we would identify and activate their brand ambassadors. But typically, we would see the same people joining a contest for a travel organization X one day and a travel organization Y the other day. So it was more about the prizes for them. We called them prize hunters.”

The Solution: Genuine Employee Advocacy

This observation led Koen to a pivotal realization: “After trials and tribulations, we found out that the core people who can help you do that actually are the organization’s employees. And that was the breeding ground for Ambassify.”

What makes Ambassify different from traditional social sharing tools is its dedicated community approach. “We try to build meaningful interactions between people,” Koen explains. “It’s really about building this engaging culture of community feeling. That’s what we aspire to do with Ambassify.”

The platform goes beyond simple content sharing: “Once you have built this connection with your ambassadors—we call them ambassadors—your employees in this case, why would you not try to go one step beyond that? For example, offer them different types of campaigns where they can voice their own opinion through surveys, polls, ideation campaigns, and net promoter scores.”

This approach creates a virtuous cycle: “You see, when you do that, people are much more eager to share company branded content or give input to the organization, take pictures at an event, etc. That can be used for social media purposes.”

Implementing Employee Advocacy: How Ambassify Works

Ambassify provides specific tools and features designed to activate employee advocacy programs:

1. Content-sharing mechanisms that make it easy for employees to share company-approved content on their personal networks.
   
2. Engagement modules including “surveys, polls, ideation campaigns, and net promoter scores” that give employees a voice within the organization.
   
3. Gamification features, reward systems and collective goals that can align with company values: “One thing you can do in the platform is use gamification, and then in the reward section, for example, use very specific rewards that promote those initiatives, like taking specific free training for managers or, when it’s about sustainability, planting trees for a better world.”
   
4. Training modules to prepare employees for their advocacy role: “We have a training module. When people enter the platform, you can let them watch and read specific content around a specific topic and then ask them a few questions through the quiz feature.”
   
5. Integration capabilities with platforms like Strava that enable community-building around common goals: “We’ll say, ‘Okay, before the end of the year, we would like to walk 1 million miles with the company. We have Strava integration, so we can track everything that’s happening there.’”

Measuring Real ROI from Employee Advocacy

For data-driven stakeholders, Ambassify offers concrete metrics to demonstrate the value of employee advocacy programs.

“The one key metric that your C-level will care about these days is saved advertising costs,” Koen explains. “With the right tool, it’s extremely easy to evaluate the success of a program by just looking at the combined and saved click costs of all the campaigns you launched.”

The platform calculates this precisely: “In Ambassify, we calculate this very accurately by calculating the exact CPC of each customer individually—or taking the average CPC for their specific industry and sector. This should allow you to calculate your ROI precisely, and we typically see 3x to 20x returns on well-run programs.”

This substantial ROI comes from the trust advantage that employee communications have over corporate channels. When employees share company content, Koen notes, it “resonates with the audience they have on all the different social media channels.”

Employee Advocacy in Practice

What makes Ambassify’s approach particularly effective is that it builds genuine advocacy rather than transactional relationships.

“The ambassadors are proud to be working for the company, and the company is proud that they can have real employee-generated content,” Koen notes. “It reinforces the company’s mission, and it eventually strengthens the company’s culture.”

Ambassify has found that this encompassing approach leads to shifts in employee behavior. For example, when offering rewards through the platform’s gamification system, “What we saw in our own community is that over 70% of people that claim the reward typically would claim such rewards [like sustainability initiatives or training], you know, so less rewards that are just like company swag and hats and shirts.”

The Social Advocacy Report

A significant part of Ambassify’s thought leadership is its Social Advocacy Report, which brings together insights from industry experts. Koen and his marketing team created this report to capture valuable perspectives often emerging during networking conversations.

“A lot of interesting stuff typically is being shared in those conversations, but then nothing is being done with that,” he explains. “That’s when I thought, ‘Why don’t we collect the insights from these experts to compile a comprehensive report?’”

The 2025 report features 14 thought leaders selected for their unique insights and strong opinions. “When you see that someone has really good content and strong opinions, we ask them to be included in the report because I strongly believe you need to be able to voice a strong opinion,” Stevens says.

True to Ambassify’s philosophy, they leverage the contributors’ networks for distribution: “We can let them also promote it through their own social channels, basically also practicing what we preach ourselves.”

Through this report, Koen has identified several trends shaping the future of employee advocacy and social media engagement:

AI Integration

“The fear that was there maybe 12 to 18 months ago has changed drastically,” Koen observes about AI. “People were afraid about losing their jobs, etc. And some basic world work will be filled in with easy AI-driven results.”

However, the impact has been largely positive: “People are beginning to think more and more strategically. And I think that’s cool to see because even in our organization, we were very execution driven. But now, with the help of those tools, we see the shift to be less focused on execution only, and people are more and more often thinking strategically.”

For Ambassify, AI offers new possibilities: “AI is also proving to be a game-changer, and it offers brands a smart and scalable alternative to traditional influencer collaborations. Automated content creation enables brands to produce engaging, hyper-personalized content without relying solely on human creators.”

Micro-Communities

Koen sees significant potential in micro-communities but warns about platform dependencies: “Communities and micro-communities are an excellent go-to-market strategy basically for a lot of companies and a lot of products. But it’s also challenging because you have to consider the analytical part of it as well.”

He cautions organizations about building entirely on third-party platforms: “Do not build everything on somebody else’s land because you never know what will happen.”

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Ambassify has directly integrated DEI values into its platform: “We have modules in the platform, but we also have modules to support the other initiatives mentioned. So to build that culture.”

Koen adds that the gamification system can promote these initiatives by “using very specific rewards that promote those initiatives, like taking specific free training for managers, then if they get them as a reward, or when it’s about sustainability, planting trees for a better world.”

The Future of Advocacy

As Ambassify continues making strides, Koen emphasizes the importance of developing employee skills as brand ambassadors. 

“What emerges from the report is that training employees is essential—about how to be brand ambassadors, how to become a creator on social media, and how to find the confidence to use their brand voice.”

To meet this need, the company has developed learning features “to allow companies to put employees through that training themselves directly with our platform, both on the mobile app and desktop community.”

For creator economy professionals and organizations alike, the foundational insight remains powerful: “When you understand that, you will also understand how vital it is to ensure you wield that power together with your employees. That means starting from within and strengthening your culture, then working on your employer brand and your marketing together with your employees rather than on your own, which makes a much more powerful combo.”

As social and environmental challenges become more prominent for companies, Koen believes this collaborative approach to advocacy will only grow in importance: “Social advocacy will become even more important as the social and environmental challenges take hold in companies, and it can become a powerful amplification tool for the company’s initiatives and commitment.”