Mobilize your Brand Advocates to Skyrocket your Business Growth
Let’s face it.
Brand advocacy is way underutilized.
Think about it — our loyal, enthusiastic customers are ready to be acknowledged and engaged, but most brands (80% to be exact) are oblivious to their presence and do not leverage their power and authority to improve their bottom line.
Yes, it does sound silly.
Brands spend oodles of cash on marketing materials, online/offline ads and varied outreach campaigns, completely ignoring the influence of advocacy marketing and its impact on branding and acquisition costs.
The consumer attitude, behavior, research methodologies have changed radically in the past few years. They want to delve deeper to know more about the brand, the history of it, and they seek authentic feedback from their peers who are already using the product.
Their dislike for pushy emails and pop-up advertisements is a clear indication that they crave a more personalized approach; they trust peer-to-peer marketing over any of the exciting brand claims.
This calls for brand advocacy. It plays a pivotal role in molding the customer’s opinion and sentiment towards a company.
Your brand advocates are your super-fans — they are delighted with your products and services and are willing to share their favorable opinions with other prospects out of sheer goodwill.
They are not just loyal customers, they are heavily invested in the success of your brand. These advocates have forged an emotional connection with your brand and are willing to go that extra mile to speak on behalf of your brand and guide others who are in the consideration stage.
Why Advocacy = Increased (Revenue+Trust)
- Brand advocates stock your sales pipeline with quality customers for free via referrals. *Mic drop*.
- They are influential, and can reach out to people you might not have considered, or even have access to.
- They are your most powerful marketing tool — they can bring up your company’s credibility score single-handedly just by association.
- Their organic endorsement has immense business value, as it’s driven purely by genuine instincts.
- They bring down your branding cost by promoting your products and driving passive sales.
- They provide valuable product feedback and audience insights.
- They are the source of authentic reviews and testimonials. They engage with the brand and on social channels and help amplify its exposure.
They are the ideal high CLV customers — they are unwilling to switch vendors, they agree to pay a premium if it entails superior service, and they voluntarily submit feedback regularly instead of looking for other cheaper options.
They provide real value, they are thrilled to be a part of the team and wish to create significant impact. They’d happily answer queries, help other users through the process, without expecting any tangible rewards in return.
Identifying Brand Advocates
There’s a thin line of differentiation between brand advocates and loyalists. You have to look for the outward projection of their sentiment for your brand.
If they are voluntarily engaging with the team, with other users and recommending your products without any incentives, they are your advocates. Loyal customers are your return buyers, who may or may not be comfortable with sharing your brand messages publicly.
- Find your advocates through NPS surveys, (obvious hint: your promoters are your advocates)
- Check your CRM to spot the customers who are actively participating in referral/loyalty programs, and are leaving positive reviews on 3rd party review sites.
- With the help of social listening tools, find out who’s gushing over your brand, engaging with your online content, or offering assistance to other users who are in a fix.
However, your customers are not your only advocates. If trained properly, your employees and partners can act as your most profitable brand advocates.
They know the product inside out; they are capable of providing support and answering queries at the drop of a hat, and the leads generated by an employee through social networking convert 7 times more often than other leads.
Nurturing Advocates
Advocacy results from complete customer satisfaction initiated via quality product experience, personalized service, and a top-notch customer support. It’s not induced by a single discount campaign or a loyalty program, it depends on how cohesive and integrated the entire brand experience is starting from the awareness stage.
As Chris Connell, Marketo’s Senior Director of marketing (Asia-Pacific), says in the Food for Thought: Driving Customer Advocacy series by CMO,
Customers are demanding that brands stop ‘marketing’ to them, and start ‘engaging’ with them. They want a dialogue, not a monologue. They want you to listen to them, and prove that you care about them as an individual. They want your brand to be personal and authentic — to stand for something other than just profit. They want marketers to cut out the ‘marketing speak,’ and bring them through the customer journey in a meaningful way. That’s how you turn customers into advocates.
Think beyond the sales funnel, nurture your valuable customers even after purchase to turn them into delighted brand advocates. Build a solid foundation of trust, mutual respect by delivering what’s promised and providing continuous value.
Build a strong rapport:
Carefully study all outgoing communications to personalize each and every touch points for your loyal customers. Make them feel valued by gathering insights and surprising them with kind gestures. If possible, arrange for face-to-face informal meetings to encourage two-way communication.
Listen judiciously:
Monitor the web with the help of sentiment analysis tools to gauge customer reactions. Listen to what they are saying, engage whenever possible, guide them (if needed) without expecting anything in return.
Record any feedback you receive, thank them for it, and make sure its forwarded to the right team.
Be thoughtful and understanding — own up when there’s a mistake on your end, and try to diffuse red-alert situations by being genuine in your interactions.
Study trends:
Focus on the customer behavior, observe how they engage with the team, with the brand and the content on social media. Select those advocates who’ll be willing to participate in UGC campaigns.
Urban Outfitters has a separate platform, the UO Community where they showcase all the UGC from Instagram. They feature the snaps of the customers wearing/exhibiting the products directly from their Instagram profiles.
Keep a track of the feedback received on social channels, identify opportunity areas and work on those to turn the existing customers into advocates.
Similarly, make a note of the positive reactions to a specific feature, or a service and leverage that to push the on-the-fence customers towards advocacy.
Build customer-driven communities to assist and/or engage with the customers and to encourage stimulating conversations.
Make them feel valued:
It’s all about reciprocity.
Showcase your customer’s achievements, acknowledge them publicly, give them well-deserved exposure by featuring them on your success stories, case studies, newsletters, blog pieces.
Offer them perks such as courtesy discounts, inside info on new product launches, consistent pricing plan, dedicated support, highlight their reviews/testimonials on social media, or on your main website.
Invite your influential advocates to exclusive events, offer them speaking opportunities, include them in panels, arrange for media interviews. Co-create high-quality content with them in the form of podcasts or webinars.
For example, Cisco started Cisco Champion Program for their influential IT technical advocates to share their knowledge, expertise, and ideas with their industry peers across all social channels. The Champions got the opportunity to attend and participate in weekly live podcasts, got invitations to attend pre-launch briefings and other exclusive events.
Get all departments on board:
Your Sales, Marketing and Customer Success teams need to be aligned so that all the important accounts are continually surveilled. After the initial pre-purchase campaign is over, focus on nurturing the customers by designing the post-sales-funnel with the help of all the departments to ensure that the customer experience is seamless throughout the journey.
Offer a token of appreciation:
Referrals are one of the most effective acquisition tools that actually bring in quality leads, and these referral customers have a 16 percent higher lifetime value than non-referred customers.
In all probability, your brand advocates will recommend your product to only those prospects who they think will be a good fit for your company. Even if they do it out of the goodness of their hearts, you can invest in a referral marketing software to express your gratitude and encourage them to keep on referring.
Create a personalized email drip, or an in-app campaign, set it up with referral conditions, select a reward that you think will interest the advocates and run with it! It can be anything from a coupon to a company swag, depending on your relationship with the advocates.
Boosting Employee Advocacy
Your employees are the hidden gems equipped with their own niche network that can help you amplify the brand message. Leverage their connections, company knowledge and skill set to create and distribute content. However, just asking them to share the content isn’t going to move the needle. You need to have a proper program in place.
- Train them, organize workshops to educate them about the importance of social sharing and how they can contribute to spreading the word.
- Boost their network by following them from the company profiles, sharing their relevant posts, co-creating content with them. Help them build their personal brand so that they gain enough credibility to market your company.
- Incentivize the program, but don’t bribe them. Organize fun contests for frequent sharers and referrers, acknowledge them in important company events.
Your happy customers have tremendous brand value — they drive awareness, are capable of persuading people to consider your product, they bring in quality leads susceptible to conversion, hence boosting company growth.
Have a program architecture in place to harness the power of the advocates. It’s a fact that you need a steady influx of customers while retaining your existing ones to maintain and increase your revenue.
Other than building a kickass product and operating a stellar customer support, you need to keep the loyalists hooked and turn them into brand advocates by reinforcing your value and providing a differentiator that they care for.
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