Branding is and should be an essential component of any marketing strategy. It is crucial for organisational growth as well. Traditionally, content, social sharing, advertising, and other approaches have been used to improve brand visibility. However, even after all the marketing push, branding efforts can still go in vain. Therefore, brand advocacy shouldn’t be overlooked.
Brand advocacy has gained significance recently, as businesses aim to stand out and gain a competitive edge. Understanding the role of brand advocacy is crucial for customer engagement, product marketing, and overall business growth. In this article, we’ll explore what brand advocacy is. Additionally, we’ll highlight its importance and how it can be leveraged.
What is Customer Brand Advocacy?
These are customers who have expressed their positive feelings about a product or service. For instance, through word-of-mouth, reviews, social media, or other means. They provide feedback on your brand experience and how they believe it could be improved. Additionally, they can act as influential vendors who sell products directly to consumers or distributors.
Colleagues, clients, or influencers can swiftly spread brand awareness. Also, outperforming paid advertising. This can take various forms, including paid ads, freebies, or simple word-of-mouth recommendations from happy customers.
Companies can use brand advocacy as part of their overall marketing strategy. However, it should be treated as an alternative to traditional advertising. Since, it is designed to reach specific target audiences.
Why is it important?
Brand advocacy is an important pillar of modern business marketing. It is a way to get consumers to officially support your company and its products. This can be done by posting reviews, photos, videos, etc. on social media platforms.
1. Build brand awareness
Brand awareness is the first step toward building brand advocacy. It is not enough to have a useful product or service. Unquestionably, it must be known. Brand awareness means you are in the minds of consumers. Also, they will refer you to others who need what you offer. Brand advocacy helps a brand expand in a more organic way. No need to spend thousands on advertising, when your supporters can spread the word about your business quickly. Depending on the size of your business, this increase may be exponential.
2. Offers insights into your product/ service
Secondly, your brand becomes more valuable since, people trust other’s opinions more than corporate statements. Customers and employees sharing knowledge about the workplace’s culture are more trusted than corporate executives. When these factors come together, they help increase a business. Further, attract top talent and increase interest in the offerings of your company.
3. Identify new audience
Customer brand advocacy programs can help a company reach new audiences. Particularly, those who might not normally fall into its target market. Brand advocates are three times more likely to tell a stranger about a brand. For instance, advertising for smartphones targets a particular age range. If a friend or co-worker they trust advocates about a smartphone, people beyond that group might be persuaded to acquire one.
How to Identify Potential Brand advocates?
A brand advocate is more of a brand ambassador. Simply put, someone who proactively promotes the brand within their networks. For instance, via social, word of mouth, email, or through content without any incentive. Besides, their love for the brand. Stakeholders that can act as brand advocates include:
Customers
To begin with, customers, or clients, are the most crucial component of brand advocacy. They go beyond referring you to others if they love your customer experience and the services you provide.
Employees
A company’s employees are not only simply employees. They also contribute significantly to the exponential growth of the brand and messaging. They can reach more businesses and people if they continuously share material and promote their firm.
Influencers
Influencers use their relationship with their followers to buy or promote products. It is an easy way for brands to reach customers who might not otherwise hear about them.
When choosing a brand advocate, it is important to identify the best fit for your business. Building strong customer communities requires brands to consider the following:
1. Social Listening
The easiest way to find brand advocates is by looking through and sorting brand mentions. Companies can use keyword-driven search campaigns to track down mentions. This can include company name, rivals, and market on digital media. These advocates are more likely to recommend what works for them.
2. Identify Social Media Sentiment
Social media sentiment measures people’s feelings about a brand, product, or service. It can help you determine the happy customers who can drive your online communities. Importantly, it is not only about whether people like or dislike a brand. It is also about looking at how they feel about it. For instance, whether they are positive or negative in their comments and reactions. Natural language processing (NLP) is one such technique. It helps grouping favourable and unfavourable posts, therefore, saving time for review.
3. Social Media Engagement
The best way to identify potential brand advocates is to look at their social media engagement. For instance, through their interactions with your brand and comments on other people’s posts. Various tools are available to assist in finding potential brand advocates on social media. Here are three great ones:
Best Practices: How to Convert your Loyal Customers into Advocates
Advocates can be a powerful force for your business. They are more likely to share your content and recommend you to others. Additionally, they can be repeat customers. However, getting them involved with your brand is not always easy. Here are some ways to make it happen:
– Use data to understand various aspects of brand experience
The starting point of converting loyal customers into brand advocates is to monitor customer engagement. Interestingly, data is a priceless resource for finding and reaching out to potential advocates. Companies can discover customers through purchase record, engagement rates, frequent communication, and good CSAT/NPS scores by tracking and analysing data. Then, to regularly interact with these identified advocates and convey information regarding incentives, AI and messaging tools can be employed.
– Provide superior experiences
Creating brand advocates involves providing a positive experience for existing customers. This builds confidence in businesses to allow supporters to participate in online forums, share ideas, and network with other fans. Therefore, making advocates feel more valued and develop a sense of community. Companies, in turn, can demonstrate their appreciation through strong loyalty programs and referral programs.
Companies should offer their advocates specific opportunities and rewards to make sure that their time is worth it. Access to pre-launch technologies, mentoring programs, or even financial incentives could fall under this category. For example, while Dropbox allows users to earn more storage space when they urge others to use its product, Google’s referral program pays consumers with bonuses when they convince others to sign up for and use Google Workspace.
– Embed feedback into your product & processes
Once you know who your valuable customers are, it is important to make sure they feel heard. Use their feedback as a way of improving your product or service, Thus, making them more satisfied with the results. Collecting feedback can help you improve your products and services. Additionally, it can help your customers make better decisions about their buying habits. You will want to make sure that giving feedback is easy for customers. If they cannot easily provide feedback, they may not bother trying at all!
There are several ways to collect and analyse customer feedback:
- Make it easy for customers to provide feedback. For instance, directly through your website or app.
- Use surveys and/or in-app tools to gather feedback.
- Include a feature that allows customers to leave a review for you on sites like Yelp or Google Places.
The idea of emphasising your company’s brand is not new. But brand advocacy is still a new idea. Though a lot of businesses are currently actively involved in brand advocacy. However, the vast majority still do not see it as a top strategy to be put into practice. While creating strategies, concentrating on your company’s brand should be a top priority. Since, it will completely support your marketing initiatives.
Content marketing is a great way to get customers excited about your brand and also build on brand advocacy. To find out how you can use content marketing and other marketing levers follow the link to our articles!
