Articulating your brand’s value, the satisfaction it brings customers, and the effectiveness of your product or service is difficult. The persuasive power of existing customers, however, makes this much easier. Your brand can gather reliable, honest reviews, social media posts, or testimonials from people who turn from simply existing customers to brand advocates.
Why do brands need customer advocacy?
Businesses need customer advocacy for two reasons: Advocacy puts the customers’ voice first, and theirs is the most convincing to potential customers, and an advocacy program ensures that the brand’s goals are being realized for a positive impact on the customer.
The best customer advocates are won over by their outstanding experiences with your brand. When your customers have great experiences with your brand – that includes customer support and resolution of problems – they are prime candidates to become advocates.
Strategies for customer advocacy programs
Customer advocacy programs can be implemented in several ways. Your brand can key in on excellent customer service to draw insight into what makes customers happy, harness the power of social media to grow your reputation exponentially or identify existing opportunities to convert loyal customers into brand advocates.
Personalization in advocacy programs
Advocacy programs are all about building a deeper relationship with your customers. Understanding why they turn to your brand helps meet their needs and anticipate what they may expect from your brand in the future.
Strategies for personalizing customer experiences
Talk to your customers. This may seem simple, but it’s essential. Go beyond the customer personas you build with data and draw some qualitative insights about who your customers are.
Provide personalized products. Customers who go out of their way to advocate for your brand should be rewarded. For example, a makeup brand sending a customer advocate a travel makeup bag with their first name embroidered could drive home their appreciation for a loyal, vocal advocate.
Keep track of customers’ interactions with your brand. You can make some conclusions about how people want to engage with your brand by analyzing data surrounding the decisions they make. Answering questions such as which social platform customers interact with your brand most or what time of year they buy from you most often gives your brand the ability to cater to those needs.
Leveraging technology and automation with Zuberance.com. Technology that integrates seamlessly into your existing CRM platform allows your brand to track insights from the customer advocacy program alongside other key metrics such as sales.
Zuberance allows you to send email invitations to potential advocates from the platform. Zuberance also provides robust tracking and analytics, enabling brands to monitor the effectiveness of influencer campaigns. This data-driven approach helps in understanding the impact of each influencer and optimizing the campaigns for better ROI.
Zuberance ensures you have a holistic view of your marketing efforts. This integration is critical to understanding the full impact of your advocacy program on your sales funnel.
Building a community of advocates
Fostering a community with your advocacy efforts can make your program sustainable and bring profound insight into how customers interact with your brand.
A community makes all of your brand’s marketing efforts have an effect that is more than the sum of its parts. A community of customers who share true insight into your products offers your brand the opportunity to track behavior, sentiment, and trends. It also makes identifying potential brand advocates that much easier.
Strategies for fostering a sense of community among advocates
Welcome user-generated content. Some of the best customer advocacy programs start as TikTok challenges, Instagram hashtags, or Facebook contests. A creative, fun call for user-generated content brings your brand to the forefront of people’s minds.
Create a forum for discussion. Your brand’s website provides information about your products and answers to frequently asked questions. What if you could offer a space where people can find the answer to any question? Creating a forum for discussion about your products encourages buzz for your products and gives your die-hard fans a place to gather. A forum can have great SEO value and allow you to keep tabs on the sentiment around your brand.
Be responsive. Frequent contact with customers tells them your brand is here to hear what they say. Whether they have praise, concerns, issues, or questions, customers will be happy to engage with a brand that is quick to reply on social platforms, phone support, or email.
Measuring the success of your customer advocacy program
Zuberance makes it easy to track the success of your efforts.
How to track program success
Assess the success of your program after a set period of time. Compare metrics before and after the implementation of your customer advocacy program.
Examine essential metrics such as the number of UGC pieces created, number of advocates, engagement rates, referral traffic, and conversion rates before and after your program takes off. These numbers will help you understand your advocate community.
It’s also crucial to set goals for your program. Does your brand want to aim for a stronger social media presence, or are you focusing on increasing sales? Can increasing efforts toward either of those goals correlate with improving the other?
Thought starters
Zuberance helps businesses maximize their ability to impress customers with data-driven, multi-faceted strategies that build brand advocacy opportunities and create communities of brand advocates. FeastFiesta, a unique restaurant with Instagram-friendly meals and decor, succeeded with the assistance of Zuberance’s suite of brand advocacy resources.
FeastFiesta wanted to improve its online presence through Google and Yelp reviews, and encourage diners to share their memorable dining experiences. Zuberance helped FeastFiesta build a community of brand advocates and launched the Share Your Feast campaign, which encouraged diners to share the visual and emotional appeal of their experience at FeastFiesta.
Zuberance, an IZEA company, is on a mission to revolutionize customer-based marketing through brand advocacy. Brand advocacy turns customer satisfaction into a potent force, transforming authentic customer voices into effect, genuine marketing.
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Businesses leverage Zuberance to fuel their advocacy programs, integrating them into their overall marketing programs. The outcome? Lowered marketing expenses, enhanced customer engagement, improved retention rates, and most importantly, positive ROI.
