Your Guide to a Brand Advocacy Funnel

You’re likely familiar with a sales funnel, but what about a brand advocacy funnel? A brand advocacy funnel helps you convert customers, but the end goal is to turn loyal customers into advocates. 

Brand advocates can help your brand build trust, promote products, engage customers, and drive sales. To get started, you must understand what a brand advocacy funnel is, how it works, and which strategies you can use to move people through the funnel.  

Definition of brand advocacy funnel

A brand advocacy funnel explores the stages prospective customers go through to become not only paying customers but brand advocates. Advocates genuinely love your product and are willing to share their experience with others, making them effective marketers for your brand.

The funnel represents five stages that convert people who have never heard of your product into advocates. The five stages in the funnel are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion
• Loyalty
• Advocacy

The importance and role of brand advocacy funnel in marketing

The funnel helps marketing teams align their goals and content to build a team of brand advocates. While advocates can surface on their own and share positive feedback on your behalf, it’s more effective to take an active approach to brand advocacy. 

With brand advocacy serving as your marketing team’s end game, they can design tailored content, collaborate with customer service and sales, and promote a structured advocacy program that rewards loyalty. 

The importance of each stage of the brand advocacy funnel

As you might suspect, a customer doesn’t instantly go from learning about your product to prompting it on social media. Typically, advocates go through phases, which they move through over time. The stages are:

Awareness

During the awareness phase, prospects learn about your products.  

As a brand, your efforts focus on making customers aware of your product’s existence. Using a variety of content, like product pictures, blog posts, or video demos, your brand communicates with potential buyers. 

Consideration

Once someone is aware of your product, they consider it. They look closer at your company’s mission, read product reviews, and search for additional content to learn more about your product. 

Conversion

When you convert a potential customer into a paying one, you make a conversion. It typically takes about eight touches, or brand interactions, for a customer to convert. Those eight touches could include anything from listening to your brand’s podcast to engaging with an Instagram snap. 

Loyalty

Once you make a sale, the funnel isn’t closed. Now, you need to cultivate the relationship. By keeping customers happy and monitoring retention metrics, you can build a base of loyal customers. 

Advocacy

Loyal, satisfied customers can become brand advocates. They can tout the brand and its products in a more effective way than traditional advertising and, ultimately, drive more sales. 

Strategies for nurturing customers through the brand advocacy funnel

Not every customer makes it all the way through the funnel. Some might become paying customers, but stop there. Some might even become loyal customers but aren’t interested in sharing their opinions with others. To help customers move into the final phase of advocacy, here are several suggestions:

Create content for each stage of the funnel

As customers work through the funnel, they have different needs at each stage. Your brand must meet those needs through targeted content. Think about the needs, challenges, and questions that arise at each point. 

For example, email marketing provider Campaign Monitor created an e-book to help people “consider” switching from a competing email service provider to theirs. The guide provides step-by-step instructions so prospective customers can see what’s involved in the process. 

Building strong relationships with customers

You should actively engage your customers to build strong relationships. What does that look like? Here are some ideas:

• Respond to all customer inquiries
• Personalize your communication
• Regularly connect with customers without pushing sales each time
• Reward loyal customers
• Share customer stories or testimonials

Provide exceptional customer service

To cultivate brand advocates, your brand must ensure its customer service is top-notch. Your customer service team should:

• Respond quickly and efficiently
• Always have a positive attitude and a willingness to fix any problem
• Personalize the service
• Provide solutions
• Consider creating a knowledge center so customers can help themselves
• Offer multiple methods of support

Xbox, for example, gives its customers the opportunity to call, email, or ask questions on X. 

Ask for customer feedback and use it to elevate your products or service

Customers have a wealth of knowledge, and they’re more than willing to share it if you ask. They have a different perspective than employees, so ask them how you can:

• Improve a product
• Elevate customer service
• Enrich the customer experience

You can reach out to customers through emailed surveys or gather feedback through online polls. Use the feedback to make improvements.

The role of social media in the brand advocacy funnel

Social media offers a way to connect with customers, which means it has many uses throughout the brand advocacy funnel, including these two priorities:

Attract and engage customers

Through your social channels, your brand and your advocates can use social media to reach your target audience. You can create posts that align with the various brand advocacy funnel stages and encourage followers to like, comment, and share as much as possible. 

Encourage customer advocacy

To build a team of customer advocates, you need a structured advocacy plan. From identifying advocates to inspiring them to create content on your behalf, you can use social media to share your advocacy program. 

You could encourage advocates to join a rewards program, where actions (like buying a product or sharing a product demo on social media) are rewarded with points that are redeemed for products. 

 A brand advocacy funnel provides a roadmap to follow, so your brand can encourage more customers to become advocates. An advocate marketing program can help you mobilize these ambassadors and create effective content. Want to learn more? Check out Zuberance.