Brand Advocate Recruitment Tips: How to Recruit a Customer Advocate

A brand advocate loves your brand and shares their experiences with friends, family and the online community. Finding and recruiting advocates for your brand may be simple or may take a little digging, depending on how your customers are already connecting with your brand.

Recruiting brand advocates may seem easy to jump into, especially if you already have a pool of potential ambassadors, but brands should make sure they have an organized program first. Not only is this a better experience for the advocates, but it will also set your internal team up for success. Here are seven tips to get you started with brand advocate recruitment.

Brand advocate recruitment tips

Create a brand advocate profile

First and foremost, know who you’re looking for. You may already have a customer persona created, so use that to begin. What is important to your brand? Who do you want to promote your brand? Start developing a comprehensive list so you know exactly who you’re looking for.

Things to include:

• Demographics
• Experience with the brand
• Online community size (if needed)

Find loyal customers first

The first place to recruit a brand advocate is your current customer base. Which employees are your brand’s most prominent cheerleaders? Which customers have signed up for loyalty programs? Who has joined your mailing list? Do you have any partnerships with other brands you can tap into? Most importantly, which customers are already talking about you? Look at your reviews, emails to customer service, tags or comments on social media, and referrals.

Finding brand advocates authentically in love with your brand is of utmost importance, so why not start with those who already sing your praises? It’s a slam dunk — you have found the right advocates and those customers will feel like they get to be a part of something special with a brand they love.

Have a clear outline of your ambassador program

Develop a clear outline of your advocate program before inviting anyone to join. Brainstorm tasks you would like your advocates to take, topics for discussion with your community, products you might ask them to try or share, and any perks that will come along with the program. You want to be sure the program benefits advocates, whether it’s discounts on your product, recognition or giveaways.

Share your program with customers

Once you’ve got a clear program outline, it’s time to share it with the customers you think will resonate with it. One way to invite advocates is to use the Zuberance platform, where you can email invitation links to your potential candidates. You can also share your program on your social media, via your email list or in-store.

This is also the time to reach out to customers you think would be a good fit who are already sharing about you online, in reviews or other ways.

Connect with and interview potential advocates

Connect with the pool of advocates you have. You can interview them virtually or in person, create application forms, or send them personal messages.

Organize and measure your program

Finally, you’ll want to have a way to measure your program. Within your outline (mentioned above,) your brand should have some metrics that you’ll be following to understand success.

Some ways to measure the ROI of your program would be:

• Number of advocates
• Number of social media shares
• Rise in product ratings on third-party sites
• Sentiment or feedback
• Referral revenue
• Link clicks
• Social media engagement

With Zuberance’s brand advocacy platform, brands have access to these analytics and can report the program’s results to internal stakeholders.

Recruiting brand advocates into your advocacy program is a fun new adventure for your brand and customers. Take in feedback, update your program as you go and remember to keep that line of communication open between your brand and the advocates.