Advocate marketing isn’t just about boosting consumer trust. This cost-effective tool provides a wide array of benefits, from increased brand awareness and loyalty to expanded reach and improved search engine optimization (SEO).
Check out how turning your loyal customers into brand advocates can boost your SEO strategy.
What is advocate marketing?
Advocate marketing is a strategy that uses the opinions and experiences of real people to amplify your brand’s message to your target audience. Examples of these customer-created assets—user-generated content (UGC)—may include reviews, testimonials, videos, images, ratings, and blogs.
10 ways advocate marketing helps SEO
Although advocate marketing can include thought leaders, employees, and industry pioneers, most of your efforts will be focused on content created by your brand’s enthusiastic customers. This is especially true for B2C and D2C brands who want to hear from real consumers about their experience with a product or service.
Here are 10 ways your brand can use customer advocacy marketing to help your SEO efforts.
Build trust with social proof
By demonstrating to your target audience that others have had positive experiences with your product, service, or brand, consumers are more likely to deem your brand trustworthy. Known as the “bandwagon effect,” this psychological tactic can create a sense of reliability and safety, encouraging others to take action by lowering the perception of risk.
Sharing this content on your social channels and sites signifies to search engines that you’re a credible source of information with topical authority.
Provide visual content
User preferences now lean toward the visual in obtaining information and search engines prioritize pages and sites with images and videos when looking for answers to users’ queries.
Offer fresh content for search engines
The type of content is incredibly important, but so is its volume and newness. Advocate marketing provides plenty of fresh content to signal search engines that your pages are frequently updated rather than stagnant.
Expand the diversity of your content
When consumers create content about your brand, it adds variety in terms of content, keywords, and creators themselves. This increases the appeal to a broader spectrum of consumers and the chances of appearing in SERPs thanks to the wider spectrum of information and keywords on your website. Create transcripts of your advocates’ videos to provide more keywords for search engines to index.
Create the potential for backlinks
Search engines consider backlinks a key factor because they indicate your content is valuable. When bloggers, journalists, or other creators use your user-generated content, it can provide valuable backlinks, which demonstrate to search engines that your content is worth referencing.
Increase engagement
User-generated content, such as reviews, is often the first thing consumers look for on a website or e-commerce store to help them determine if a purchase is worth their money. By sharing advocate-created video tutorials, reviews, or unboxing videos, you’ll get users engaged and keep them on your pages longer. Search engines view these metrics as important because they suggest your site offers relevant and helpful content.
Encourages others to create UGC
When consumers see customers sharing positive content about a brand, it can help drive action in others beyond just visiting a site or making a purchase; it can encourage them to make content themselves. You can encourage this by hosting contests and challenges with recognition, financial, or promotional incentives for participation or by creating an advocate marketing program. More UGC provides exponential marketing that feeds back into increased SEO.
Capitalize on metadata
Don’t skimp on your advocate-created videos’ metadata (tags, titles, descriptions, keywords). By including this information, you’ll help consumers and search engines find your content.
Localize content
Tagging UGC with information specific to your location can help ensure your business, brand, product, or services show up in local searches. This could mean adding tags with the town, city, state, or region or asking your advocates to mention locations in their content and then including transcriptions on your website.
Increase likelihood of rich snippet inclusion
Annotate your advocate-created content with structured data to help search engines find it and increase the chances that it will show up in the highlighted results as rich snippets. These showcased pieces often include helpful information for consumers, such as recipes, thumbnail videos, product information, reviews, and articles and are displayed near the top of SERPs.
Getting started with advocate marketing
Are you ready to ramp up your advocacy marketing efforts but don’t know where to start?
Zuberance can help marketers transform their most passionate customers into advocates who drive results. Its all-in-one advocate marketing platform offers a comprehensive suite of marketing tools to help brands recruit and reward advocates, share their content, and measure and analyze results. To learn more about how Zuberance can help you improve customer engagement and retention rates while lowering your marketing expenses, reach out for a demo.
Want to check it out?
Book a Demo
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.
