As a young man, one of the things I did was work at a Tony Robbins lecture. I noticed a whole bunch of people selling tickets for other workshops and courses , all wearing T-shirts with the gold glittery word “Volunteer” on the back.
I approached one of these volunteers and asked her why she was giving her time for free instead of earning at least the minimum wage (like I was). Her answer? She was such a fan of the talks that she always volunteered to sell tickets when one was happening nearby.
Robbins had created a following of loyal fans who helped him market his products for free. This brand advocacy was a cost-effective marketing strategy that required him to pay only for catering (in the form of sandwiches and drinks) and a bulk order of glitter T-shirts.
Many people with speech bubbles
Why your next marketing move should be to build brand advocacy
Brand advocacy not only works for motivational speakers, but can also significantly impact a company's success in brand awareness and brand positioning, especially when it has limited financial resources.
This particularly affects small and medium-sized companies, which often do not have the resources for chatbots or a large acquisition team. This can lead to lost leads and lost sales.
The cost-effective alternative to chatbots and acquisition teams? A solid brand positioning that creates basic customer service without incurring additional costs.
This article explains how a company can keep its overhead low while still generating loyal customers and leads. It also describes brand advocacy strategies: how they work and how they can help a company with brand positioning and increasing brand awareness.
The 4 Brand Advocacy Strategies
Simply put, a brand advocate is someone who is so enthusiastic about a product that they speak out in public on behalf of a company.
Below we focus on four customer-based types of brand advocates:
Table of Brand Advocacy Types
Brand loyalists are loyal customers who buy all of a particular company's products because they like it so much. The catch: They may not publicly endorse the company.
Brand advocates like a company and its products and will promote them to anyone who will listen. The catch: They don't necessarily use the products themselves.
Brand ambassadors are the holy grail, the declared goal of brand advocacy. They use a product and like it so much that they recommend the company to everyone, whether it's friends, family, neighbors or their pets.
Brand detractors not only reject a product, but also try to persuade others not to use it. Sometimes a company's brand advocates and ambassadors are also brand detractors of its competitors.
All four types of brand advocates can be crucial to achieving business goals: the first three types can greatly advance your company, while the fourth type can, in the worst case, cause damage.
Why Brand Advocacy is beneficial for a company regardless of goals
Companies usually set specific goals that can change depending on a variety of factors. However, brand advocacy strategies are a universal solution.
Let’s look at five common business goals and how brand advocacy can help achieve them.
1. Goal: Increase visibility
Brand ambassadors frequently use social media and are twice as likely to share information about a company as non-brand ambassadors.
Marketing planning service Marketing Charts even found that brand ambassadors reach an average of 150 people each time they mention a company. With just five ambassadors, that's 650 new people learning about the products.
This kind of public relations cannot be bought, which brings us to the next point.
2nd goal: Maintain a positive ROI
Brand advocacy is a relatively inexpensive marketing strategy. Companies and their products receive a lot of attention through channels that cost them nothing .
At most, you have to create incentives for your ambassadors (we'll get to that in a moment) and pay for advocacy software to measure success, but other than that, there are no other costs.
3. Goal: Generate leads
According to a 2018 Gartner survey, 27% of small and medium-sized businesses use social media as their first source of information when purchasing software.*
When brand advocates are active, the increased visibility and positive portrayal means that up to a quarter of all software buyers in the sales funnel can be traced back to them.
4th goal: increase productivity
When brand advocates take on the majority of outreach, generate organic search results, and create demand, the marketing team can focus primarily on innovative projects and serve more channels.
87% of Germans feel stressed and one in two believe they are facing burnout . This makes work easier for the marketing department and is a correspondingly important building block of the company strategy.
By becoming brand advocates, customers take on more of a partner role. They feel part of the process and a valuable member of the community.
This is a great way to collect feedback, get to know your customer base even better, and give them a feeling of appreciation.
The key to your own brand advocacy
To have an effective brand advocacy program, you need to follow at least a few denmark telegram data broad guidelines.
determination of KPIs
The first step is to establish tangible metrics, known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). This could be something as simple as “increasing the number of social media followers,” which is both easily measured and clearly attributable to brand advocacy.
The latter is especially important – the KPIs must be directly linked to the brand advocacy program, otherwise you will get incorrect results, which in turn can have negative effects elsewhere.
Here's an example: A bad KPI would be "increase sales." Aside from social media presence, there are a number of other factors that contribute to increasing sales. To attribute all of the success to brand advocacy alone would belittle the work of the other teams and harm them - and the company.
determining the target audience
Then you have to get a clear picture of your target audience. Which social media platforms do they use? Who do they follow there?