Expense and efficacy are key considerations for your marketing efforts: How much will a strategy cost your business, and how well will it work?
Often, there’s a trade-off involved: Yelling your business’s name on the subway is ineffective but free, and going door-to-door with product recommendations and samples would probably work if it weren’t cost-prohibitive.
Word-of-mouth marketing strategies are an exception. These strategies encourage brand advocacy, activating your audience to promote your brand for you. Brand advocacy can maximize conversions and reach while utilizing relatively few resources—though it does require careful planning and thoughtfulness to be truly effective. Here’s a deep dive into this approach and a guide to help you build your own brand advocacy program.
What is brand advocacy?
Brand advocacy occurs when people promote your brand to others, often by sharing content on social media platforms or discussing your brand in social groups.
Brand advocacy can boost brand awareness, improve your brand image, and help you attract potential customers. Encouraging brand advocacy can also be more effective than promoting your business directly. Research shows that more consumers trust recommendations from people they know over messaging from a company.
Many ecommerce businesses use brand advocacy programs to identify brand advocates and encourage word-of-mouth marketing activities. Culinary brand Momofuku Goods is one example. “I think we as a brand have always kind of prioritized the diehards, the people that are spreading the word to all of their friends,” says Momofuku restaurant group CEO Marguerite Zabar Mariscal on an episode of Shopify Masters. “I think if you can start there and have it continue to radiate out, that’s how we find marketing works best.”
Types of brand advocates
Anybody can be a brand advocate, but many advocates fall into one of the following categories:
Customer advocates
Customer advocacy occurs when existing customers or former clients recommend your company to others. Many effective brand advocacy programs focus on customer advocacy. Loyal customers can speak directly to your products, services, and customer experience, and they typically represent a business’s largest pool of potential advocates.
Employee advocates
Your employees know your brand from the inside out, so their recommendation is a vote of confidence in your products or services and the integrity of the process behind them. Employee advocacy also speaks well of your company culture and can help you attract and hire new talent.
Strategic partner advocates
Co-marketing or co-branding partners and other strategic allies can also advocate for your brand. Strategic partnerships often involve reciprocal advocacy. For example, a trail-running shoe company might suggest that customers purchase running gaiters from a partner brand, while the gaiter company might refer clients to that shoe company for trail-worthy kicks.
You can also earn recommendations from industry peers, including consultants, vendors, and acquaintances from your professional networks.
Influencer advocates
Influencer marketing programs can also promote brand advocacy. You can pay for content featuring your brand or compensate specific influencers for long-term brand advocacy partnerships (known as brand ambassadorships). Influencer advocates can promote your brand at in-person events and through blogs, social media posts, or videos.
How to build your brand advocacy program
- Set goals
- Choose an audience
- Assess your reputation
- Build relationships
- Provide incentives
- Launch your program
Brand advocacy programs vary in target audience, scope, and scale. You can encourage word-of-mouth promotion by building an elaborate customer loyalty program complete with a custom mobile app—or by sending a few business cards with each online order. These six steps can help you build a successful brand advocacy program for your business.
1. Set goals
A brand advocacy strategy can help you increase brand visibility and brand recognition, reach new audiences, and increase sales—and you can design your program to target the outcomes that provide the most strategic value to your business.
Start by setting brand advocacy goals that ladder up to your larger marketing and business goals. If one of your business goals is reducing customer acquisition costs, for example, you might set a brand advocacy goal of increasing your referral volume by 40% in the next quarter.
2. Choose an audience
Use your goals to determine the best brand advocates for your campaigns. If your goal is to attract new talent or improve your reputation among industry peers, for example, you might decide to run an employee advocacy or partner advocacy program. If your goal is to boost sales, you might consider influencer or customer advocacy instead.
3. Assess your reputation
Assess the current state of your relationship with your target audience. You might conduct customer or employee satisfaction surveys, calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS), review your influencer marketing efforts and strategic partnerships, or take stock of the strength and depth of your professional network. Your goal is to determine how likely an audience is to promote your business and identify ways to increase their motivation.
4. Build relationships
Strong brand advocacy is built on authentic connections, so use your current assessment findings to build relationships with your target advocates. Engage in two-way conversations with potential customer, employee, industry, and influencer advocates; thank them for their input; and credit them for changes you make based on their feedback.
You can also build relationships with industry experts by attending industry events, developing a backlink strategy, and looking for opportunities to promote other companies. To forge connections with influencers, start by engaging with their content or sending samples for them to review.
5. Provide incentives
Many businesses build brand advocacy incentives into their programs. Here are a few examples by audience:
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Customer advocacy programs. Customer advocacy programs can reward customers for activities like making referrals, promoting a brand from their social media accounts, or submitting positive reviews to review sites or search engine directories. Common incentives include reward points or loyalty program status.
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Employee advocacy programs. Employee advocacy programs offer financial bonuses for talent referrals that result in a successful hire. You can also reward employees for referring customers to your business or for sharing user-generated content (UGC) about your company on social media channels.
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Industry advocacy programs. Industry advocacy initiatives are often built on reciprocity: You can incentivize a business or contact to promote your company by promoting theirs. Some strategic partnerships formalize this arrangement. Many co-marketing partnerships involve cross-promotion, for example.
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Influencer advocacy programs. Influencer advocacy programs offer monetary compensation or free products in exchange for brand advocacy.
Best practices include providing exclusive incentives or benefits and allowing brand advocates to choose from a range of reward options. You can also research incentives that motivate your target audience and review successful advocacy marketing initiatives in your target market to see how they create brand advocates.
6. Launch your program
Launch your program, and promote your brand advocacy campaigns through your website, social media channels, and email marketing programs. Keep track of performance goals through social listening tools, “How did you hear about us?” surveys, and customer engagement rates with your email campaigns.
Tips for creating your brand advocacy program
- Create shared spaces
- Provide shareable assets
- Onboard advocates
- Recruit your fans
- Make it personal
- Focus on customer experience
- Monitor performance
Here are seven strategies to maximize the success of your brand advocacy program, with insight from Marguerite on how Momofoku approaches it:
Create shared spaces
Create spaces where customers can share their feedback and insights with each other. Enable customer reviews on your online store, and use automated post-purchase emails to encourage satisfied customers to review and rate products. You can also add your company to online business directories (by creating a Google Business Profile, for instance) and create groups or discussions dedicated to your brand on social platforms.
“We have a Facebook group for the products that’s about 15,000 people right now,” says Marguerite. “And every day, people are posting recipes, they’re commenting on each other’s photos, they’re talking about what new products they want to see and building that kind of very intentional community around the products.”
Provide shareable assets
Encourage referrals by making it as easy as possible to promote your business. Provide shareable materials that your advocates can use to spread the word. For example, you can provide referral links that drive to unique landing pages, create entertaining social posts or blog content for brand advocates to share, distribute high-quality product photos to influencer partners, or share brochures, sell sheets, and business cards with industry partners.
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Onboard advocates
A formal onboarding process ensures brand advocates understand how to promote your company, how to access rewards, and who to contact with feedback or questions. Share brand assets, provide sample posts and channel recommendations, and cover any legal or brand parameters.
Recruit your fans
Momofuku Goods encourages brand advocacy by promoting user-generated content on social platforms and reaching out to brand enthusiasts about advocacy partnerships. “We will find people that are organically posting about our products because they love them, and then those are the people that we’re going to say, ‘Hey, let’s work together on producing content,’” says Marguerite. “We’re not trying to sell someone on something that they’re not already a believer in, but I think it’s really giving those people an elevated platform.”
Make it personal
Expressing gratitude can help you build and maintain relationships with brand advocates. Consider sending personalized thank-you notes or gifts, like branded merch, for referrals. As your referral program grows, you can move to automated email follow-ups and reserve personal notes or calls for your top brand advocates.
Focus on customer experience
A high-quality customer experience is critical to any advocacy strategy. “This is where I think we really have a leg up as a restaurant group,” Marguerite says. “This idea of customer service, taking care of someone, creating an experience for someone. I think that that’s something that we’re always trying to do, whether it’s DTC or if someone is physically coming in to eat.”
Maximizing value throughout the customer journey can encourage all types of brand advocates to refer prospective customers to your business. Best practices include soliciting and responding to customer feedback and using customer satisfaction surveys to identify areas for improvement. You can also consider strategies like including free product samples in orders or reaching out to customers by phone to offer proactive customer support.
Monitor performance
Use brand monitoring, social media analytics, website analytics, and ecommerce analytics tools to monitor your progress toward your goals. In addition to tracking growth in customer numbers or sales, you can also see referral sources, identify your most successful assets and channels, and monitor online conversions about your brand—information that can help you adjust your strategy and improve results.
Brand advocacy FAQ
How do you build a brand advocate program?
Here’s how to build an effective brand advocacy program:
1. Set advocacy goals.
2. Choose a type of advocacy program.
3. Assess your reputation.
4. Build relationships.
5. Provide incentives.
6. Launch your program.
How do you measure brand advocacy?
You can use multiple marketing metrics to measure the effectiveness of a brand advocacy campaign. Examples include brand mentions, referral rates, customer acquisition costs, and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
What is the difference between brand ambassadors and brand advocates?
A brand advocate is an employee, customer, business owner, or influencer who promotes your brand to others in their network. Brand ambassadors are paid brand advocates, often influencers contracted to promote your brand for a specific length of time.