The Art (or Science) of Modern Advocacy Marketing

What do good brands do so impressively as to motivate you to tell other brands about them?Your telling others good things about a brand makes you a “brand advocate” - exactly what you want other brands to do for you.Word-of-mouth is the most trusted form of marketing: over 90% trust peer recommendations over any other form of marketing, yielding businesses 37% higher customer retention rates!Here, I’ll describe how you can nurture other brands into growing your business, through “advocacy marketing”.

What is Advocacy Marketing?Advocacy marketing is the promotion of your brand through others mentioning your brand positively whenever and wherever possible - recommending you, mentioning you on social or in reviews… the list goes on. Put another way, it’s connecting with those businesses who are so happy with your products, services and help desk experiences that they just have to tell everybody.Of course, this sort of publicity is pure gold for marketers - low-cost, highly profitable - for example, Cisco is achieving an ROI of 368%1 with its B2B advocacy program - proving that brand advocates are priceless to marketers.Why would a business advocate another business? If they’re direct competitors, then maybe not but if they’re not and especially if they’re complementary businesses or better still subsidiaries, then it makes perfect sense! You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours! There is still a lot of communication between businesses, including formal and not so formal references. Use them.How to Execute Advocacy MarketingAdvocacy marketing isn’t so prescriptive a science. Rather, it is following what you ‘feel’ is going right. However, there are some basic principles to follow:1. Aim for product or service excellence.To turn brands into advocates (or “fans”), first, have yourself an excellent product or service. No amount of marketing or customer experience will make up for a substandard product or service - but an excellent product or service can cover up shortfalls in marketing or customer experience!2. Aim for excellence in customers’ brand experience.Every interaction with your brand - every client browsing your products or services, every contact with your service team, every customer delivery - forms a part of your customers’ overall brand experiences. These experiences you can easily make unforgettably great experiences making your customers want to share and promote your business with their friends and colleagues.3. Be client-centric.A brand philosophy centring around your clients fosters their support and advocacy. A valuable part of this is building empathy - listening and constructively responding to your clients’ comments. Make consistency part of your brand philosophy, especially with regard to promises. Honour promises of discounts or salesHonour delivery schedules and product shipmentsHonour help and support provision, making it as quick and easy as possible.Honour your clients. Use LinkedIn, for example, to share any useful articles they publish or news that positively affects your business.Honouring promises of help and support best generates client advocacy. Every contact with a business customer is critical, so, before anyone else, provide thoroughly customer-centric support.4. Find out who your advocates are.Brand advocacy doesn’t work if you can’t identify your brand advocates. You need their details to collect feedback or contact them within campaigns: you’ll then also be well-positioned to use them for increasing brand awareness.You can do this in several ways:Campaigns that reveal their identities: competitions to create content or gifts for giving feedback (like further content).Use of tracking software to spot online engagement with your brand and advocacy.Loyalty programs - still good for creating and identifying brand advocates.Communicate with your sales teams. (see our LinkedIn article “CRP challenges along the way:”)

5. Simplify customer advocacy.Customer brand advocates come in two flavours: those who need no help or persuasion to sing your brand’s praises and those who are still passionate about your brand but won’t post or share this unless you make it worth it for them, either by giving them titbits or making it easy.For both types of advocate, you still need to make sharing their comments and feelings as easy as possible. How?Some proven methods are to provide them with:Branded hashtags that they can easily put into their comments or posts.Ready-made content that they just have to copy and paste to successfully post on social media.ClickToTweet and Share buttons on every web page to make sharing that content easy.Upload links for Instagram photo or video clips.ConclusionOffering an excellent product or service, excellent customer experience and centring your whole business culture around your customer is just good business. Businesses that refer other businesses usually get the favour returned, so one that is fully satisfied with your business is likely to tell others about you and what impresses them about you. You can’t better good references just like you can’t better advocacy marketing done well.