What is Advocacy Marketing?
Take a moment to think back to a time when you purchased a product that you were really satisfied with. Did you tell your friends and family? Did you post something on social media? Advocacy marketing is an inexpensive yet effective marketing tactic, wherein the brand is equipping customers to generate interest in your brand through social media, reviews, and word-of-mouth. Brands can empower and equip their customers to be powerful marketing tools for their products. But how do is advocacy marketing set up? Below, we have a few things to consider when you’re developing your advocacy marketing strategies.
Provide an excellent product
The only way to find and develop advocates is to provide an excellent product or service. It won’t matter how well you market your product or how friendly and helpful your customer service is if your product doesn’t provide value to the customer. Each customer is coming into the shopping experience with a problem, and vendors are selling solutions to those problems. But your solution has to provide value. Focus on the product before you find advocates. Once your product is as good as it can be, it will be much easier to find someone to advocate for you.
Deliver an excellent experience
The customer experience might be the most important part of building an advocacy marketing program. Each piece of the experience holds significance, whether it’s an in-store experience, unpackaging the product, or their interactions with your customer service reps. The weight these experiences hold should not be underestimated. When the customer walks away from a positive experience like this, they will likely encourage their friends to look into your company.
Customers come first
This may seem obvious, but your customers must come first. Listening to your customers and hearing what they have to say is the foundation of customer service. If they feel that you’re not taking their questions or concerns seriously, you will lose credibility and customer loyalty. Show your audience that you care about what they need by responding to questions on social media, writing blogs about how the customers are influencing the product and updating your FAQ page with answers to real customer questions. Maintain your customer’s loyalty by being honest about shipping time, customer support, and discounts. If they believe that they can rely on your brand, they will advocate for it.
Make it easy to advocate
Give your customers a reason to advocate for you! The simplest way to do this is to divide your customers into two groups: customers that love your brand so much that they want to talk about, and customers that loved your brand but need incentives to share their experience. Both groups are great, they just require different approaches. After you divide them up, provide all of the necessary branded pieces they will need: pre-written social media posts, images, hashtags, and branded links.
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