Edward Boatman • May 9th
Have you ever seen a popular celebrity or influencer wearing clothes or using products from a brand you’ve never heard of? Or, an employee on LinkedIn talking about their company in a way that solves a problem you might have? These are a common practice for many brands, and it can even encourage some consumers to purchase a product they’ve never heard of before. After all, why wouldn’t you trust cookware endorsed by a celebrity chef or a service for your company to solve an immediate problem you’ve identified
These are examples of brand advocacy, and it’s a strategy brands use to reach larger audiences and inform their target market of their products and services. Whether you’re an established brand launching a new product or a smaller brand trying to reach new customers, encouraging brand advocacy can help. We’ll take a closer look at brand advocacy, why it’s important, and how to build brand advocacy in this guide.
Put simply, a brand advocate is a person who promotes and advocates for your brand. In some cases, brand advocates also function as brand ambassadors — or someone you pay to promote your brand. In other cases, they are employees already employed by the brand using their social media and voice to promote the brand and its services. For example, the HexClad brand hiring Gordon Ramsey to advertise its products is an example of a brand ambassador paid to promote a brand.
Your goal as a brand should be to encourage natural brand advocacy, where your customers and employees are the ones spreading the word about your brand and its benefits. It is often considered more authentic when coming from a person rather than a branded social media account. While brand advocacy was traditionally word-of-mouth marketing, many people learn about brands through social media today.
Source: The Three Levels of Happiness
Brand advocacy is one of the best ways to grow your customer base organically. Reaching a larger audience is one of the biggest challenges, especially if you’re trying to do it in a way that’s not off-putting to people. Your customers don’t want to be upsold or convinced to buy something they don’t need, but you don’t have to worry about that when other people are advocating for your brand.
While building brand advocacy can cost time and money, it’s one of the more cost-effective forms of marketing once you’ve got strong brand advocates. There’s also a snowball effect that makes brand advocacy increasingly effective over time. If someone recommends your brand to a friend and their friend loves your brand, you might have a new brand advocate.
Brand advocacy is especially important for products that are widely used. Most people aren’t in the market for professional-grade audio equipment, but you might recommend the new wireless earbuds you purchased to a friend or colleague.
Brand ambassador is typically a term reserved for paying someone to advertise a brand or product. In many cases, brand ambassadors are celebrities who are paid to post on social media and appear in ads to promote a product. This can be an excellent way for larger brands to connect with a target audience they’re not currently reaching. Examples include:
For the average brand, focusing on brand advocacy through your employees is more important than finding a brand ambassador. Oftentimes, your employees have a vested interest in the success of your company and are willing to help share about your brand via their social networks. Likewise, they are often closer to your customers, creating a network of people who are closely aligned to your target audience, which makes targeting your brand message easier than you might think.
Source: PostBeyond
Some of the most successful brands in the world have relied on employee advocacy to expand and reach new target audiences. Your employees know your brand and your products inside and out, from the features and benefits to the challenges people face when using competitors’ products. It also helps when people are in the market for a product or service that solves their problem or question.
Employee brand advocacy can often be seen on social media and are seen as a form of thought leadership. Additionally as communities become more prevalent, employee brand advocacy pops up in community discussion.
Source: Exit Five
For example, in the private B2B marketing community, Exit Five, a tool recommendation was made in two of the comments from either a past or current employee of a company.
Even if someone isn’t an employee, they can still be intimately familiar with and advocate for your brand. You can probably think of a brand or product you’ve been counting on for years — and you might know more about those products than some employees do. Customers who have used a product to solve a specific problem and had a positive experience can recommend that product or brand to people they know.
If friends or family whose opinions you trust recommend a particular brand or product, the odds of you checking out that brand or product increase.
The concept of brand advocacy is simple enough, but how do you encourage someone to become an advocate for your brand? And who makes a good brand advocate? Building brand advocacy can take time, but you can start by using some of these strategies to encourage customers and employees to become brand advocates.
If you want people to advocate for your brand, the first thing you need to focus on is creating positive customer experiences. People aren’t going to advocate for your brand if they have a bad experience with your product. Even something as simple as a difficult checkout process can discourage someone from recommending your brand to friends and family.
Make sure your customers have positive experiences with your brand and they’ll be more likely to have brand loyalty and become advocates. You can create positive customer experiences by focusing on the customer journey and the quality of your products.
Your brand identity and the products you create are important, but those aren’t the only things that keep customers coming back. If you want people to commit to your brand and recommend it to people as a trusted brand, focus on positive customer relationships.
Even if a customer has a somewhat negative experience with a product, you can maintain a positive relationship by fixing the problem for them and being friendly. Many brands are known specifically for offering legendary customer service, even if they don’t offer the best products or services. Some of the most successful brands — like Chick-fil-A and Chewy— are even known for high-quality products and unrivaled customer service.
Source: X
Offering incentives is always an effective way to get people to share your brand with others. If you don’t have a referral program, now is the perfect time to set one up. Brand advocates can refer their friends using a unique code or link, and you can track the number of referrals each advocate has. This helps boost your brand by encouraging advocates to spread the word about your brand, and you can even use tracked referrals to reward advocates.
Your customers aren’t likely to become brand advocates and recommend your brand to friends and family if you don’t tell them about the program. When you launch your brand advocacy and referral program, promote it to make sure all your customers know how it works, what they need to do to get started, and what it means to be a brand advocate.
One of the easiest ways to promote your referral program is to highlight it for app and website users. When someone logs into your app or website or visits your online store, you can show them a quick graphic with a link to your referral program to let them know about it.
Get paid to share Lingo! Learn more about Lingo's referral program.
You don’t have to pay for brand advocacy, but offering an incentive is one of the best ways to encourage people to refer friends and family to your brand. You can offer discounts for each referral, promotions based on how much the referral spent, or a flat amount of store credit for each referral. If you are using an employee brand advocacy platform, many offer leaderboards to reward employees for sharing on social media. Each ‘share’ is associated with a point value that accumulates until it is redeemed for company swag.
Referring someone should be quick and easy, so make sure customers have a code or link they can send to friends to streamline the referral process. Popular ecommerce tools and online stores usually have this functionality built in.
There are several key metrics you can look at to measure brand advocacy and evaluate the effectiveness of your brand advocacy program. After implementing your brand advocacy program, you should look at metrics like social media mentions, referral rates, and social media shares to determine how successful the program is.
You can also get feedback from brand advocates about your advocacy program. If brand advocates recommend specific changes or have insights about which content generates more engagement, you can use that knowledge to your advantage.
Don’t forget if your brand advocacy program involves employees, comments on their social posts are a valuable place to both engage with the audience and to get a sentiment analysis in real-time.
Building a brand is challenging, and it’s not always a quick process. Encouraging brand advocacy starts with creating a better customer experience, which is why your branding strategy plays such a crucial role in the growth of your brand.
With Lingo, it’s easy to keep everyone on the same page with centralized brand guidelines. You can update your brand guidelines with the latest information and metrics regarding your brand advocacy program, and everyone can see those changes you make in real-time. Book a demo to find out how Lingo can help you optimize your branding strategy to boost brand advocacy.