A “brand ambassador”  or “brand advocate” can be a customer, employee, influencer, or someone who speaks favorably of a brand. A brand advocate generally promotes your brand and can influence the buying habits of others. Implementing a Brand Advocacy Program for any business will result in positive word-of-mouth marketing across various networks. 

Brand Advocacy, also termed Customer Advocacy, is often considered the holy grail of marketing. According to statistics, 92% of the customers trust recommendations from their social circles. 

Brand Advocacy Program establishes your customers’ preferred activities; it makes it easy for social influencers to connect and promote your program through their favorite platforms.

An aggressive brand advocacy program starts with a strong personal connection. It transforms active customers into dedicated partners by providing valuable incentives and rewards. 

In its most basic form, a Brand Advocacy Program converts loyal customers into active advocates. It provides rewards and incentives for your customers to participate in promotional efforts. While also providing a well-structured platform for you to organize, communicate, and direct your excited base of brand advocates. 

Ways to Boost Brand Advocacy:

Every business wants their brand to get promoted organically through word-of-mouth messages. Companies need to have a stable tool that can engage customers.

• Build a strong relationship with your customers by providing a quality product, excellent customer service, and a consistent experience
• Provide immediate help when your customers need it
• Reward your customers at every touchpoint
• Surprise customers with gifts
• Empower advocates by offering an incentive for sending new business your way
• Remember special occasions and greet your customers

The best Brand Advocacy Software provider, NextBee, rightly says –

“A large base of enthusiastic supporters passionately advocating on your behalf – this is your reward. Everything else that you do must be an incentive for your customers. Their experience will create your success. Improve it every single day, and reward yourself for a lifetime.” 

NextBee Features will Boost Brand Advocacy Key Motivators for Program Participants

• Social posts, social following, social sharing – everyday customer advocacy activities result in quickly earned points
• Keep daily sweepstakes that can generate a stream of customer advocacy
• Quickly develop exciting group challenges that increase community motivation and encourage customer advocacy
• Encourage friendly competition through dynamic leaderboards and keep everyone engaged with regular contests
• Offer exciting rewards such as a variety of profile badges, level-ups, bonus activities, cash payouts, electronic gift cards, service credits, and more
• Create auto-triggered credits for defined customer advocacy activities, such as sharing short video demonstrating correct product usage

Guaranteed Results through Smart Controls

• Keep in regular contact with your top customer through weekly challenge emails that include one-click activities
• Analyze activity based on the brand advocate’s segment, his or her captured demographics, and even the channels they come through
• Use your data to discover, contact, and recruit top influencers on social media. Create and target segments with custom messaging
• Track nearly all customer advocacy, even offline activity with printed cards, and phone sales through all major CRM software systems
• Personalize every aspect -the customer advocacy dashboard, the rewards offered, and the activities needed to gain points – all designed to be adaptive
• Pre-register current users and eliminate all sign-up friction among existing customers. Easily encourage early customer advocacy actions by providing ready-to-use welcome credits

Best of the Breed Technology Platform

• Link brand advocates with a particular franchise or inside sales professional, thereby encouraging continued activities on a more personal level
• Automatically synchronize all major CRM software systems to capture every engagement, online and offline
• Use our optimized Social Connect plugin for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to make it even easier to encourage brand advocates to share
• Put your program in purse and pocket with a branded mobile application that makes it simple to stay engaged
• Enjoy the integrated Single Sign-On technology to allow users the ease of logging in with their current customer account.
• Develop a series of critical events and triggered milestones in the program, from birthdays to the anniversary of first purchase, and easily create accompanying automated messages

Commitment to Success of the Program

• Encourage brand advocates to take the lead by efficiently facilitating quality customer-generated content 
• Easily use your data on user behaviors and activities to identify, contact, and recruit your strongest brand advocates
• Suggest topics for social and blog posts for top brand advocates, including pre-filled form content 
• Consult us for the facilitation of group webinars, help in creating learning modules, and support for direct one-on-one assistance to your top brand advocates
• Create a curated Twitter list to facilitate private dialog among select brand advocates
• Take advantage of our advanced expertise based on real-world experience in building customer advocacy campaigns

Active Engagement with the Advocacy Program Users

When an advocacy program automatically reacts to your users’ activities by either thanking them, requesting them to do it again, or offering a more valuable reward, that user knows that their participation matters. Such interactions have proven to be significant drivers of increased participation.

The Advocacy Program users will also quickly grow fond of favorite activities, look forward to doing them, and expect to be rewarded for their participation. Use their demonstrated desire as leverage to motivate behaviors and actions that help you meet and exceed your program’s goals. 

Control the direction of your advocacy program users’ energy and harness it to be as effective as possible by structuring the program’s approach:

Goal – Measurably increased engagement Method: 

Do it again, do it more – When you see a pattern that indicates a popular activity encourages its expanded use. If your users enjoy posting images to Twitter, tweak the incentive, so they post to Pinterest as well.

Goal – Development of user-directed advocacy Method:

Follow the follower – Demonstrate program leadership by delegating to your users. Regularly post an image of one of your products and hold contests for creating the official product slogan. By following the lead of your users, you will generate greater buy-in from all of your customers.

Goal – Expansion of your customer base Method: 

Do what your data tells you – Your customers will naturally migrate to new activities, communication methods, and social media platforms. When your Program demonstrates the adaptive ability to react and grow along with your customers, they will increase their advocacy on your behalf and earn you many new customers.

Developing a reliable, robust brand advocacy program is the key to success. It will establish emotional touchpoints that directly boost brand advocacy.

When customers know that their activities and actions have a real impact, they tend to react correctly.

The customers benefit both emotionally and financially from participating in an advocacy program. The more they become involved, the more likely they will remain valuable customers advocating on your behalf for a very long time.

 1. Accelerate the Entire Eco-System 

You want to motivate your advocates within every aspect of your business. It is not just your customers who will become your greatest advocates. Employees, vendors, suppliers, and other partners can all aggressively advocate on your behalf.

Create Advocate Teams

• Combine customers and employees into teams that benefit from each other’s efforts
• Develop team goals and rewards
• Create exciting competitions between multiple teams
• We always do more when working together. Design a program that offers everyone that opportunity

Promote Exclusivity as a Reward

• Create a private Twitter list of your top advocates
• Let them know about upcoming promotions ahead of time
• Increase their prestige by letting them give other program users access to a VIP level

Seek Valuable Affiliations

• Ask your advocates about what sites they visit and what blogs they read
• Explore creating affiliate relationships with those bloggers and sites
• Encourage your advocates to submit guest posts and assist them with the content

2. Focus on Power Users 

Your best advocate deserves special attention. It is not only for a job well done but also for learning how to motivate a user to go the extra mile. Share their strategies for success with others and even organize them into a best practices guide for new advocates. You can use your users to not only create more brand advocates but better ones as well.

Develop and Advocate Checklist

Use your program data and survey top advocates to identify 35 actions that increase the likelihood of long-term success—design messages and incentives for your users to motivate them to complete every activity.

Generate Wider Public Support

Celebrate the success of your top advocates with press releases that emphasize their standing on a leaderboard. Create promotional events that focus on their contributions. Design targeted microsites based on the preferences of your top advocates and promote it alongside your regular site. 

Directly Contact Early Achievers

Those users who achieve the first rewards most quickly can offer a wealth of actionable information. Learn their favorite activities for gaining points. Ask what they would suggest to other users. Give them a status reward by featuring them in an upcoming newsletter.

3. Plan Remarketing Strategies

Remarketing strategies have proven to be an effective means of placing a product’s message in front of interested customers’ eyes. It keeps the customers engaged and leads directly to increased sales. Attaining insight into your customers’ preferences and the incentives they respond to can increase the effectiveness of your remarketing efforts dramatically.

Your brand advocates will always demonstrate what the most interested customer prefers. The actions and activities of your brand advocates can answer these questions and more.

• Do they spread messages that speak to your product’s utility or the lifestyle it suggests?
• On which platforms do they interact the most with their followers?
• Are they motivated more by a big reward or a valuable discount?
• How far off into the future can the reward be placed?

Everyone seeks a complete understanding of their customers’ motivations. The ability to combine multiple data streams into one easy-to-use dashboard for quick and in-depth analysis can rapidly improve anyone’s approach to every customer interaction.

Recruit social influencers

Understand which potential customer needs product remarketing and respond to a discount for sharing their social media purchase.

Know-how to follow

Use an analysis of your program’s engagement levels over time to ascertain precisely when, where, and how to present a product to a new customer.

Encourage a sense of competition

Instead of displaying products through remarketing, keep a running tally on how often that product has been purchased and shared on social media.

A robust Brand Advocacy Program can deepen the relationship with your customers to engage them in the program. Even those who have only just visited your site for the very first time. Tracking for remarketing efforts have always focused on what products were viewed.

A remarketing program can even become a reward for your Brand Advocates. You can encourage your advocates to take the lead on developing targeted messages that speak personally to a potential new customer. When their efforts result in a successful new sale, the advocate can earn a reward.

4. Push Notification via Mobile Apps

Push notifications drive advocacy programs on social platforms that run user engagement and interaction like never before. By pushing your message directly to the most compelling screen in use today – our phones – engagement has become more direct, personal, and relevant than ever before.

You can develop your own branded mobile apps that place your program directly into the purse and pocket of every one of your customers. Now, when you want to get an important message out to your top program users, you can add push notifications to your arsenal and guarantee greater promotion penetration than ever before.

Beyond superior promotion control, a branded mobile app with push notifications gives you the ability to interact with your program users in a highly personalized manner. 

Stay in touch across multiple platforms

Send automatic notifications when a user’s program-related post on social media is liked and shared by their friends, family, and colleagues.

Push motivational updates

Automatically inform every program member whenever there’s a change in the top 5 leaderboard positions.

Creatively use innovative features

Develop geo-targeting activities and games, such as rewarding users merely for visiting a particular store or area multiple times.

Program users rely on their smartphones to keep them connected to the most important people, activities, and events in their lives. It’s the best platform for fostering a close personal relationship that will provide a lifetime value for both the user and your program. 

Instead of encouraging your program users to interact through your website, you can push important information and activities directly to your users. 

When new rewards are added or earned, you can automatically push an image of the reward out to your customers. When they are one social engagement away from earning bonus points, your program can make a one-click method for achieving the incentive.   

If you want to form your users into teams and entire cities into game boards, you can push your imagination to limit the possibilities that mobile enables.

5. Make the Advocacy Program Successful

Many strategies remain for promoting your program to a growing community of dedicated users. No matter the method, we often encourage our clients, as well as ourselves, to keep the following points in mind:

Provide an Ego Boost

Go out of your way to design a program that reminds users what a great decision they made by joining the program. When users consider your brand, it should work as a mirror, reflecting their best characteristics. 

Remain Useful

Offer important information, and keep your users updated on current trends. Work to develop a program that becomes a trustworthy resource for your users by helping them to remain up-to-date and connected with what matters in their lives.  

Aim for the Heart

Humor works well because it provokes socially acceptable emotions. We all love a good laugh. Pulling the heart-strings with a touching message can have a similar effect.

You do not need to take this general approach and posture always, though it is often useful to deploy a healthy mix of many of these suggested items. If you have reliable messaging that works and suddenly starts to go stale, it’s a good list to remember to ensure you are still following core principles.

The strategy you use to engage and grow loyal users’ active base will change as your program progresses. A successful launch is only the first step. Consistently following a well-defined plan will encourage the likelihood of an advocacy program’s growth and success.

Conclusion

An adaptive and robust brand advocacy program accelerates all sorts of advocacy efforts with a multi-pronged approach. It includes exciting contests, regular sweepstakes, community rewards, competitive challenges, and more. 

Complete 360-degree tracking allows you to monitor every activity’s success, including offline and online. Rewards and gamification activities work fantastically for specific segments and channels.

All the features and functionality effectively move your program users along with a series of actions that increase the effectiveness and customer lifetime value.

Contact our marketing specialists to book a free demo.