Marketing your business through advocacy is a dream come true. An advocacy program is simple but effective; it is the process of leveraging your customers’ word-of-mouth to reach out to new customers.

It is the follow up to having happy and satisfied customers and gaining more market share.

While referral marketing works well individually and uses the power of peer-to-peer influence to onboard new customers, advocacy programs operate on a group level. They are more effective when scaling up your business.

Now, according to a global survey across 60 countries, 83% of people have faith in their friends and family members and are likely to try a brand upon their recommendation.

While traditional advocacy marketing focused on creating more case studies or testimonials, the modern-day approach revolves around blogs, vlogs, and engagement through social media platforms.

The reason advocacy marketing works is that a potential buyer can get information from different sources. When a majority of people are recommending your brand, your chance of onboarding that customer increases.

Advocacy Marketing Software

Did you know that to sell your marketing software, you can enlist an advocacy marketing software?

That’s right, a software solution to sell software.

An advocacy marketing software is a perfect way to reach out to potential brand advocates amidst the extensive list of customers in your database. It is essentially the culmination of an advocacy program with a marketing solution.

It assists your team to engage them effectively and create personalized strategies to keep them coming back to your brand; It is cost-effective, reliable, and offers many benefits to companies that are selling marketing software. Some of them include:

• Lower customer acquisition costs
• Better customer engagement with data across several metrics
• Converts customers to brand advocates
• Brand advocates’ word does the job of a salesperson
• Creates a more substantial loyal customer base
• AI-programming learns from interactions between customers and the brand
• Saves money spend on online reputation management
• Makes your brand more valuable in the market
• Results in higher conversion rates

Ideal Ways to Push Advocacy Programs

When you sell marketing software, there is not much need for any brick and mortar stores. Instead, it would be best if you focused on promoting your brand through digital mediums.

When we talk about advocacy marketing, there are two significant areas to consider. First, your employees and second, social media. Let’s take a look at how each one helps in pushing your advocacy programs.

Employees:

Now, employee advocacy focuses on your staff knowing your marketing software inside and believing in what you claim to sell.

When they are convinced and proud of the product they are selling, they can promote the product better, and their efforts can organize your efforts into a streamlined channel.

When your employees share content about the product, it has eight times more impact than a random user and your chances of conversion increase by seven times.

It also reduces the ad clutter and helps you reach your desired audience in a well-targeted manner.

Social Media: 

If you wish to have a competitive advantage in the marketing software market, you need to have a terrific social media presence with testimonials from brand advocates ruling the charts.

Social media platforms are an ideal place to let the delighted customers share their experiences. Customers always check the social pages to know more about a brand, and thus a strong presence there is the foundation of a great social media advocacy program.

How the Big Boys Run Their Advocacy Programs

If you wonder if advocacy marketing works, then look at how the big boys are leveraging it regularly to achieve new milestones.

Tweet Campaign by Starbucks:

Starbucks launched a ‘Tweet-a-Coffee’ campaign, which was a simple but effective idea to increase their revenue.

All their customers had to do was buy a $5 gift card on Twitter by tweeting @tweetacoffee on their handle. The first 100,000 people who tweeted got themselves a $5 gift card.

So, how did this help? Starbucks doesn’t sell marketing software, right? Then what is the point of discussing this? It is simple; they created an automated campaign that was managed through an advocacy program and marketing solution.

The entire experiment generated around $180,000 for the brand and helped them find out who their most loyal customers were and whom they could count on to boost sales in the future.

Shot on iPhone Campaign:

Apple is well known for innovation in the technology world. They sell a wide range of products like phones, tablets, computers, software, and other accessories.

But even one of the world’s greatest brands needs to know who its loyal customer base consists of.

They launched the ‘Shot on iPhone’ Campaign that sources thousands of pictures from iPhone users worldwide.

The idea was simple, share the pictures clicked on iPhones with a hashtag to flaunt the camera quality and various cool features of their mobile OS.

What happened then? Apple found the best pictures and used the user-generated content to market their product without spending their hard-earned money on new designs. Is there any better example of an advocacy program in action?

Shopify’s Social Campaigns:

Shopify helps a wide range of eCommerce companies sell their unique products online. Apart from that, they have an excellent track record when it comes to social advocacy programs.

Shopify engages their staff members and asks them to share their knowledge with innovative and problem-solving how-to guides, blogs, case studies, and more.

They stay a step ahead of the competition by offering their staff marketing courses, and once the staff raises their game, their success is shared on their blog and circulated through social channels.

The Role of AI Programming in Advocacy Marketing

Today, marketing is about holding conversations with your customers and not about broadcasting a product.

Advocacy programs fall in the spot where they listen to user feedback and suggestions from an omnichannel business presence.

That is why AI programming is going leaps and bounds and extending itself from customer service into other business spheres.

With their self-learning capabilities, the AI-programs can now swiftly identify potential brand advocates and gather data from multiple platforms with seamless integrations to get detailed analytics.

They can also predict customer behavior based on their past purchase history and spending patterns and serve as the much-needed help that the marketers need to know what their customers exactly want.

And once you have unlocked the true power of advocacy programs for your company, you and up your ROI manifolds.

Fun Fact: Positive word-of-mouth is responsible for driving over $6 trillion in consumer spending annually and successfully increasing sales by 13% (average).

Final Thoughts

Implementing robust advocacy programs can help you attain higher revenues over time. Deloitte, one of the most prominent firms in the world, believes that customers who come to your brand through a friend’s reference have a 37% higher retention rate.

Are you ready to kickstart your advocacy programs with intuitive AI-powered software that offers personalized solutions to identify your potential brand advocates?

Then wait no more. Get in touch with NextBee to know more about our turnkey solution that is robust, flexible, and can integrate seamlessly with different platforms (CRM, POS, Marketing Automation, etc.) in your technology stack.

Book a free consultation today to know more about the details.