What is Advocacy Marketing?

Advocacy marketing is a business owner’s dream — it’s highly effective and it effectively costs nothing. This marketing method is considered one of the best ways to attract new customers and increase revenue at very low costs.

This makes brand advocates highly valuable brand assets. They are familiar with your products or services, they tend to spend more than the average customer, and they are a great source of information for leads and potential customers, as they contribute with positive reviews that generate natural conversations around your brand.

Unlike other similar forms of referral marketing, such as influencer marketing, advocacy marketing is not as structured. However, there are several things you can do to maximize the likelihood of your customers turning into brand advocates:

Provide high-quality products and exceptional services

Before even thinking about how to market your products and services, focus on what you’re selling. Even if you provide an incredible customer experience, without top-quality products your customers won’t have a reason to tell others about you.

Deliver an unforgettable customer experience

Seek to go beyond expectations, address every pain point in the customer journey, and make them feel valued. Whether you use machine learning to identify product preferences, communication habits, or set up automated flows to surprise them on their birthdays, do your best to WOW your customers.

Make experience sharing easy

Some customers will want to share their experiences organically, others will need to be incentivized (and that’s not a bad thing either). No matter what the case is, you should make sure they have the tools and resources at hand to spread the word about your business. Some examples are automated emails asking customers to leave reviews after each order, sending out surveys to assess Net Promoter Scores, creating social media sharing links or hashtags, setting up loyalty and referral programs, creating campaigns and contests based on User-Generated Content, etc.

Remember how we said brand advocates are the best thing a business can have? theMarketer makes it so easy to turn your first-time customers into brand advocates using a suite of fully customizable and AI-based features, including personalized recommendations, irresistible loyalty and referral programs, as well as a fun way to gather and display reviews.