Promote Your Business with Customer Advocacy Marketing!

Every business wants its products and services to reach more people and hence bring more sales. To attain that goal, businesses usually have a marketing team dedicated to promotional activities. However, one marketing technique is considered the most effective among the rest: customer advocacy marketing.

Let’s find out more about customer advocacy marketing and how you can apply it to promote your business!

What is customer advocacy marketing?

Customer advocacy marketing is a marketing technique in which customers promote a business to other potential customers. Advocacy marketing strategy is highly looked into because it is more affordable than other marketing techniques as it only requires advocacy from customers.

What makes advocacy marketing effective?

At a glance, businesses don’t always grasp the understanding that everyday people or customers can promote them better than advertisements or mega-endorsers. However, there are some factors that make advocacy marketing highly effective, which are:

1. Trust

   In this day and age, people are more careful in choosing the products that they buy. They seek information from the most credible, trustworthy sources. Trust is what makes advocacy marketing more effective than other marketing strategies.
   Research by Nielsen found that 83% of customers trust the recommendation they get from family and friends. This is because when we receive a recommendation out of genuineness, it’s much easier for us to believe in it compared to the ads we see on mass media.

2. Social media

   With the huge amount of social media users today, advocacy marketing is even more effective. In the past, people may only get the chance to talk about products they like when they are gathering or meeting up with their friends. Now, the chance is greatly multiplied as many people have used social media to share their experiences and opinions.
   With a single photo or short video along with some words shared on social media, people have become advocates for a business without realizing it. As an example, if one of your customers has 300 followers on their social media account, they might promote your business to those 300 people. If you have 100 loyal customers doing the same thing, you are already reaching 30000 people!

Benefits of customer advocacy marketing

The benefits of customer advocacy marketing run much deeper than just promoting your business to more people. Here they are:

1. Building customer loyalty and retention

   Did you know that advocacy marketing directly affects customer loyalty and retention? For every new business, advocacy marketing may be seen as a promising acquisition strategy. Once businesses have run for a longer time, it’s more important to build loyalty from customers so that they stay longer in your business, which is what retention is all about.
   According to research by the University of Pennsylvania, referred customers have 18% higher loyalty and 37% higher retention rate compared to regular customers. What’s even better is that these referred customers may end up promoting your business to their circle of friends so that the advocacy cycle keeps growing!

2. Increasing brand value

   With advocacy marketing, your business’ value will increase and you will be much more credible. Advocacy marketing improves your business’ reputation and customers are more likely to choose your business despite the presence of cheaper competitors because you have established good credibility.

3. Boosting revenue

   Advocacy marketing is also undeniably tied to higher business revenue. In fact, increasing advocacy marketing efforts by just 12% can boost revenue up to 2x. Customer advocacy marketing also generates 2x more sales than paid advertisements.
   With the many benefits of advocacy marketing, it will be great to apply it in your business! How can you do so?

Steps to start advocacy marketing

1. Optimize your product and service quality

   This is surely the most important step. If customers aren’t satisfied with your business, they won’t bother recommending you to the people they know. So, first things first: make sure your product and service already have the best possible quality and be consistent. You can also have a customer survey to obtain their precious feedback on your business.

2. Provide a simple way to be advocates

   Customers may be talking about your products as you read this, but you won’t know when and where. So, you need to create a simple way in which customers can advocate for your business and you are able to monitor every successful recommendation. For example, by using a loyalty app or loyalty program, get customers to sign up and assign them a unique link they can share with their friends whenever they promote your business.

3. Give attractive rewards

   A study from Texas Tech University discovered that among all satisfied customers, 83% are willing to recommend the business, but only 29% actually do so. The simplest way to boost this percentage is through giving attractive rewards whenever customers successfully bring a friend to your business. That way, they will be more motivated to do advocacy marketing!

Have you applied this most effective marketing technique to promote your business? If you are interested in starting advocacy marketing, we’ll be happy to help!