As a brand, it’s essential to stay on top of the competition. To do this, you need to come up with new creative ideas that will set you apart from others and make your brand stand out in the market. To increase your brand’s exposure, you might have used all the branding strategies available, such as social media sharing and advertising, but found that these tactics are not effective for your business.
This is simply because today’s consumers don’t buy these marketing methods adopted by most businesses. Instead, they highly value the words and feedback coming directly from other consumers. In fact, a study found that nearly 95% of buyers read customer reviews before making a purchasing decision. They value feedback directly from other consumers.
These statistics highlight the importance of word-of-mouth marketing for every business. It is therefore a good idea to include a strategy for brand advocacy in your marketing plan. To ensure great brand advocacy, you need to exercise customer advocacy within your organization.
But what is customer advocacy, and how can it benefit your business? In this article, we discuss how to turn customers into advocates for your business and stimulate enterprise growth, and drive value.
What is Customer Advocacy?
Customer advocacy is the strategy that aims to build and nurture relationships with loyal clients, who can then act as spokespersons for your brand and help promote its products and services.
The key to customer advocacy is creating a great experience for the customer. Businesses that prioritize building a customer advocacy program, manage to reduce acquisition costs, drive word-of-mouth referrals, and boost brand awareness. With this, they can build trust, provide excellent customer service and offer a seamless experience.
Understand What Motivates Advocates
Your brand’s advocates will always be a small percentage of the total number of customers. The majority of your customers may buy from you once or more times, but will not actively promote your brand or spread positive words about it. That’s why you must find out what motivates your customers to spread the word about your brand. For example, you can offer surveys to your customers, and get a quick response from them.
Accelerate Onboarding
To get your customers excited about your product, you need to accelerate their ability to do so independently. Customer success onboarding is focused on getting customers to incorporate the product as quickly as possible into their daily workflow.
By building data-driven engagement throughout onboarding, you can ensure the customer develops a steady understanding of your products and starts to link their use with practical real-world success as fast as possible. Onboarding is the space between promise and delivery. You want to minimize that gap as much as you can.
Use Multiple Channels To Serve Customers
Everyone prefers to do things on the go in today’s busy and fast-paced world. You can satisfy your customers in this situation by allowing them to reach out to you through different channels.
Customers love options, and omnichannel services give them that. It’s important to provide a consistent experience, with agents who are ready and willing to respond on any channel, at any time. All channels should be optimized to provide great service. Customers often have their preferred method of communication, so make sure you take that into consideration and engage them on their preferred channel to maximize impact.
Offer them multiple ways to connect, including email, SMS, and phone and video calls. You can also use social media, chat apps, or even create QR codes as a way to integrate online sources with offline ones. Live chat could be one of the most effective methods to address the doubts of customers in real time and when they’re on the move.
Personalize All Communications
You can personalize communication with customers based on data about product usage and sales. This will ensure that the right message is delivered to the right people, at the right moment.
Are some of your customers not logging in enough? Maybe they need to be trained more on how the product works. Are they not using certain features? Why not send them a video tutorial on the features and their benefits? It’s essential to close the feedback loop on all customer responses and ensure you’ve personalized the follow-up with the next steps.
Engage Customers through Social Media
Your social media channels are the best place to look for customer advocates. Each positive comment is an opportunity to build a relationship with the customer, either by thanking them for making the comment or by involving them in your marketing campaigns.
What about negative feedback? It’s important to respond to every concern and show that your brand truly addresses customer concerns on these public platforms. Social media engagement plays a major role in connecting with satisfied customers and turning frustrated ones into customer advocates.
Final Thoughts
To stay ahead in today’s competitive market, you must continue to improve and innovate your products and services even if you have a large base of loyal clients. By using the abovementioned tactics, you can start building a strong customer advocacy program and create a community that will promote your brand and grow your business.
