Word of mouth marketing has often been regarded to be one of the most effective. Brand advocacy is one of the most effective methods especially when you want to reach a specific target group. In brand advocacy, someone will push your brand towards a certain group and it is usually done through word of mouth.
Riding on the positive effects of digital marketing
In most cases, brand advocates will leave reviews that are positive about what you offer. Besides that, they will refer customers and in the process, create certain content for your products. Furthermore, they contribute data that are insightful for you as well. In this digital age, more than 90% of customers will seek recommendations and product reviews before they make a decision to buy. As such, brand advocates will become user agents that could push your brand to greater heights.
So, who are they and what do they do?
Basically, a brand advocate is someone who directly and indirectly plays a crucial role in the growth of your brand or product. This means they could be:
- Customers who buy from you: Generally, they are not people who are part of your company. As such, when they give you a positive review, their recommendations are seen to be more genuine and way more influential to potential customers.
- Within the company: Your employees are important brand advocates. They know all about how your business works where their knowledge and recommendations can play a truly vital role to advocate your brand.
- Partners and business relations: This refers to organizations or businesses that are affiliated with your brand.
- Influencers: Perhaps the most common brand advocates today made up of social media influencers and opinion leaders who can help to target your audience more effectively.
Where are your brand advocates?
In the true essence of marketing, earned media is at least 4 times more effective than paid media. When you have peer-to-peer recommendations and word-of-mouth marketing, it works a lot better and is more impactful than your communication on other platforms. Hence, if you want an effective brand advocate, you need to:
- Determine who is strongly related to your brand. Find out who has high-quality testimonials through social listening tools and data analytics. Look for partners that could benefit both parties and derive a mutual advocacy plan.
- Remember that more than 75% of consumers stated that they are more likely to trust the content that they read which is posted by people who are ‘normal’.
- his will help your brand to grow organically and it can be very genuine too. When you have brand advocates to push your brand instead of your corporate messages, it provides more value to the reader and potential customers. Hence, it will draw more attention from both customers and other media which could then provide the platform for better audience reach.
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