To provide your customers with a delightful experience, you need to ensure that you are able to meet their expectations at each buying stage. A customer journey typically involves three phases: marketing, sales and customer experience. The first step consists in attracting your customers. You make them familiar with your brand by using traditional or modern marketing methods.
By telling them they need your product, you invite them to buy it, and then you provide them with customer support. While some customers will leave you immediately after buying your product, others will stay loyal to you. Here comes customer advocacy.
It is a programe that stirs up your loyal customers to pitch your product to others. It is a kind of influencer marketing where you represent the brand. Since these people have a positive experience with your product, they will use it to generate genuine leads.
Customer advocacy can be used in various ways, for instance, verbal references, social media posts, blogging, the recommendation at events, and the like. To take advantage of customer advocacy, you must ensure that they receive value for their service.
Most businesses are capable of marketing and selling their products, but they fail to hook them to your brand. Here is what surveys suggest:
- About 85% of buyers are willing to pay more by getting a great customer experience, which means your profits graph will automatically grow.
- Customer experience influences the on-the-spot buying decision. Around 50% of customers buy a product immediately after getting a personalized experience.
- More than 60% of business comes from existing customers.
Tips for creating a team of customer advocates
Loyal customers deserve to be in the team of customer advocates, but you need to ensure they will get much more than they are putting in. Delightful customer experience is at the forefront of any inbound marketing strategies, but customer advocates can grow your business. Here are the tips to follow:
- The value offered does not need to be money
Having a team of customer advocates will help attract new customers, but it will be only possible when they stand by your brand. No customer can be an advocate if they have not been persistently in touch with your business.
Most of the time, you try to offer them monetary rewards, but remember that if their actions are solely driven by money, their messages will be worthless. Your purpose of building a team of customer advocates is to attract more and more customers.
Since they will be doing word-of-mouth marketing based on their own experience, you will likely grow your customer base.
This is why it is essential to choose those customers who are willing to represent your brand and have motives that align with your company’s goals. However, it does not mean that you do not need to reward your customer advocates. Use an alternative form of reward.
- Personalize the programe
Your customer advocates are a new sales team, and they have their own motives to represent your brand. It must be a win-win strategy. You need to identify what they are precisely expecting of you.
Conduct surveys to identify their unique interests and then align your strategy accordingly. Below is the table that explains the needs of customer advocates:
| Needs | How to meet them |
| Physical rewards | It involves basic needs like a gift card and promotional products. |
| Recognition | It includes appreciation like thank you and wishing on special occasions. |
| Empowerment | Some advocates make a remarkable contribution by giving feedback and sharing their opinions. |
| VIP experience | High-performing advocates will expect additional benefits like premium membership. |
| Influence | A very few advocates reach this level, participate in speaking events. |
- Prioritize advocacy goals
It is not worth conducting a customer advocacy programe if it does not increase leads and provide value to your advocates. You cannot track the results from this programe as not all efforts are measurable, like word-of-mouth referrals.
You will have to set both business goals and advocacy goals. The former includes what you want to achieve by conducting this programe. The most common goal is to acquire genuine leads. The latter includes what customer advocates are expecting in exchange for the effort they put in.
They may include exclusive discounts, added benefits, and so forth. If you want to make your customer advocacy programe successful, you will have to prioritize your advocacy goals.
Since you have appointed them to increase leads or attract more customers, your business will get direct benefits. If you manage to deliver what they expect of you, they will put more effort into achieving your business goals.
- Streamline your advocacy programe
If your client advocates’ hard work goes overlooked, it is simply a waste of your resources. This is why it is crucial to ensure that your programe is not unorganized.
Try to set guidelines to ensure that your programe can achieve your set goals, and you can make it happen by centralizing your efforts.
Other tips to follow
Making an effective customer advocacy programe, follow these tips as well:
- Allow your team to use the right tools. You must have advanced technology equipment. If you need money now in the UK to find them, make sure you can pack back the debt.
- Focus on the needs of your customer advocates every other day so you can tweak the programe.
- Keep an eye on the metrics like time spent to respond, customer satisfaction rating, and so on.
- Onboard your new staff with a customer advocacy programe.
The bottom line
A customer advocacy programe can help achieve your business goals. The most significant advantage you can avail yourself of is you can increase leads.
Most businesses spend a lot of money on increasing their customer base and often take out start-up business cash loans. However, the fact is you can generate leads with a customer advocacy programe. People trust their friends or buyers who have tried your products. If they have anything good to say about your products, they will certainly try your product.
