Advocacy Marketing Software and Strategies that give you Results!

Nowadays, businesses depend too much on paid advertising. This method works. However, sales are sometimes coming slow

Imagine if your customer actively recommends your product or services to their friends, family, and colleagues. We usually call that Advocate Marketing.In short, the customer recommends our company.

He becomes the leading promoter and diffuser of our brand. In this article, we explain how companies move in the market to achieve this and what campaigns they use to make consumers their corporate spokesperson. We will further give you some software-recommendations we personally recommend and the strategies that are proven to work.

What is an Advocacy Marketing strategy?

This marketing strategy is defined as any act that generates a consumer's recommendation about a company, brand, service, or product. Thus, the impact that gets the recommendations of customers can cause an increase in sales more significant than any other source of information or business advertising. The "positive noise" about a brand favors the corporate image, and at the same time, an environment or negative comments about a company can cause an immediate crisis.

With the advent of the Internet, users have seen how consumer habits and purchasing decisions have been completely changed because they can compare with an immense amount of products and offers. As a result, the situation is no longer as before. The consultant Mckinsey believes that communication between the clients themselves is a factor that is behind 20-50% of the purchase decisions.

With so much competition for companies, there is nothing left but to invest in achieving earned media. The reward for a job well done (mentions, shares, reviews, like) that will allow us to grow within visibility. And how is it achieved?

With Paid Media - advertising campaigns, social ADS, the content generated by influencers, display campaigns - or with Owned Media - all the content that a company creates to communicate its information or sell its products - that is, the content of our Websites, blogs, apps and everything we spread through RRSS. The primary strategy of the company must be that the consumer is the center of everything he does in it. All campaigns are aimed at him so that he can subsequently recommend it to other consumers.

Until recently, the only way for companies to analyze the recommendation capacity of their customers was the Net Promoter Score test. This consisted of only one question: How likely is it to recommend the product, service, or brand to another person? Then, with a scale of 0 to 10, companies analyze and classify consumers into promoters, liabilities, and detractors.

If the detractors are subtracted from the promoters, we get the recommendation percentage of our brand.

The Benefits of Using Advocacy Marketing

Social media opens up a new world of opportunities and building trust and recommending brands today. Think about the last time you recommended a product or service to your family, friend, or peer. We often look for reviews on sites such as Yelp, Amazon, TripAdvisor, or G to the crowd to decide on trusting the claim of a brand or not. 

The bottom line is advocacy happens all the time in today's digital world. Support plays a pivotal role in digital transformation. It's all about harnessing the power of employees, customers, and partners by empowering them to be trusted advocates with advocacy, marketing, and action. Brand perception is now based on a personalized experience. 

People mostly trust peers, friends, or family. Word of mouth marketing has become a gold standard for a recommendation. Inbound Marketing brings more qualified leads than traditional marketing does.

Advocacy marketing proves to be a significant driving force behind its organizations' line of business, such as sales, marketing, human resources, corporate communication, and product fans. The key benefits that include increased organic web traffic brand awareness, lead generation, and employee engagement. Remember, nothing ensures your rapid sales and customer retention like positive advocacy about your brand. 

How does advocacy marketing work?

The operation of advocacy marketing is, in fact, straightforward. It is more difficult to start it because you should have a database or you have to build one for it. The customer database is the main source when it comes to creating a community of ambassadors or advocates. 

Not all companies are in the same conditions. We could talk about two large groups:

Ecommerce companies: they usually have large databases and will not need to do a previous job, since they have already done so. They have their clients, and they can start using them to start a project of ambassadors or advocates.

Other types of companies: unlike eCommerce, the rest of organizations, if they want to start a project of this type, will have to start with an inbound marketing project. This will also allow them to generate more demand and will be able to build the base of data needed to launch a brand ambassadors project.

Advocacy Marketing Software

Nowadays, there is a multitude of tools and applications that allow us to monitor how customers on the Internet and social networks interact. That would enable us to boost our advocate marketing effort. These are what we recommend:

#1 TADA

Tada can help you convert your regular customers to active advocates. Imagine you have a customer named Alex. He purchased product and service from his favorite store YOUR BRAND.

He can buy in the store or online. After his purchase, he got a digital membership card from YOURBRAND. Now, every time Alex shops in YOURBRAND, Alex receives YOURBRAND points or cashback, then Alex meets his friends Anna.

Alex was so excited to tell Anna how happy he is with YOURBRAND. Alex refers Anna to shopping YOURBRAND by giving Anna YOURBRAND digital member card. All Alex needs is Anna's phone number. So easy and simple. 

Now every time Anna shops in YOURBRAND in the receives cashback or points, and because Alex referred Anna to shop in YOURBRAND, every time Anna shops in YOURBRAND, Alex also receives cashback the rewards make Alex more loyal to YOURBRAND and encouraged him to promote YOURBRAND even more to his friends in person and via social media. 

Alex has been converted from customer to advocate and guess what's the best part? Now, Anna joins Alex to become YOURBRAND advocate.

Now, YOURBRAND has much more extensive customer network by converting their happy customers into its advocates. This is the new age of customer acquisition method and is highly effective and measurable. After all, increasing sales doesn't have to be so hard, loyal customers and engaged advocates are the secret weapon.

#2 Socxo

Only 15% of people trust recommendations made directly by the brand. On the contrary, 84% of people believe recommendations from people they know, and that's where SOCXO becomes the game-changer. 

SOCXO helps brands and organizations have a broader reach in the digital space through your trusted network of employees, customers well-wishers, and intermediaries while being cost-effective compared to what is spent the paid ads. SOCXO helps create social media buzz driving brand awareness and impact purchase decisions.

In a nutshell, SOCXO helps you maximize your revenues while being cost-effective. So your brand, your people, and your story amplified

#3 CustomerAdvocacy.com

Advocacy beyond like, love, or loyalty. The content our customers generate will be 50% more likely to influence a purchase. Our customers are the best way to share our information.

They're trusted to give reliable information because they already use our products and services. So, how do we encourage them to talk about us? There are several things we all need to keep in mind.

• Have we identified our most vocal customers? 
• And are we confident that we know what they can do for our business? 
• What do we know about them? 
• What are their strengths?
• And what are their weaknesses?

It's important to remember that every recommendation from a customer has a hard dollar amount tied to it. How much impact will their recommendations be to our prospects? It's essential to determine the most efficient way to turn our customers into advocates and know in advance how influential they can be.

Let's face it, some advocates are much more prominent than others. 

We also need to be knowledgeable about our advocates and keep up to date with their careers. But this isn't easy to do.

There are some common problems. It's hard to identify new potential advocates at our clients quickly and manage so many existing relationships. Even more, we want these advocates to feel involved when we make requests and always be happy to offer referrals. 

• But how do we get them all mobilized, engaged, and ready to push our message on a moment's notice? 
• Are we matching each advocate to the right sales prospect every single time? 
• How can you tell?
• Are your marketing and sales teams doing this? 

This software can help. That's customeradvocacy.com does. Anyone can take a net promoter score and find out who likes your products and services.

Good marketing departments usually do this to find out who is capable of generating buzz. However, this software takes identifying, nurturing, and mobilizing advocates to an entirely new level. The platform can get your customers even more passionate about your success.

One way the software does this is through gamification. Gamification is about getting your customers enthusiastic. And it's also a huge marketing trend and during b2b business marketing. The idea is exciting and straightforward.

The software has:

• badges for recognizing your advocates' efforts,
• levels to show how strongly your advocates support you,
• leaderboards to track progress and build competition,
• progress indicators to show how they're doing
• virtual currency to purchase real rewards. 

When your advocates accomplish a task you send out like writing a blog post or giving a customer referral, the platform singles them out and lets them know how much you appreciate them. Then, you can make them redeem great prizes and acknowledge them as an influential opinion leader. Gamification encourages your customers to compete against each other for contributing the most to your business. 

You can identify who can give the most referrals to write the best blog post. This social mechanics also makes it easy to use your customers' login with their existing social network accounts like LinkedIn, and complete your challenges in an intuitive and familiar web portal.

It makes it easy for you to communicate how great your advocates are doing through user messaging, ratings, and feedback comments. 

Your advocates will also have detailed and actionable profiles. The software also takes advantage of critical behavioral dynamics. These are what motivate your advocates to complete the challenges you build out for them.

Points as rewards levels for status among peers, leaderboards for competition, and even gift-giving and charity to match your advocates' altruistic side. And the challenges your advocate see are only the ones that match their abilities and preferences. The result, better sales, more content, and higher customer retention through word of mouth marketing.

Customer advocacy calm is software as a service platform made for marketing departments and focused on considered b2b customers. The system is easy to customize to your marketing department's needs. The software lets your customers come to you to generate marketing content and grow your bottom line by making sure each customer advocate accomplishes challenges best suited for them. 

Examples of an Advocacy Marketing strategy

#1Transform consumers into ambassadors

In this case, you should create channels that allow customers to have a voice and opinion about the products and the company. Platforms or pages that will enable you to upload photos with the company's products would be an appropriate example.

#2 Story Telling campaigns

The market is huge, and there are countless products. A brand must make a difference and explain or promote its origins, its history or its corporate culture can be the key to be chosen and subsequently recommended. The clearest example is Coca-Cola.

Since its beginnings, it sells a clear philosophy: enjoy life, share good times and have communicated it correctly with its ads: "the spark of life" "the Coca-Cola side of life." It is consistent with its philosophy and always uses the same corporate motto (which works). 

Storytelling creates excellent communication strategies, forms powerful brands. How many times has an acquaintance told you something about the new announcement of this drink? There we see that it is a strategy that works perfectly.

#3 Gamification

When we have already achieved that customers have our brand and recommend us, the next step comes: keep them long term. Gamification techniques allow us to encourage and involve customers with our products and services.

#4 Customer Experience

Making the customer buying and selling process easier with Customer Experience strategies will result in a considerable increase in favorable opinions and therefore, recommendations.

#5 Visual content as the basis of dissemination

Prime the audiovisual! If we want customers to disseminate their images and videos related to our brand, we will gain unique branded content. It is not the company that generates corporate content but the users themselves.

#6 Incorporate automated systems to encourage the sharing of content

Whether they are their tools or those that incorporate the RRSS, but it is essential that in an intuitive and straightforward way, the user can easily share and comment on the products.

So, have you decided which software and strategies you would like to use for your advocacy marketing campaign? Let us know in the comment below!