What is Brand Advocacy?

Many businesses find that traditional marketing strategies can be costly and consume a lot of resources, without delivering the desired results. If you relate to this, it might be worth exploring brand advocacy programs and initiatives as an alternative route.

Brand advocacy is a powerful tool that can help businesses expand their market reach. If you’re interested in setting this up for your brand, it’s important to learn what brand advocacy is, what its different types are, and how to build it successfully for your business. This guide will explain everything you need to know about brand advocacy initiatives and how they can help businesses grow.

Customer advocates

Customers who have had a positive personal experience with your brand might promote it in various ways, including:

• Sharing their experiences/referrals via word-of-mouth
• Sharing social media posts, profiles and blog posts
• Creating content for their social media featuring your products/services
• Writing reviews and completing surveys

Employee advocates

Employee advocates have a unique knowledge and experience of the business, placing them in the perfect position to advocate for your brand internally. They might support the business by:

• Sharing their work, business outcomes, company news or job listings on social media
• Telling others about the employer’s services, products and successes
• Offering to represent their business at professional events
• Providing leads from their personal/professional networks

Influencer advocates

Whether they’re celebrities or regular people, the influencer market is currently booming. Taking advantage of it with a brand advocacy program tailored to influencers can be a smart business decision. Typically, influencers are paid to promote a business, which might include:

• Sharing the brand’s content with their followers across social channels
• Sharing discounts, affiliate links and personalised promotions using the brand’s products/services
• Creating sponsored content using a brand’s products/services

It’s worth noting that the most successful influencer advocate programs involve influencers who are genuine customers. Partnering with somebody who wouldn’t normally use or benefit from your products or services might not grow your audience and the business as effectively.

Whether you run a B2B or a not-for-profit charity, brand success relies on positive perceptions which can be hugely improved with a good dose of brand advocacy. But why is it so important to focus on these types of campaigns?

Firstly, creating effective brand advocacy programs is an excellent way to stay ahead of the competition since it gets people talking about your business. This increases your share of voice and brings your brand to the forefront of the market. As a result, this can also help your business discover new audiences since your brand will become more visible.

In addition, brand advocacy is important for businesses because it can build trust and encourage customer loyalty. This can actually convert more customers into brand advocates and provide more people will a positive experience of your brand.

One of the biggest reasons that brand advocacy is crucial for businesses is because it promotes business growth. Advocates will indirectly lead to an increase in sales, which boosts revenue and creates bigger profit margins, allowing your business to grow in ways that aren’t always possible with traditional marketing.

Brand advocacy programs and campaigns can look different depending on what kind of business you own and the goals you have. So to give you a better understanding of it, here are some successful brand advocacy programs in action and how they benefitted the business.

Starbucks – Tweet-A-Coffee

The well-known global coffee chain Starbucks created an advocate marketing campaign called Tweet-A-Coffee, which allowed customers to buy a $5 gift card for their friends via Twitter – now known as X. Customers sent a Tweet to the @tweetacoffee handle including the recipient’s own Twitter handle, and the first 100,000 to do so also received a $5 gift card for themselves.

This campaign was highly profitable for the brand, generating around $180,000 in gift card sales. But alongside the profits, it also allowed the business to identify loyal brand advocates and new potential customers they could engage with to boost sales after the campaign ended.

Coca-Cola – Share a Coke

Coca-Cola has run multiple successful brand advocacy programs over the years, but one of the most iconic was their ‘Share a Coke’ initiative. The campaign aimed to connect with their customers on a more personal level, moving focus away from the product itself to the individuals the campaign was targeting. The initiative centred around a simple idea – sharing a special moment with others over a bottle or can of Coca-Cola. They replaced the traditional logo with “Share a Coke with” followed by a person’s name or a generic name like mum, dad or mate. It started with 150 of the most popular names, and as the campaign’s popularity grew, they created a way to vote online for the names they would like to see on their bottles. This resulted in high brand engagement and meant that they had been successful in reaching a wider audience.

The campaign highlighted the significance of connecting with audiences on a personal level. It encouraged loyal and new customers to connect and share special moments in the real world and online, making it more about the shared experience than the product or the brand.

Driving brand advocacy takes some persistence, but once you’ve got the hang of how to create a successful campaign or program, it’ll become much easier. Below are our top tips for building brand advocacy.

Conduct customer research

Developing a good understanding of current and potential customers is crucial when building an advocacy program. Conducting extensive research is the best way to do this since you’ll discover important data and insights on everything from demographics to customer needs and interests. Whether your team carries out face-to-face interviews or surveys focus groups, customer research is an essential part of the process.

Create positive customer experiences

If your customers have a negative experience with your brand, it’s unlikely that they’ll recommend it to others. Therefore, it’s important to rethink your business goals and ensure you focus on providing a positive customer experience. When customers feel that they’ve received exceptional service, they become much more likely to share their positive experiences with others and become effective brand advocates who will increase your brand visibility.

Develop a simple and easy referral program

Keeping things simple and user-friendly is important because a difficult program is likely to put people off. Establish clear guidelines, make the referral process simple to understand and keep the number of steps for signing up to a minimum to increase engagement.

 Choose effective rewards

Incentives are effective tools for boosting the success of brand advocacy campaigns, but the rewards must be worthwhile for your customers. Customer research can give you valuable insight into which incentives your customers lean more towards, but as a general rule, we suggest choosing exclusive and personalised rewards. These tend to be the most effective for most brands because they give customers something that other people can’t access. 

Promote your advocacy program

Brand advocacy campaigns can be promoted in a variety of ways, including launch parties, emails, social media, shareable explainers and surveys. Prioritise a few promotion routes and track their effectiveness to see whether some perform better than others.

Metrics to measure can include:

• Social shares and engagement: Whether you’re monitoring engagement data directly from your social media accounts or via social media management software, this is a great way to find out how many customers are actively engaging with your content and profiles.
• Share of voice: Use SEO tools or Google Ads to see your business’s share of voice in the market compared to competitors. This will give a good indication of how well your brand awareness is spreading because of your brand advocacy efforts.
• Customer satisfaction: Track customer reviews, referrals, sales and survey feedback to find out how satisfied your customers are. These can all indicate the overall satisfaction of existing customers, influencing the number of referrals you receive from advocacy initiatives.
• Customer loyalty and retention: Working out your customer loyalty and retention rates will show you how many customers have been gained and lost throughout your brand advocacy program.
• Net Promotor Score: This metric measures how likely your customers are to recommend your business to others. A high score indicates a high likelihood that customers will promote your business, while middle-range scores suggest that they are more passive. On the other hand, a low score indicates that most customers are likely to detract from your business, which is not ideal.

We hope this guide has highlighted the impact that brand advocacy can have on your business’ success. Whatever type of business you’re trying to boost, these types of campaigns have proven to be valuable when pulled off properly.