Customer Advocacy

What does customer advocacy mean? 

Customer advocacy is a cultural and strategic approach where brands nurture their relationships with satisfied customers, intending to turn them into brand advocates who promote the brand’s products and services. It usually involves deploying multiple ways to encourage these customer-turned-brand advocates to share their positive experiences within their networks or review platforms, building trust for your brand and attracting potential customers.  

Customer advocacy consists of four key elements: - 

1. Word-of-mouth  
2. Feedback and insights 
3. Trust and credibility 
4. Community building 

Delivering exceptional customer service to your existing customers is one of the best ways to cultivate customer advocacy. Satisfied customers are not only loyal to your brand they are also vocal about their positive experiences, driving organic word-of-mouth marketing and tons of referral traffic your way.  

While some critics argue that customer advocacy can be artificially manipulated, its genuine form remains a powerful tool for building customer loyalty and trust. 

How to get started with customer advocacy 

Here are some proven ways to establish customer advocacy and extract maximum mileage from it: 

1. Leverage data to identify advocates and engage with them through social media, email or loyalty programs to encourage advocacy. 
2. Make sure to provide peak-level customer experiences to build a strong foundation of advocacy. 
3. Incentivize customers to give feedback (but do not manipulate it) and action it to improve your offerings, demonstrating customer-centricity. 
4. Provide your customers with advocacy tools like social media posts, shareable content and referral links making it easier to advocate for your brand. 
5. Get a hand on metrics like referral rates, social media mentions and net promoter score, monitor and measure them to understand the success of your advocacy efforts.  

Follow the above practices to cultivate a strong base of customer advocates, amplify your brand's message and drive growth.