Customer advocates are an incredibly valuable asset for any brand marketer. With fast evolving terms and tactics, it’s important to define what a customer advocate is, what they aren’t, and how to think about their potential to help grow and improve your brand.
What is a customer advocate?
The key characteristic that defines an advocate from a regular happy customer is that they show up. They engage with your content, they opt-in, they hand raise, they refer, they review, and they share their love of your brand. As a rule of thumb, your existing brand advocates engage with you at least once a year. Although advocates are very passionate and engaged customers, that doesn’t mean they have to have a tattoo of your logo or engage on every brand post to be considered one.
What they aren’t
Advocates are not elite or drastically different from your average customer. They’re not professional macro or microinfluencers who are getting paid to talk about your brand. Customer advocates are not just the top 1% of customers engaging with your brand, or solely the top tier of spenders.
Activating the potential of your customer advocates
There are a few simple ways to activate your customer advocates and unlock their potential. Begin by getting in front of your customers who are happy and willing to engage with an invitation to participate in something fun and creative – a giveaway, a contest, a sampling program, a VIP experience, an event invite, etc.
To activate your customer advocates at scale, you should focus on engaging the top 10%-20% of your customers. Too many brands focus just on the top 1% of their customers. They are missing out on potential reach from so many more everyday consumers.
With a structured advocacy program, you can aim to get 4x the engagement that you were getting from existing advocates, and activate the large opportunity in potential advocates who had been more passive.
Depending on your goals, it might make sense to segment and target certain activations to different groups of advocates. For a higher touch activation like a surprise & delight, or VIP event invite, you might want to reward the most active and engaged advocates. For a larger scale UGC contest, or referral program, it makes sense to put that in front of the masses.
To effectively foster and leverage customer advocacy at scale, it’s crucial that you’re not rejecting people who don’t match a certain criteria, or spend a certain threshold of money, or have a high number of followers, or live a glamorous life.