By: Chris Reid, Account Manager
If you ask people why they bought something, most will say it was because it had good reviews or a friend recommended it. Sometimes it’s both: research says peer recommendations are the key deciding factor in 20 to 50% of purchases.
This isn’t surprising: it’s understandable people would trust a person, especially someone they know, over an ad. Brand – or customer – advocacy isn’t a new idea. Marketers have long relied on testimonials and social proof to establish credibility. But the big question is: how can you get advocates to take your content marketing efforts to new heights?
Connecting With Your Potential Advocates
Let’s start at the start. Before you can tap into customer advocacy to enhance your marketing, you first need to build relationships with potential advocates. How do you do this?
Obviously, you need to have a solid product that exceeds expectations. A humanized brand and valuable content that appeals to your target customers’ tastes also helps the connection.
From there, ensure you have communication channels open for your customers to engage with, be it email, social media or even text. Often, you just have to ask customers for their email, to like you on Facebook, follow you on Instagram or give you a top rating on the most important rating site for your industry. Make it as easy as possible with links to all your social channels or relevant rating sites so they can share the love more easily.
Assuming your customers’ experience with your brand have been positive, you should quickly begin to build up your follower lists and reviews. These provide you with the critical social proof that many new shoppers want to see before their first purchase.
After you’ve started to engage your customers, you should be better able to identify those that will work as your most loyal advocates, whether it’s sharing your content on social, leaving positive reviews or participating in customer-led user forums.
An Extra Push
To get the maximum number of positive reviews possible, sometimes you need to incentivize people to take the time to write a review, or to keep engaging with your content and brand. Show your customer advocates how much you appreciate what they do. This can mean little gifts, discount promotions or entering them into a draw for a prize.
You can also reward your advocates with rewards programs that include points or badges for a variety of activities: from purchases to sharing on social. Finally, always keep up with the “Thank yous!” when a customer does something for you, like leaving a great review on social.
The Key to Growth is All About Relationships
It’s clear that people put way more value on their friends, friends-of-friends’ or even strangers’ reviews rather than ads. So much so that CMOs cite customer advocacy as their biggest priority in today’s digital marketing landscape.
To create and retain powerful advocates, you need to build relationships by creating valuable content, having conversations, proactively getting feedback and acknowledging customers. If you do, you’ll benefit from the best (and most powerful) kind of marketing of all.