Editorial
The Gist
- Advocacy fuels growth. Prioritizing customer advocacy boosts brand loyalty and competitive advantage.
- Value at every stage. Marketing should foster brand choice continuously, not just post-purchase.
- Engage advocates effectively. Tools and insights can transform customers into active brand advocates.
Customer advocacy is a powerful tool that can fuel growth. In fact, Gartner research found that CMOs that prioritize loyalty and advocacy through budget and resources fare better than their peers.
However, many companies place most of their channel investments on initial conversion and acquisition, and miss out on the opportunity to drive repeat purchases and secure long-term customer loyalty. Some brands do deploy advocacy, often in the form of product ratings, but they fail to consider advocacy throughout the entire customer journey.
The goal of marketing isn’t just to acquire customers, but to create strong, resilient relationships. In highly competitive markets, marketers must shift their focus toward being the brand of choice, not just at the initial transaction, but for every moment thereafter.
There are three actions marketing leaders can take to grow customer advocacy and make improving brand reputation effortless for customers.
Identify Experiences That Deliver Value to Customers
There are specific kinds of value that are more noteworthy and compel customers to advocate for a brand. There are three levels of customer value that can drive commercially productive customer behaviors, such as paying a premium or referring other customers to the brand. The following levels of value can describe the impact of customer experiences, each more powerful than the last:
- Functional: This is the most fundamental type of value, occurring when a brand demonstrates how the product specifically fits customer needs through education or helps them fulfill a need more efficiently.
- Personal: Occurs when a brand affirms a customer’s own choice or validates their decisions by facilitating a connection to others like them or by providing direction and guidance in making a choice. Personal value is about connection to others and directing the customer toward the right product for their needs.
- Catalytic: The most powerful level of value, this focuses on shaping a customer’s journey to a goal so that they have a greater understanding of their own needs and are confident in taking a new direction. This type of value is a partnership that is built around helping customers realize a better path to achieving their goals or reinforcing what they are trying to accomplish. Catalytic value is about self-discovery, self-reflection, a sense of agency and affirmation of the customer’s decision.
These levels for delivering value fall into two dimensions:
- Value framing: Helps guide customers to understand what they should value.
- Value affirmation: Helps customers get value out of a decision they’ve already made.
Marketing leaders must evaluate their customer journey and look for opportunities to support a customer need, expectation or goal that can be framed by these forms of customer value. While you can certainly apply these categories to the purchase, they can be even more impactful when applied to your existing customers at important touchpoints in their customer journey.
Related Article: How Customer Advocacy Fuels Brand Loyalty and Growth
Expose Customers to Advocacy Across the Customer Journey
By focusing only on initiatives such as product reviews, brands neglect the opportunity to use advocacy across the entire customer journey. Advocacy can be relevant and, more importantly, helpful to customers at any stage of their journey. For example, consumers conduct research about a product after their purchase, not just in making the purchase decision itself. Gartner research shows that the top topics for postpurchase research include detailed product information or documentation, return policies and product warranties or guarantees.
Marketing leaders should use the customer insight they already have to help identify the areas of the journey where your audience would benefit from exposure to customer advocacy. For example, analyze frequently asked or anticipated questions that can be surfaced from direct or indirect customer feedback, such as social media, customer communities, your call center, sales or frontline employees.
Next, they should draw from observations on how customers are using their products to solve problems or engage with them in new inventive ways. For example, a cleaning products company monitors its company hashtag on social platforms. The company notices that customers in the gaming community, a cohort of customers the company did not realize it had, were sharing how they used their products to fix sticky keys and gaming equipment. With the customer’s permission, the company reshared this user-generated content on their social feed tagging the content with a branded hashtag.
Leaders must expand past the idea of advocacy as an end result of a customer engagement or purchase. Instead, consider advocacy as an ongoing byproduct of high-value customer experiences, and then seek ways for advocates to offer help, creativity and support throughout a consumer’s journey.
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Related Article: Ways Your Frontline Team Can Ensure Customer Advocacy
Make Customer Advocacy Easy and Engaging
Customer reviews play an important role in making and validating other customers’ decisions. In parallel, the top two reasons that customers say that they leave reviews are that they have something positive to share (42%) or that they want to help others make informed decisions (30%). These dynamics present a compelling opportunity for marketing leaders to encourage their advocates to provide feedback on specific aspects of their experience that would guide other customers in being confident in their choices. After all, customers like to share their experiences. It’s marketing’s job to leverage that.
Many customers are willing to advocate, but don’t follow through. Marketing leaders need to leverage those advocates, providing pathways or tools throughout the customer journey so that these customers can share their feedback. Observe how customers are conversing with each other to solve problems, share inspiration and answer questions; use that insight as a guide for what types of content templates or resources that your company could provide.
By providing more opportunities for customers to advocate for their brand, marketing leaders can leverage opportunities to grow advocacy throughout the customer journey, not just in the buy phase.
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