GoPro. Nike. Apple. These brands are well-known for their huge social media followings. But what’s even more remarkable is their loyal, sometimes even die-hard online community.
Companies don’t just create a network of brand advocates out of nothing. They create a carefully planned social media advocacy strategy that includes creating emotional connections, exceptional customer experiences, consistent value, and other things.
What is Social Media Advocacy?
Social media advocacy is the use of social media networks to foster and sustain positive relationships. A social media advocacy strategy aims to build brand advocates who love your brand and advocate for it.
What Social Media Advocacy Strategies Do for Brands
Brand advocates do more than just buy more. In the face of controversy, they jump to our defence. They will recommend you to their friends and families. They share, comment, like, and mention you. These actions have immense benefits. We’ll be discussing some of them below.
- Builds brand trust
Your brand’s advocates can help establish trustworthiness. Your brand’s reputation will be enhanced and strengthened by them sharing their positive experiences on both online and offline platforms.
93% of consumers believe that family and friends are the most trustworthy information source. Closely followed by customer reviews, which is 93%.
Image taken from marketingcharts.com
- Brand awareness increases
Social media users number over 4 billion. The average user has 600+ contacts on social media. You can increase brand awareness by building a social media network of brand advocates and sharing content.
- Increase your revenue
Customers who are customer advocates are the most valuable customers. They buy more often and spend more. High brand advocacy is a better way for businesses to raise the price of their products and services. Employee advocacy content can generate revenue by creating higher quality content.
- Customer loyalty strengthened
Social media allows you to connect with customers in a more intimate way. You can build loyal customers by investing in customer relationships via social media interactions.
- This can increase content creation
UGC (user-generated content) is one of the most valuable types of content. Although you don’t need to do anything to create it you should encourage your users to share their testimonials, YouTube videos and social media graphics.
This will not only provide your audience with more content, but it can also enrich your content curation process and spark your creativity for new ideas.
Who can be a great brand advocate and why?
Did you know that employees and customers make great advocates? Here’s why.
Customers
Referrals from friends and family, as well as social media sharing, are key to customer advocates driving lead generation. They also promote UGC through their social media channels, driving conversions as well as influencing purchasing decisions.
Simply put, customer advocates are your customers. They do all the marketing and buying from your company.
Employers
Employee advocates may be just as valuable as customer advocates. Oktopost reports that almost half of CMOs consider employee advocacy to be their most successful social initiative.
Image taken from oktopost.com
Your brand’s engagement is 30%, and your employees are 14x more likely than others to share your social media content.
How to Implement Social Media Brand Advocacy
Even if social media advocacy is new, there are chances that you have already started your journey. You can create valuable brand advocates as long as your contact center software facilitates omnichannel messaging via social media.
Here are the steps.
Lay out your plan and key performance indicators
Your advocacy strategy must have clear, achievable goals. KPIs allow you to track your performance and make data-driven decision.
KPIs to Reach
You need to monitor your reach KPIs in order to ensure your strategy generates leads and builds brand awareness. These KPIs include:
- Impressions
- Reach after
- Web traffic
- Follower count
While Reach KPIs only track passive interactions, they can tell you a lot more about your advocacy strategy’s effectiveness at reaching the right audience.
KPIs for Engagement
Your social media content is almost three times more popular with consumers than any other type of content. To ensure that your goals are being met, you need to monitor engagement levels. These are some of the most important engagement KPIs.
- Likes
- Shares
- Mentions
- Visits to profiles
- Comment
KPIs for conversion
It takes a lot of work to convert website visitors into brand advocates. The following KPIs should be tracked to ensure your advocacy strategy converts customers.
- Conversion rate for lead
- Sales revenue
- Subscribe to our email newsletter
Check out previous campaigns and adjust based on audience.
Were your previous campaigns successful? What was the reason for your failures? Campaigns can fail if they are not targeted correctly or if the messaging is not personalized.
Another reason for campaigns failing is a lack legacy digitization (to this you can use enterprise Microservices), insufficient research and lack of creativity. Review your campaigns to identify the successes and failures. Even better, ask your audience for their feedback.
Follow Brand Advocates Already in Place
You likely already have brand advocates. It won’t take long to find them. Social media is more popular than any other content for 56% of consumers.
Image from tintup.com
Find customers who are highly engaged with your brand. Pay attention to where they are at the end of their customer journey and how they interact with your brand. These customers can be targeted for hyper-personalized brand advocacy. You can also use them to create a profile of potential brand advocates.
Personalize Customer Experiences
Salesforce recently conducted a study that revealed what we know: customers want personalized engagements, shopping experiences and customer service.
Half of millennials and half of Gen-Zers say they won’t pay attention to messages that aren’t personal. It’s no longer enough to simply address them by their name. It is important to tailor messaging and experiences to each customer’s browsing and buying habits.
Reward and Perks
It’s important to recognize your customers’ loyalty and appreciate the content they produce. You can reward customers with exclusive content, discounts, shoutouts, or other rewards. A loyalty program can draw 37% of consumers in, so it’s a good idea to create a reward-filed loyalty and referral program.
Get content created with brand advocates
With a value of around 13.8 billion dollars, influencer marketing has become a mainstream phenomenon. It is regarded as one of the most successful marketing strategies, according to the Influencer Marketing Hub.
To create value-added content, you can partner with influencers and affiliates. For example, Make promises a 20% commission to lure customers into becoming affiliates.
Image Sourced from influencermarketinghub.com
7. Make sure brand advocates are properly trained and orientated
Although brand advocates love creating content for brands they love, they aren’t always sure where to begin. 60% of consumers would like brands to tell them what content they are looking for. Create a resource that provides UGC tips for brand advocates.
8. Encourage employees to become brand advocates
You can also create a social media advocacy program or ask for it directly, but you can also focus on building a supportive and communicative culture within your team.
VoIP phones and unified communications platforms allow for easy interconnection. Regular upskilling and recalibration is a way to prioritize your employees’ growth and development. Involve employees more in your content creation and decision-making. Finally, reward and recognize their hard work.
9. Deliver Consistently Outstanding Customer Experiences
It’s easy – make it a great experience and your customers will share it with their friends. They will also share the experience on social media, follow you on your platforms and, hopefully, make more purchases.
Personalize and optimize every step of the customer journey. Provide omnichannel customer service. You can target them with targeted SMS and email marketing campaigns. You can nurture them through the sales funnel to brand advocacy by providing seamless experiences at all touchpoints.
Brand Advocacy Campaign Examples and Why They Stand Out
You want to see brand advocacy campaigns in action. These are the top brands advocacy campaigns.
Adidas’ Club
Adidas’ club stands out because it’s not your ordinary loyalty program.
Advocates are treated as royalty for their support of Adidas on social media, uploading UGC and referring friends. High-value rewards are given to them, including VIP access to events, exclusive products for members, early access and meet-and-greets with celebrities. This is a sustainable strategy that places advocacy at the core of growth.
Electronic Arts – E4 Insiders
Electronic arts created an advocacy program to address internal disunity among globally-distributed employees. Gamification was used by the E4 Insiders program to increase community spirit and employee engagement. It connected employees and generated thousands upon thousands of social sharing each month.
Free to use image sourced from delightfulcommunications.com
Starbucks – Tweet-a-Coffee
Starbucks launched a Twitter campaign to allow people to buy coffee for their friends. They asked Twitter users to use the hashtag @tweetacoffee with their friend’s handle. The $5 gift card would be given to the first 100,000 people who entered the campaign.
This campaign’s simplicity is the reason it was so successful. Starbucks invited 27,000 brand advocates and linked 54,000 customers’ and their Twitter IDs with 54,000 participants.
Conclusion
Social media is a powerful tool that can influence your brand’s reputation. Social media advocacy can bring you many benefits, including increased awareness, trust and loyalty, as well as revenue.
Personalize your customer experiences. Make sure your campaigns reflect the values of your target audience. Encourage your employees to produce employee-generated content. Encourage UGC creation by working with customers.
Your brand advocates will be more loyal if you have a closer relationship with customers.
Scoop.it Blog published the article How to Champion Your Brand with Social Media Advocacy Content.
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