An efficient marketer recognizes the need to win over the public’s image and support. Such as that rather than purchasing from competing businesses, the general public instead opts to buy from only one company and end up as loyal customers. The process is said to begin with starting with a strong plan, onboarding process, and a product retention strategy. This is where the foundation of advocacy marketing comes into the picture.
Advocacy marketing refers to the process of giving customers a voice. It’s considered a unique way to communicate with your company’s target audience. Akin to word-of-mouth, advocacy marketing involves clients sharing their positive feedback and experience with your company’s products and services. These helpful pieces of input may help your business gain more traction and reach significant portions of your target market base over different marketing channels.
You can effectively boost your public perception and image, with advocacy marketing, as it brings about the following benefits for your business:
It Increases Brand Engagement
Customer advocacy is also characterized as a marketing type, which has user-generated content. As its name implies, this means the content of those marketing strategies isn’t made or curated by your in-house marketing team. Rather, it’s unfiltered output and responses from your customers who are the users of your products and services.
With this kind of user-generated content and with the use of the appropriate customer engagement tool, it’s not surprising that brand engagement increases as well. Your business’ new customers are more likely to engage with your brand through your customer advocacy program. This is for the reason that new customers feel more comfortable engaging with other customers and with whom they can relate.
Advocacy marketing makes your brand look approachable, inviting, and refreshing in the eyes of your potential patrons.
It Lowers Your Marketing Costs
Marketing is a very important operational expense for any business. But, as important as it may be, it doesn’t mean you should incur high marketing expenses in a bid to succeed in the market. The lower the cost, the better. Among all the other forms of marketing you can go for, it’s believed that you can’t go wrong with customer advocacy.
If your customers really love you and your brand, they’ll wholeheartedly come up with content that references your business’ products and services and then share these on a variety of platforms. Your customers are all doing this on their own, without even expecting anything in return from your brand. This lowers your marketing costs significantly.
Rather than having to spend for exceedingly high marketing campaigns, advocacy marketing brings in a return-on-investment (ROI) rate that far outweighs the costs of running the program and the rewards you’ll give your advocates.
It Builds Strong Customer Loyalty
Customer loyalty is said to strengthen through advocacy marketing as new customers generally take the word of your current satisfied customers. This is the best form of advocacy any business can ever have, as happy clients speak highly about your brand’s reputation. This can lead other customers who may still be more doubtful about your brand’s viability to trust your brand more. Positive feedback, in fact, may help you establish your company as a good brand.
Typically, customer advocacy programs are implemented across various social media channels. This makes for a more natural form of marketing as social media is perceived by the majority of consumers as more relaxed, relatable, and friendlier. With the strong population of a potential market on social media, your marketing strategies are able to make it to a wider reach by penetrating and taking advantage of this advertising avenue.
It Increases Conversions
Customer advocacy marketing can also be used to boost client conversion rates your company currently has. Positive insights from your current customers can be used in adding up to your business review section. This is found across your website, in your customer feedback and reviews section. It can also be found on different business review sites over the web. Some useful online search engines show customer reviews on companies with the use of different methods.
Conversions refer to website visitors and potential business leads that heeded to your company’s call-to-action. As a result, they’re converted to paying customers simply because they’re pleased with the products and services you offer based on the client reviews available.
Like a domino effect, increased conversions also mean a higher profit-earning potential for the business and this is a positive goal every entrepreneur should always strive for.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, customer advocacy is believed to bring in many positive changes in your business. Customer advocacy enables your business to reach new, organic, and valuable customers. It may aid in cultivating a positive customer attitude and perception towards your brand and the products and services you’re offering. Your customers become the advertisements for your brand where their pleasant experiences entice leads.
Whenever they’re happy with their experience, your customers do the marketing for your business. This creates a positive image with the sense of accountability you’re making-giving new customers that added push to support your business and not that of the competition.
Digital Web Services (DWS) is a leading IT company specializing in Software Development, Web Application Development, Website Designing, and Digital Marketing. Here are providing all kinds of services and solutions for the digital transformation of any business and website.