Customer Advocacy: How to Leverage it as a Marketer

In order to understand customer advocacy, it’s incredibly important to first recognise the following distinction:

• Customer loyalty is a purchasing behaviour
• Customer advocacy is an emotional connection

Customer advocates are therefore characterised by their emotional connection to your brand.

Advocates share their experiences with both personal and social networks.

They are defined by their passion for your brand. And most importantly, they do so freely and willingly without being incentivised.

By engaging customers who have demonstrated loyalty, you can take advantage of existing customer behaviours to foster customer advocacy:

• Proactively seeking feedback is an excellent first step to initiating conversations with potential advocates.
• Reaching out to hear their thoughts and opinions is an excellent first step on the journey to transform loyalty into advocacy.
• Building a relationship with your customers is just like any other relationship. If you demonstrate that you care about their opinions, respect their thoughts and value their time, your customers will return the favour.

 

Satisfaction, Loyalty & Customer Advocacy:

Satisfied Customers

• Are happy with your product/ service
• Might be a repeat customer
• Are easily influenced by competing products in terms of:
  • Features
  • Price
  • Convenience

Loyal Customers

• Are usually, but not always, satisfied customers and they are not strongly engaged with you or your brand
• Believe that your product/service offers the best option
• Your product may be the only choice
• May be driven by price or other necessary features offered but would change if a competitor met these requirements
• In a B2B environment, at best, these customers are neutral towards you; at worst, it can mean sticking with you because they’re unwilling to assume the risk of taking on a new supplier

Customer Advocates

• Have actively demonstrated their happiness
• Engage with you and seek your insights
• Are 100% sure that they have made the right purchasing decision, and they actively share that positive experience with their network
• Are confident in their decision and don’t second guess themselves or explore other options

Satisfied AND loyal: the path to customer advocacy

A satisfied customer means you are meeting expectations.

But satisfaction itself does not always translate into loyalty. Most satisfied customers will consider the competition for their next purchase.

The following steps are crucial in ensuring your path to customer advocacy is successful:

Step 1) Deliver what you promise

This is the ‘pay to play’ step. Give them what they expect and more. If it is wrong, fix it. Listen to your customer.

A loyal customer is usually satisfied for a variety of logical and emotional reasons and will continue to buy your brand, but this does not make them an advocate.

 

Step 2) Be customer-centric

Engage your customers in ways that are purposeful, deliberate and coordinated with content that supports customer engagement.

Social media is your friend if you engage with it proactively. Respond to what your customers are saying.

 

Customer success is where the journey to advocate starts…

The customer is the epicentre of your business; customer success is an enterprise-wide endeavour

To achieve this you need to:

1. Understand the customer journey.
2. Understand who your customers are.
3. Know what motivates and inspires customers.
4. Promote a culture that puts your customer at the centre of you business.
5. Understand what your staff need to deliver to this customer centric perspective and empower them to deliver.
6. Measure, measure, measure!

 

A satisfied customer is not an advocate

An advocate is satisfied, loyal and wants to talk about your brand to other people. Advocates have developed an intimate relationship with your brand, it is important to them and, they are willing to risk their personal reputation for you.

 

Step 3) Cultivate and manage advocacy

Some customers will organically become advocates. Awesome! Others will need to be cultivated. Don’t be afraid to approach loyal customers about becoming an advocate. Make it about them, not about you.

Technology has changed the world of intimacy and removed barriers we can advocate on anything

It is easy to be a casual advocate or detractor without any real intimacy with the brand

Managing this type of very public feedback is crucial to managing reputation and building advocacy.
You will need to pick your battles; you can’t respond to everything.

 

Why is measuring satisfaction, engagement and advocacy so important?

Because it helps you to:

• Understand shifting sentiments and respond to customer needs
• Address issues (individual and systemic) quickly and transparently
• Drive engagement with employees, not just customers
• Get real time reactions to changing circumstances

 

And how do you measure effectively?

• Customer Satisfaction Score
• Customer Effort Score
  • Looks at how hard it is for a customer to do business with your brand (focus on customer support)
• Customer Journey Mapping
  • Looks the total experience rather than satisfaction with individual touchpoints
• Net Promoter Score
  • Meaningless as an independent measure
  • Is open to manipulation in some environments
  • Is usually a lagging measure so proceed with caution!
• Customer data
  • Churn rate, contact frequency, total spend, etc.

 

Finally, it’s important for you not to rely on one metric to measure satisfaction and advocacy.

You need a suite of measures, both ongoing and ad hoc, to effectively measure satisfaction and advocacy over time.

Want to know more about how to leverage customer advocacy in your business? Get in touch with our team of experts today!