Brand Advocates

Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force

Rob Fuggetta

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118336038
• eBook ISBN: 9781118336540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

"The ultimate guidebook to brand advocacy."
—PORTER GALE, former VP of Marketing, Virgin America

Brand Advocates are your most loyal, passionate, and engaged customers, and your best marketers. They don't just buy your products—they sell your products for you. Brand Advocates tweet, blog, and Yelp about you; they praise you with five-star reviews on Amazon and TripAdvisor; they talk you up in social networks, online communities, and over coffee; and they defend you from detractors. Do you know who your Brand Advocates are? Are you systematically leveraging them to get more brand and product recommendations as well as drive sales? If you're not, you're missing the most powerful opportunity to turn likes into leads and social media into sales.

Brand Advocates teaches you how to turn your enthusiastic customers into a powerful and sustainable marketing force. Through a step-by-step playbook and real-world examples, you'll learn exactly what it takes to build and activate your Advocate Army, from identifying your Advocates to energizing them and tracking results. By following this strategic and sustainable approach, you'll soon be able to:

• Discover who your Brand Advocates are and what makes these influential customers tick
• Create and grow your Advocate Army by continuously identifying Advocates on digital, social, and mobile channels
• Energize and mobilize your Advocate Army to recommend your brand and products, boost sales, and defend you from social media ambushes
• Reward your Advocates by giving them what they crave most
• Measure results and ROI from advocacy programs

Every company in the world—including yours!—has Brand Advocates. Get more value from your social media marketing and transform your company by unleashing the most powerful marketing force you have. Your Advocate Army is ready and waiting to build your brand and business.

Section Four

Advocate Marketing Playbook

Chapter 15

Advocate Marketing Playbook Overview

You're excited about turning your Advocates into a powerful marketing force.

Now the big question: How do you do this? How do you identify Advocates? How do you energize them to spread positive word of mouth and drive sales? And how do you track results from advocacy programs?

The Advocate Marketing Playbook provides an easy to follow, step-by-step approach to harnessing the power of advocacy in your business. The playbook details the four major steps of the Advocate marketing process (see Figure 15.1).

1. Identifying is the process of continually identifying Advocates by name and/or e-mail address or other contact method. As I'll discuss, a simple, yet highly effective way to identify Advocates is by asking the Ultimate Question for customer loyalty: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” I strongly recommend asking the Ultimate Question often and across multiple customer touch points. This enables you to build and keep growing your Advocate army.

2. Energizing is the process of leveraging Advocates on an ongoing basis to spread positive word of mouth and boost sales. Energizing is the heart of what Advocate marketing is all about. I'll talk about encouraging Advocates to:

• Write and publish highly positive reviews of your products and services, boosting online ratings and sales.
• Create and share glowing stories about their experiences with your company and/or brand, increasing credibility and highlighting your unique value proposition.
• Answer prospects' questions, boosting buyer confidence and conversion rates plus generate leads.
• Share offers and content with their social and business networks, driving referral leads, clicks, and sales.

3. Mobilizing is about focusing Advocates on a short-term basis to address specific marketing challenges and opportunities like product launches; fighting a social media ambush; and special promotions, such as the Super Bowl, holidays, and back to school.

4. Tracking enables you to get actionable insights about Advocates; optimize advocacy programs and campaigns; and answer the question: What are we getting from our advocacy investment?

Figure 15.1 Advocacy System

Source: Zuberance.

At the center of these four steps is an Advocacy system that enables you to automate and scale advocacy, manage advocacy programs efficiently, and track results in real time.

By the way, these actions are not necessarily sequential. You don't need to mobilize Advocates directly after energizing them. And tracking isn't the final step on the advocacy process. It is an ongoing process. But since these actions are different from each other, it helps to think of them as a process.

In the playbook, I'll also answer two questions often asked about turning your Advocates into a marketing force.

1. How do you reward Advocates? If paying or providing financial incentives isn't kosher, what is the right way to acknowledge Advocates?

2. How do you engage Advocates? Advocacy is about building relationships with Advocates. What are the most effective ways of doing this?

Advocate Flow

Before getting into the how-to part of advocacy, it helps to understand the Advocate flow from a customer perspective.

Figure 15.2 shows how the advocacy process typically starts with inviting customers to answer the Ultimate Question. There are multiple customer touch points and sources you can leverage to identify Advocates. This includes e-mail, web, social media, and other. I will discuss these in detail in Chapter 16, Identifying.

Figure 15.2 Sample Brand Advocate Flow

Source: Zuberance.

Depending on the customers' response to the Ultimate Question, you can bring them down three different paths.

1. Advocates (9 and 10) can be invited to rate and review your products, create stories, answer prospects' questions, or recommend you in other ways.

2. Passives (7 and 8) can be encouraged to share promotional offers and content with their social networks. You probably don't want to encourage Passives to create reviews or stories. Passives are just not into you that much.

3. Detractors (0 through 6) can be routed to your service and support team.

As Figure 15.2 shows, social sharing tools make it easy for Advocates and Passives to share offers and content wherever you would like.

Keep in mind this is a sample Advocate flow. You could decide you want to invite Advocates to write a review and then share an offer. Or you may decide you'd like to encourage Advocates to create a story instead of a review. You can set this up any way you'd like.

Chapter 16

Identifying

Identifying your Advocates is the first step of the advocacy process. I often refer to this step as building your Advocate Army. It's the prelude to unleashing your Advocates.

Identifying isn't a one-time deal. As I'll discuss, you should be identifying your Advocates continuously. The more recruits in your Advocate Army, the more impact it can have on your sales and marketing.

Three Ways to Identify Advocates

Here are three ways you can identify your Advocates:

1. Ask. The first way to find Advocates is to ask the Ultimate Question for customer loyalty: (On a scale of 0 to 10), “How likely are you to recommend us? Customers who answer 9 or 10 (highly likely to recommend) can be considered Advocates.

2. Listen. You can identify Advocates by monitoring Twitter and other social channels. Social media listening tools can also help you find Advocates. But these tools by themselves aren't always the best way to identify Advocates. (I'll explain more soon.)

3. Observe. You can find Advocates by observing customers' behavior. For example, if customers are bringing referrals to you or creating positive videos about your products and posting them on YouTube, they're already showing by their behavior that they're Advocates.

Asking the Ultimate Question

Frederick F. Reichheld, founder of the loyalty practice at management consultants Bain and Company, created the Ultimate Question along with customer experience management company Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Reichheld, the high priest of customer loyalty, has written several best-selling books on customer loyalty, including Loyalty Rules! After years of studying consumer behavior, Reichheld found that the real litmus test for loyalty was whether customers would recommend the company or product to a friend.

You may say you're satisfied with your Jeep Cherokee. But would you put your personal reputation on the line by recommending it to a friend? May...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Brand Advocates
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section One: Understanding Brand Advocates
• Section Two: The Power of Advocate Marketing
• Section Three: Advocacy Goes Vertical
• Section Four: Advocate Marketing Playbook
• Section Five: Putting Advocacy to Work for You
• Index