Image adapted from Dan Markeye's photo on flickr.

Zuberance defines brand advocates as "highly satisfied customers who proactively recommend their favorite brands and products online and offline, without being paid to do so." It’s common sense to say that brand advocates provide value to your company. But to what extent?

Zuberance found that "for every $1 a company invests in energizing advocates, the company gets $10 in positive word of mouth impressions and sales.". That's a 10x ROI on advocate marketing. In addition, Zuberance notes that people trust word of mouth five times more than more promotional vehicles, such as advertising and paid search.

The benefits of activating your brand advocates (aka “advocate marketing”) is clear. In this post, I’ll detail how Evoq makes it easy for you to create advocate marketing campaigns, right on your website.

The Advocate Marketing Cycle

Recently, Carter Hostelley (CEO of Leadtail) presented an advocate marketing webinar with us (view Carter’s webinar on-demand). Carter outlined a three-step cycle for any advocate marketing campaign. Let’s dive into each step.

Identify Brand Advocates

In advocate marketing, the first step is identifying your brand advocates. Carter recommended these three tactics for identifying advocates:

1. Via a survey tool, ask them if they'll recommend your brand. Use the Net Promoter Score "Ultimate Question" to find those highly likely to recommend you.
2. Use social media listening tools to identify who's talking favorably about your product or company
3. Capture who's sending your organization fan mail (e.g. happy customers)

Before you begin the identification process, Carter urges brands to put the following foundation in place:

1. Update your CRM system to flag advocates
2. Designate a single point of contact to receive and collect advocacy emails, phone calls, etc.
3. Make brand advocacy a priority for the social media team and ensure that the social playbook details the process for engaging advocates
4. Bookmark social media advocacy posts so you can find them later

Mobilize Brand Advocates

Now that you have the right foundation in place, it’s time to spur your brand advocates into action. Carter suggests numerous ways in which brand advocates can support you:

• Write reviews and testimonials
• Recommend on social media
• Share branded content and offers
• Answer prospect questions
• Battle negative word of mouth
• Provide product feedback
• Contribute blog posts and curate content
• Buy more products and services
• Generate referrals

To increase your chances of success, make it easy for brand advocates: arm them with pre-written posts, shareworthy images, special offers and trackable links. Of course, don’t forget to acknowledge and thank your brand advocates.

Track Brand Advocates

Track data from your advocate marketing campaigns to determine which advocate marketing activities see the most activity. Data helps you understand how active your advocates are and how you can increase the level of activity. By tracking and measuring each advocate marketing campaign, you’ll find that future campaigns become more and more effective.

How to Make Advocate Marketing Work for You

By Carter Hostelley

Advocate Marketing with Evoq

Advocate Marketing is available in Evoq Engage. Let’s take a look at how Evoq manages each step of the advocate marketing cycle.

Identifying Brand Advocates Made Easy

While Carter provides an excellent approach to identifying brand advocates, Evoq helps you fast-track the identification process. Guess what? Your brand advocates are already on your website. They routinely visit to download your latest product brochure, read your latest blog post and engage with other customers. So give them the ability to identify themselves.

Evoq accomplishes this with a feature called Challenges. Create a Challenge and it's published to your site's Activity Feed for all users to see. Challenges can be “accepted” by users, at which point they’re provided with calls-to-action to follow to complete the Challenge.

Mobilize Brand Advocates via Challenges

The following Challenges in Evoq get your brand advocates to take action:

1. Social network share. Invite advocates to share content on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
2. Create content. Incent users to create blog posts, discussions, ideas and questions.
3. Comment on content. When users receive comments on their content, they’re more likely to remain interested in participating.
4. Answer a question. Save the time of your customer care team by having your customers help answer questions.
5. Vote on an idea or answer. Encourage customers to provide feedback on ideas and answers submitted by the community.

As you can see, these actions align closely with the list Carter provided earlier.

RELATED RESOURCE: Evoq Engage product data sheet

Challenges are integrated with Evoq’s gaming mechanics engine: you can designate the number of points associated with Challenge completion, giving users a way to elevate their status on the Leaderboard. In addition, custom badges can be created for completing one or more Challenges.

Track Challenges via Evoq’s Analytics

Evoq provides an analytics dashboard for each Challenge, including statistics on participation: number of users invited, percent accepted, percent completed, etc. In addition, Evoq captures the list of users who accepted and completed each challenge.

RELATED RESOURCE: Evoq's Advocate Marketing: feature summary (PDF)

For the “social network share” challenge, Evoq provides attribution of page activity back to individual users. For instance, if Jane completed a challenge to share on Twitter, Evoq records the number of page views generated from her tweet. This helps you understand how advocate marketing is impacting your website traffic.

Evoq and Advocate Marketing

Since Carter outlined an advocate marketing cycle (described above), we wanted to check in with him and show him what we implemented in Evoq. 

I’ll leave you with this quote from Carter:

“During my recent webinar with DNN, I presented an Identify->Mobilize->Track methodology for brand advocacy. Evoq’s advocate marketing feature implements this very cycle. And best of all, it happens where many of your brand advocates already happen to be: your website.”

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Try Evoq Engage

Create an engaging website that attracts and engages your target audience. Expand the content pipeline and keep your website fresh and up to date. 

Try all of our product features, including:

1. Advocate marketing!
2. Page creation
3. Personalization
4. Content analytics

See it for yourself: sign up for a 14-day trial of Evoq today.