How customer advocacy can be a game-changer for your organisation

Digital experiences continue to influence customers’ expectations. As we move into a more customer-centric market, traditional marketing is left behind and customer experience is key.

Your customers have expectations whenever they visit your website; they’re searching for a specific product or service. They know what they want and when they want it. It’s all good and well to reap the financial rewards of turning visitors into customers, but that’s only one part of a successful customer experience. Today, you want to turn customers into advocates. 

That’s the ultimate goal.

So, if you aim to build a customer-centric business which can rely on your audience to promote your business to friends and family, learn the importance of customer advocacy. 

Understand what customer advocacy is

Customer advocacy is a form of customer service, which makes an organisation focus on what is best for their customers. This can only happen when a business changes its culture to support customer-focused marketing techniques, ensuring that you cater to your visitors' needs throughout their customer journey. In turn, your customers will become a brand advocate for your business; essentially, a highly-satisfied customer who is willing to share information regarding your service or product free of charge. Customer advocates can help your business “recruit” new customers without your help. What a win! 

Why is customer advocacy important for an organisation?

Brand advocates will share their experiences on social media, review pages, community forums and through word of mouth. By doing this, not only are they creating brand awareness, but they are convincing others to purchase or utilise your services. That can be to an audience who needs what you offer, or to those who are sceptical about your brand. 

An example of customer advocacy is when a happy customer shares or gives a review about their experience with your business on their social media. By telling others about their experience with your brand, they are immediately persuading followers to try it out for themselves. Not only is it because they have used it, but because it's feedback coming from a regular person, like them, who has no affiliation with your brand. This creates trust. 

As mentioned in our CX report, “three-quarters of those surveyed (75%) stated that they would share news of their positive experience with friends and family and 43% said they would post about their experience on social media (up from 37% last year). And a full 42% say that they intend to buy more from a brand that pleases them.” This shows that creating a customer-centric business helps you acquire more customers and improve your bottom line.

How to cultivate brand advocacy? 

Customer advocacy value is bigger than what companies realise. 

Your customer has the power to not only deliver value to your business and grow your bottom line but to further improve the reach of your marketing strategies. This is why creating a good customer experience should be key for all marketers and business owners. To cultivate a brand advocacy environment, your brand strategies should include: 

• An understanding of your customers’ journey. Understanding that each visitor who lands on your website is different; therefore, you need to measure, monitor and manage things accordingly to ensure your organisation is delivering on your promises. More so once you've retained a customer.
• Because each customer is different, you need to monitor customer satisfaction metrics to understand your customer better and how you can continue to fulfil their expectations. 
• Create a relationship based on communication and transparency. You can do this by encouraging your customers to rate your service or product. This will show them that you care and value their input. 
• To see your customer advocacy metrics improve work on creating an overall good experience. Such as remembering special occasions like birthdays and Christmas, share positive feedback, act on feedback given by customers, empower advocates by sharing their reviews if they’ve tagged you on social media. Creating an overall positive experience is key in improving your relationship with customers and ensuring they become advocates for your brand.
• Provide useful content that not only informs but also helps you connect with your audience. 

Final thoughts

In this digital space, it's important to always be one step ahead of your competitors. And, the only way of achieving that is to ensure your business always aims for customer satisfaction in everything they do. If you're trying to build a relationship with your audience and create brand advocates, then contact Rogerwilco, a global digital marketing agency which offers everything from web development, content marketing services and other digital marketing related services. We would be thrilled to chat and help your business succeed online.