Build a Digital Word of Mouth Engine Across the Entire B2B Customer Journey with Brand Advocacy

Word of mouth marketing works well when you are able to mingle freely, attend events, etc.

Since the pandemic started, word of mouth marketing has transformed in an inevitable way. No, I am not talking about reviews on Amazon or G2. I am talking about brand advocacy.

What even is that?

To me, brand advocacy is the act of empowering your community to share content relevant to your brand in an authentic, meaningful, and engaging way on their personal social profiles.

This brings up a lot of internal questions and sounds like a s#%* ton of work. Yep. It does and it is, but it is so worth it. Let’s dive in.

What is Brand Advocacy & Why is It Important?

Definition

A brand advocate is someone who elevates your brand through word-of-mouth marketing.

What problem does it solve?

There is a ton of money being spent on paid social media ads across many different industries. In fact, in 2020 companies worldwide spent $332 billion on social media advertising. Woah. That is only going to go up.

Brand advocacy can dramatically reduce the need for that type of ad spend and bring results organically with the power of your team, customers, earned influencers and paid influencers.

With brand advocacy, you can build a social proof engine through word-of-mouth marketing across the entire customer journey.

• Your team: Awareness, Consideration, and Adoption, builds trust and relevance at the top and bottom of the funnel.
• Customers / Partners: Decision and Advocacy, they drive the conversion from consideration to decision when sharing customer stories that used your product or service. Through having customer advocate for your company, you are inspiring future customers to do the same.
• Earned Influencers: Awareness, they spread your message, mission, and goal with their entire network
• Paid Influencers: Awareness, they bring awareness to your specific niche audiences that you would not be able to reach otherwise. Their connections with this audience is built on trust and authenticity.

I know what you’re thinking: Where’s the value? Where’s the ROI? How can I justify time and effort into operationalizing brand advocacy?

Here we have an image from Sprout Social. Sprout Social shared that having 135 advocates is the same impact as 1 million people following your company’s facebook page. Imagine what you could do with 300 advocates, 500, 1,000…

How to Create Your B2B Social Proof Engine

What if no one wants to do it?

Give them free stuff to do it. No really. It works.

Do you have a big event coming up? Get the whole team to advocate for it on social media and let them know that whoever shares will be entered into a random drawing to win 1 of 5 limited edition company swag or an UberEats gift card. Whatever gets them excited about advocating for your company, do it.

Okay, cool, I like this brand advocacy idea! How do I start?

Start with your team. Build an employee advocacy program and then move to customers then to influencers.

Start by researching which advocacy platform is best for your needs. I recommend Bambu by Sprout Social. Determine the objectives, goals, and dream team for setting up an employee advocacy program at your org.

The objective could be something like — Drive traffic to your website or increase social media engagement

The goals would be — X amount of link clicks or X amount of engagements on employee advocacy posts. You can measure all of that in Bambu and you can go even deeper with Shield.

For more information on the best metrics to track, check out Sprout Social’s guide to Employee Advocacy here.

Finally, you will need a dream team. These are the people in your organization that will help you lead your employee advocacy efforts on an individual team basis. They will echo your requests for the team to their individual teams and increase engagement with the Employee Advocacy program you choose.

Got a specific question? Text me at 617–855–0404 (don’t worry it is not my real number, I won’t see your number, and I will NEVER spam you.)

Stay tuned on the next one about other forms of brand advocacy and even more on employee advocacy. ⚡️