What Is Advocacy Marketing And How It Can Leverage Your Business

Marketing is essential for reaching your target audience, and there are many strategies your business can employ. But have you ever thought of how you could utilize the customers you already have in your marketing campaign? This is important since one of the biggest assets you have as a business is your existing audience. They include your customers, visitors, and followers. 

People love talking about brands, products, experiences with people who can relate to these subjects. With this, without their knowledge, they’re already considered brand advocates.

What Is Advocacy Marketing?

As mentioned, this is marketing using people already within your brand’s reach to market your brand to people within their network circles. They can do this by posting their brand experience on their social media platforms or create written or video testimonials. This turns them into valuable brand marketers, as well as valuable marketing and brand assets. 

With a media sharing app, you can collect, manage, and distribute social media data for your business uses. What you leverage in this type of marketing are the customers who love sharing positive brand experiences. This directly influences how people within their networks perceive your brand. All that’s required from your end is to provide good products, services, and user experience. 

You also need a way to repurpose the content generated by the users to benefit your business. 

As long as your brand continues to deliver value, the cycle doesn’t stop. You’ll be flooded with new customers looking to try products, and repeat customers will come back for more. Yet, you’re still creating a larger pool of advocates. This also enhances sales, positively impacting your bottom line.

How Advocacy Marketing Can Leverage Your Business

By giving your audience a voice in your brand, you can significantly benefit in the five ways discussed below:

1. Building Customer Loyalty

When you build a customer advocacy program, you’re able to understand your customers better as the information coming back to you is directly from the horse’s mouth, to put it lightly. This makes you match your products or services to what customers actually want from you, building customer loyalty in your brand. Also, your brand advocates, being also your customers, will feel valued and part of the brand. This makes them want to show loyalty by sticking with your brand.

2. Increased Customer Retention Rates

In addition to loyalty, customers want to stay and continue receiving the importance you give them. This can be done by involving them in the marketing plan. They’ll show gratitude to the brand by being involved more and more in various brand initiatives. 

Also, when other customers recommend products, new customers are more likely to become repeat customers as well. They tend to trust other customers’ words more if it was from the brand source itself.

3. Increased Conversion Rates

Customer reviews have a massive impact on how new customers view your business. Positive reviews are excellent for a business. In fact, statistics show that they can improve sales and revenue. Customers read reviews on products and services before they engage, and advocacy marketing increases the chances of good brand reviews.

Having a massive number of people continuously giving good ratings to your brand creates a higher likelihood of increased conversion rates. 

4. Reduced Marketing Expenses

Another considerable benefit of advocacy marketing is having a large number of people working as salesmen. You have an entire operational team in a decentralized system, referring customers and selling products. They also satisfy other roles, such as answering product questions, easing any fears new customers might have. All this is happening at no cost to you, keeping your marketing budget down.  

Since the cost of acquiring customers is often higher than that of retaining customers, you’re saving your business valuable costs and time. Besides, if your advocacy marketing program is quite successful, there’s a higher chance of retaining customers, as seen elsewhere in this article. Therefore, you have customers who stay for the positive brand experience and high customer acquisition rates at no extra cost.  

5. Increased Brand Value

A successful advocacy marketing can create a trustworthy brand. When you have many people who trust your brand and willingly market it, you may be able to command higher prices than those quoted by your competitors. With higher prices, you’re bound to offer more value to customers. Your customers will stay despite having other places they can source cheaper products or services.

Having a large pool of advocates who love and enjoy being part of your brand helps your brand value to stay up. That’s why you see customers pre-ordering products they haven’t seen as they already trust the fact that it’s going to be of good quality and will give them the needed service. Trust also plays a role in why customers won’t readily substitute your brand for another, even when your products are relatively highly-priced.

Takeaway

Advocacy marketing is a powerful marketing tool when applied correctly. The broad reach, positive reviews, customer acquisition, and retention are just some of the ways it can leverage your business. It’s an irreplaceable marketing strategy as it provides the best form of brand loyalty you can get from your audience.