If you have a small business, you need to learn everything about brand advocacy, why you need a brand advocate, how to amplify your brand’s message, and all of the benefits that this process can offer. As you might already know, branding is crucial as it needs to be one of your marketing strategies’ main priorities.
Although you could always ask marketing professionals from companies like www.greenfly.com, it’s still crucial that you get the basics of brand advocacy. This is important as even though you’ve been focusing all your efforts on your marketing campaigns, you might not get the results you’ve been looking for. So, here’s everything you need to know about brand advocacy.
Why Is Brand Advocacy Important?
It can get a bit frustrating if your business doesn’t get the attention that you want, especially if the competition is tight in your industry. The only way you can solve this is by increasing your brand visibility, ensuring that you reach your target audience. This is important as people won’t care about the products or services you offer if they don’t know a thing or two about it.
Aside from brand visibility, there’s another factor that your marketing team needs to prioritize. Through the power of the Internet and social media, making your brand more visible has never been easier. But without formulating a solid branding strategy that is compatible with your marketing campaign, you won’t see an increase in your business’ visibility.
Brand advocacy can be an effective way of increasing the reach of your company. This process involves finding people who prefer your products and services. Finding these customers are important because they might be willing to promote your brand to new customers. So, more people will know about your organization without allocating more resources to your marketing campaign, making this process very cost-effect, especially for fledgling businesses.
Although other marketing strategies like paid advertising are still crucial for your overall marketing campaign, brand advocacy can be a good complement for these efforts. Not only does it cost little to no money, but it’s also quite effective, so it’s a win-win situation.
Also, traditional marketing strategies will only get you to a certain point if your potential customers don’t trust or aren’t familiar with your brand. This is especially true for large corporations, but new businesses aren’t immune from this phenomenon too. You must find real customers to make them your brand advocates and nurture that relationship for the long term.
What Is A Brand Advocate?
Now that you know some things about brand advocacy, it’s time to find your brand advocates or ‘brand ambassadors.’ Click here for more useful information. These people are either your customer or employee willing to proactively share their experience with your product or service. They can make your brand awareness grow by posting on social media, sending emails, making content, or simply through word of mouth without offering any incentive. Instead, their primary motivation would be to help your brand grow.
So, who should be your brand advocates? They should be:
- Customers and Clients
Your customers and clients are among the best people to become your brand advocate as they’re often invested in seeing your business grow. If they see that your offerings deserve it, they’ll be more likely to recommend it to everyone they know. So, if they trust your brand and give them value, they will help you gain more customers, increasing your revenue later on.
But if you don’t have a strong brand or great product and service, you won’t get as much love from your brand advocates. So, you need to work on these factors first before you see more people who will endorse your offerings fervently.
- Employees
As your business grows, you’ll realize that your employees are effective brand advocates. So, if they share their experience with your products and services and recommend it to their friends and family, your brand will reach more people more quickly. Your employees could also influence everyone in their social circles more effectively since they trust them, convincing them to believe in your brand a lot easier.
Why Is Brand Advocacy Important for Your Business?
Since you now know who the most effective brand advocates for your business are, you’ve probably realized why their role is crucial. So, here are some of the reasons why your business needs to incorporate brand advocacy into its marketing strategy:
- Grow your brand visibility organically: If you want to grow your brand naturally or without resorting to paid ads, brand advocacy is your best shot. Not only will you end up spending less on your marketing campaign, but you’ll also have highly effective brand advocates who can arguably do a better job in reaching more prospective customers.
- It could become a testament to your product or service’s quality: Since more people trust your offerings, they’d be more receptive to your brand’s message and value it more. Most people trust those they know personally than a marketing agency, so you’ll influence more people more effectively. Your employees are also good brand advocates since the people around them would easily trust their statements about your products and services.
- Traditional media will take you seriously: Since your business is receiving a lot of attention from people, more established media outlets such as magazines and newspapers will also notice. This could open new doors for your brand since getting mentioned in one of their articles will bring your brand toward more people who may not be as accessible to your brand advocates.
- You could focus on other initiatives: When you don’t have to spend more time and resources on marketing, you can divert your attention to other company matters. You might use this time to develop new products or improve your existing ones. You could also focus on your team to increase their performance or let your marketing department relax for a bit since they won’t be developing more ads or deal with negative feedback in the meantime.
Closing Thoughts
Although focusing on your brand is not entirely groundbreaking, the idea of developing brand advocacy still is. Since it’s relatively nascent, many businesses struggle to utilize this strategy to complement their traditional marketing campaigns. Still, if you prioritize brand advocacy, it will help your customers and employees have a stronger affinity with your brand, invaluable for your business.
So, it’s crucial to develop this relationship since these people can become your brand advocates, influencing other people to patronize your business. You’ll not only see an increase in your revenue, but you can also spend less on your future marketing campaigns since your advocates are already making your brand known.
