For as long as we’ve had commerce, we’ve known that word of mouth recommendations are the best. Getting your loyal customer base to do your marketing for you has always been the ideal scenario for any business.
Digital and social media have made it easier than ever before for brands to identify, capture and utilise those fervent supporters, but it’s interesting just how few have approached advocacy marketing and advocacy curation systematically, with a coherent strategy, platforms and processes.
Finding advocates comes down to two major approaches: listening and prompting. The first has been made vastly easier in recent years thanks to online review sites and social media (and monitoring tools for the latter such as Radian6), while the second involves mechanisms that ask for feedback at critical moments of truth such as that first purchase, use or visit, via tactics such as the follow-up email or customer feedback form.
The latter option is as much an offline as online tool, and to date has been the main way brands obtain information on customer experiences.
Capturing advocacy, meanwhile, is about processes and platforms. Brands have to capture and store positive sentiment in a way that can be accessed and interrogated with speed and accuracy. And that leads to the next stage, where that sentiment is repackaged so that the array of sound bites, reviews and anecdotes together form the content that underpins a marketing campaign.
Finally, that advocacy has to be distributed. There are a range of available channels, both above and below the line, and the good thing about advocacy content is that it can often be transferred between platforms. First Direct, for example, included social media consumer opinions in its live outdoor and press ads a few years ago.
Customer sentiment can be repackaged in a number of ways: the anonymous mass (e.g. US department store Nordstrom where garment hangers showed the number of Facebook Likes particular lines or items were securing); the aggregated handful or group (e.g. Amazon reviews including the average five-star rating); or the individual advocate, which can be anything from a single Instagram post on a great holiday experience to an organisation discovering via social media that a woman wanted to be married at the same venue as her grandparents and re-opening (and filming) the property just for the occasion.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that there are different levels of advocacy. It might be about content, where the brand produces a piece of content or collateral that people like, share and comment on (e.g. an especially entertaining video). Alternatively, it can be product advocacy, where people review and publicly support a particular item. At the top level you have brand advocacy, where customers are loyal to the brand and advocate it irrespective of particular products. Apple, one of the world’s biggest technology brands, is also one of the foremost examples of brand advocacy in action.
It’s also interesting the role that advocacy plays through the digital experience. People search on Google and Facebook but they also look for ‘how to’ videos on YouTube and reviews on TripAdvisor. The ad they saw on TV or the word of mouth might be a trigger that encourages a search for online advocacy; it’s become an integral part of the decision-making process.
So why aren’t brands making more of their advocates? There isn’t an easy answer. In some cases, the different platforms aren’t as joined up as they could be; or they worry that inviting feedback is to invite endless waves of criticism and negative reviews.
Some companies and industries do it very well of course. Evian for one, or the travel companies whose hand has been rather forced by the likes of TripAdvisor. Nordstrom is another, aggregating Likes and Pinterest pins to tell customers which winter boots are the most talked-about at present.
Advocacy works because it plays into some of the fundamental basics of human behaviour: the herd instinct; the desire to reduce risk; the fact we trust our peers over the ‘faceless corporations’. Word of mouth, even if that word is a Tweet, is just as powerful now as it was a thousand years ago.
