5 tips to take your brand advocacy to the next level

Ask your customers what they love about your brand and it’s very unlikely that they will say your logo or your excellent use of SEO. Imagine! Aside from the obvious, such as your delicious products, one of the most powerful assets your brand has is the people that are connected to it. The people that represent you online will help to define who your customers are, what they love about you and how loyal they are. 

One of the best ways to stay ahead of your competition, establish faster buying decisions and convert more customers is to ensure that the people talking about your products feel empowered, passionate and deliver the right message to their followers. 

Brands are more frequently turning influencers into brand ambassadors to help them achieve their sales goals. Whether that’s obtaining new customers, improving customer loyalty, or building brand awareness you need a strategy that gets people talking about you! 

How food and drink brands can take their brand advocacy to the next level

I’m going to assume that you already do some product gifting in exchange for social posts; whether that’s to your most loyal customers, social influencers that you have identified or a mix of both.

A lot of brands will measure the success of their product gifting on social metrics (likes, comments, shares etc), CTR and tracking sales via promotional codes. All of these are totally valid and shouldn’t be ignored within any successful brand advocacy marketing programme. But there are a number of things brands can (and should) do that will significantly increase their success rates and improve the longevity of their brand advocacy campaigns. 

So here are 5 tips for taking your brand advocacy to the next level:

1. Clearly define your objective 

It is crucial to clearly define your objectives to be able to identify the right advocates and the message you want them to deliver to their audiences. A clear objective will also allow you and your team to measure the success of the campaign, retain valuable data and improve in the long-term. 

Typically, food and drink brands will lead with one or more of the following objectives:

Referral sales: increasing referral sales by using social influencers.

Brand loyalty: keeping existing customers loyal and passionate about your brand. 

New markets: use content creators with targeted audiences when launching into new markets or new products etc.

User-generated content: using content creators to generate content that can be shared on your own channels.

Improved SEO: using content creators to improve search engine rankings.

Improved online sentiment: increase the amount of positive sentiment across various online platforms.

2. Segment your advocates to target specific audiences 

Brands will often have several target demographics, depending on their products and services. Trying to blanket-reach these audiences with uniform influencer marketing will likely mean diluted results. 

Once you’ve got your objectives in place, you need to understand which customer profiles you want to target. It is therefore much more effective to segment your advocates to improve your appeal to your specific customer profiles. 

3. Establish your incentives 

Simply gifting products to influencers and expecting them to passionately promote your products will very rarely deliver on your objectives.

Creating relevant incentives is crucial. They need to be exciting enough to make your advocates deliver them with pride to their audiences, enticing enough for their audiences to take action and  cost-effective for you to be able to run long-term. 

Example: 

A really effective incentive I saw recently was an influencer offering 10% discount when using their code. Not very inspiring in itself, but when using the same code, the buyer also got free delivery for 12 months when buying directly from the brand’s website. This delivers value on so many levels: to the advocate, the customer, and the business.  

4. Think long-term

Do not underestimate the power of repetition! Building long-term relationships with popular content creators will allow you to embed your brand within their audiences. And over the course of your partnership together, their audiences will identify that they have a genuine love and trust for your products. 

Long-term partnerships are about building communities and becoming an active member and contributor to conversations that are already happening online. Conversations that you and your products can be a part of so when they have a problem and you are the solution it feels like a natural part of the conversation, not wedging in a sales line.

5. Get as much data as you can

Measuring the effectiveness of brand advocacy and influencer marketing can be a daunting task. But in all honesty, the more you measure, the more you know. And the more you know, the more you can learn. 

The data you need, however, will be determined on the objective of the campaign. Sales campaigns will have different objectives from brand awareness and SEO focused campaigns, and will, therefore, mean that the data you need to collect will be slightly different. 

We suggest having two or even three tiers of data importance, depending on your goals and objectives. Collect as much data as you can for every campaign, but priorities are what is most important. This will allow you to significantly improve your success over time. 

We work with brands to create high-impact brand advocacy programmes. We help you to get under the skin of your audiences, understand where they are and collaborate with respected influencers to get your message to them. If you’d like to know how we can take your brand advocacy to the next level, drop Thom an email and arrange a time to chat.