Guest post by Rhys Williams
Customer advocacy is when customers help promote your business – either by referring their friends, or through word-of-mouth and online engagement. So how do businesses make it happen, and with more frequency?
Diminishing returns from traditional marketing channels are nothing new. And declining customer retention rates remain a challenge in most industries due to extensive competition.
But it is possible to sustainably expand your revenue at a time when customers continue to keep a close eye on the purse strings. You just have to listen closely to what your customers are telling you.
Mention Me, a customer advocacy intelligence platform, helps businesses understand and nurture customers’ advocacy actions and brand sentiment. It helps reveal the driving forces behind buying decisions.
Using this understanding to create a unique and compelling customer experience is the key to success: a customer will only refer you to a friend or leave you a positive review if they’ve had an outstanding experience with your brand.
The better, more deeply personalized your CX is, the more referrals customers will make.
Related: Why Personalized CX Matters and How Brands Can Do It Right
A customer advocacy marketing strategy takes a systematic approach to acquiring and retaining high-quality customers who want to promote your brand.
If you get customer advocacy right, not only will your customers help spread the word, they’ll also be happier, more loyal, and more likely to keep on spending with you for longer.
We’ve analyzed the feedback from brands who’ve partnered with Mention Me, and the data is clear: customers brought in through referrals are where the real value for your business lies. These customers:
Brands who’ve used customer advocacy marketing tactics to acquire new customers typically have to spend 40% less than they otherwise would on paid channels.
Here’s how they do it:
Advocacy insights strengthen your customer data, making it easier to attract the right kind of customers.
For example, fashion brand MOSS increased their Return on Advertising Spending (ROAS) by a colossal 90% and boosted conversions by an equally impressive 61%.
Identifying those customers who are just itching to promote your brand and nurturing them with the right messaging, offers and customer experience is a great way to amplify the value in your customer base and bring high-quality new customers to your brand.
So how do you develop a system for doing this that you can replicate and automate?
How, when and why customers make referrals has traditionally been regarded as a mystery. Advocacy marketing aims to change that.
Referrals don’t just happen on an individual basis. The personal connection involved in making a referral means some of that emotional warmth gets transferred to your brand. So your new customers are more likely to refer others to you in turn.
With a customer advocacy marketing strategy, you’ll keep track of who’s making the most referrals, where these referrals are clustered, and how and why referral networks develop.
These insights mean you have a greater understanding of who’s bringing the most value to your business. Observing factors that led to the growth of one network means you can repeat the process with other customers.
Once you incorporate customer advocacy data into your marketing strategy, you can start making accurate predictions about which customers will spend the most and be your most passionate advocates.
With these forecasts you’ll be hit with a striking reality: the value your customers bring is not set in stone. You can increase it with careful calibration of your customer interactions.
Whether a customer has never referred before but thinks highly of your brand, or whether they have referred 10 friends but are in danger of churning, allocating them to the right customer segment means you can provide CX that fits their needs.
This concept, developed by Bain and Co., expresses customer advocacy as a single metric.
Earned Growth is the amount your business would grow by if you stripped out all the effects of advertising and marketing spend. It captures the goodwill and enthusiasm customers have towards your brand — all the word-of-mouth promotion, positive reviews and social engagement — and calculates the net effect of customers promoting your business.
The more you lean toward earned rather than paid-for growth, the healthier the underlying economics of your business become.
Mention Me is the only platform that lets you track Earned Growth and the effect your customer advocacy strategy has on it.
Over time, it’s possible to use customer advocacy to transform your business. What starts as a simple referral program can blossom into a customer-centric, organic growth strategy.
The result? Reducing customer acquisition costs and more efficiently spending your marketing budget.
Making data-driven improvements to your CX and acquiring high-LTV customers can help rebalance away from paid marketing channels.
The high-quality customers you attract will put your business on a more stable financial footing, provide an immediate and sustainable boost to revenue, and drive profitability now and into the future.
Rhys Williams is a freelance content marketing writer specializing in B2B SaaS, martech and personalization. When he’s not extolling the virtues of outstanding CX, he can be found watching old movies and, occasionally, football. To learn more about Mention Me and how it can help you achieve sustainable growth through customer advocacy, say hi at hello@mention-me.com.
The image in this post was produced using AI on Adobe Firefly.
Dan Gingiss is a customer experience keynote speaker who helps unlock your team’s potential by fostering a culture of remarkable experiences.