The best marketers are not sitting in your marketing team; they are the ones from the targeted audience. According to the survey, 9 out of 10 customers buy from referrals and recommendations. That’s why many businesses are now taking customer advocacy seriously.

Customers can advocate your brand online and offline in many ways. But why will they do that? How will you make your customers advocate in an authentic, effective, and not off-putting way? By starting an advocacy program? No! Having an advocacy program is not enough to achieve success; businesses need to use them effectively to achieve the best results. And how do you plan on achieving the best? Follow a few tips to achieve.

Here are a few tips that can help you make the most out of customer advocacy programs:

Identify your advocates: You can’t right away make any regular customer your advocate. Not every customer will advocate your brand effectively. Try out customers who are taking an active part in your brand activities and your industry. Moreover, if they are actively working with your industry, it will be an added advantage. However, you need to reach out to them wherever they are spending their time; Voice of the customer software can help you reach the right customers at the right time for advocacy, just like your content marketing. The best brand advocates will already have a history of engaging with brands and customers.

Build Trust: If you want your customers to advocate your brand or associate their name with your brand, they need to trust your brand. Building long-lasting relationships with customers have become essential. Building a loyal, long-lasting relationship with your customer should be the key parameter of your customer advocacy programs. Make constant efforts to appreciate and create trust with your most engaging and dedicated customers. Bring more incentives to motivate your customers. Use customer data to understand their characteristics and buying patterns, get regular feedback, improve your services, and align your efforts to build strong customer relationships.

Show appreciation instead of money: There are a variety of ways to make the most out of customer experience programs, and money is not one of them. Paying money to advocate your brand becomes typical promotional activity; it reduces trust. The goal is to appreciate your most engaged customers by special offers or sending a token of gift; that way, it will spread a positive message across your existing and new referred customers. Don’t treat it as a transaction; motivate them to recommend your brand; that way, you will make the best of your advocacy program.

Communication: Good customer reference programs are based on good communication between customers and brands. It should be both ways; communication can move in any direction in any way. For instance, your advocates communicate effectively to your new customers or send you feedback about your products and services. Listen to them carefully; their feedback will be valuable for your research and development team to improve your quality and meet the needs of customers in all manners. However, It’s your responsibility to provide your customers with an accurate platform to make their voices heard. Communication is vital for your business growth, therefore invest in good VOC software to build a good relationship and understand your customer advocate feedback effectively.

Get all your departments to contribute: Your one department cannot be responsible for customer advocacy. Having other departments onboard for ideas, activities, and content will increase the efficiency of your customer advocacy programs and will make them more enjoyable. The more people will participate in creating ideas; the more creative ideas will come out. Making a single department responsible for everything about the program will limit your creativity and ideas. Here are some of the ways you can make your employees engage in advocacy programs:

• Share a newsletter of your success with your employees and ask them to share feedback and ideas.
• Arrange meetings on how your departments are taking the initiative and appreciate and motivate them for customer advocacy programs.

Track ROI of your advocacy program: Having an idea of what’s happening and why you need to invest or whether your investment is beneficial for the company or not, these questions need to be answered to make the most out of the advocacy program. However, to calculate ROI from Customer experience programs, keep track of monthly references, referrals, renewals, upsells, etc., these impact your overall revenue. Analysis whether they outweigh your investment or not. There are various VOC software or excel templates available to help you calculate the ROI concerning customer advocacy.

Final Thoughts: As you know the importance of customer advocates, handling advocacy programs effectively is crucial for success. These tips are efficient in achieving a successful customer advocacy program for overall business growth.