Brand advocacy is the most profitable stage of all the customer journey stages. Brand advocates are your true fans. These are the customers who truly believe in you, are ready to make multiple purchases from you, say nice things about your brand, and bring in numerous new customers.
Hence, there is no doubt in the fact that brand advocacy is the ideal stage of the customer journey that you must strive for.
Having more brand advocates will lead to increased sales, customer retention rate, and customer acquisition rate.
How To Turn Costumers into Brand Advocates
If you are looking for some actionable and effective tips to turn your customers into brand advocates, then this is the guide you’ve been looking for. Read on to learn more about it.
Tip #1. Create Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are an excellent way to create a loyal army of brand advocates from your customers. There’s a reason why they do so well – you’re rewarding your customers for staying with you. You gain customer loyalty, and they get incentives. So, it’s a win-win.
In fact, studies show that customers who are a part of top-performing loyalty programs are 77% more likely to choose your brand over your competitors. Therefore, creating loyalty programs seems like a sure-shot way to brand advocacy.
So, if you want to create more brand advocates, you must consider creating loyalty programs. Ensure that the incentives that you offer are attractive and useful for the customers. Only then will you find good results with your program.
Another thing to keep in mind while designing your loyalty program is that the program should be easy to understand, and the points/rewards are easily attainable. If you make it too difficult or complicated, things might not turn out the way you want.
Tip #2. Focus on Customer Experience
Did you know that 86% of customers are willing to pay for a better customer experience?! That’s how important it is for your customers. Focusing on customer experience will take you far ahead of your competitors. Ultimately your customers will keep coming back to and turn into your brand advocates.
A lot of factors come into play when we talk about customer experience. Right from personalizing all the conversations to providing comprehensive documentation, you can do a lot of things to make sure that your customer experience is on point.
Personalization is one of the best ways to improve your customer experience multiple fold. Every customer wants to feel special and valued. You can do this by building strong relationships with your customers and personalizing all the touchpoints.
You can do this effectively with the help of a potent Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool such as SuperOffice. SuperOffice allows you to manage all the customer interactions, purchase history, and information about them at a commonplace.
Using this information, you can provide an omnichannel customer experience. You can also segment your customers into different target lists and offer them exclusive content, product upgrades, offers, etc., to keep them coming back to you.
Having a CRM will completely change your customer experience, and this will ensure that more customers remain loyal to you.
Tip #3. Provide Premium Customer Support
Customer support plays a vital role in ensuring a satisfactory experience for your customers. Without proper support, it is highly likely for your customers to churn. And you definitely don’t want that.
Most brands out there have some form of customer support. You can stand out by offering premium customer support by being available 24/7, offering self-service documentations, and providing live chat support.
You can also try social media as a customer support channel. You can do this by creating customer support handles on platforms like Twitter.
Ensuring that you offer prompt responses and quick resolutions are the key to winning over your customers’ loyalty. Also, try to personalize your customer service as much as possible to show them that you truly value them.
Tip #4. Have an Omnichannel Approach to Nurturing your Customers
It’s not the wisest thing to expect that your customers will interact with you only over one platform. Today, things are not that straightforward.
Your customers will have multiple touchpoints with your brand across various mediums, including emails, phone calls, social media, in-app, website chat, etc. So, nurturing your customers on all these platforms is the best way to go about it.
Moreover, having an omnichannel approach here is important. If your customers connect with you over social media and then contact you through an email, ensure that you have the customers’ conversation history with you so that you do not start the conversation all over again.
Having an omnichannel presence and taking steps to nurture your customers on all platforms will keep them hooked and invested in your brand. This will turn many of your customers into brand advocates.
Tip #5. Offer Referral Bonuses
Referral programs are an absolute no brainer for increasing your customer acquisition and retention rates all at once. You get new customers, and your customers get rewards. This is, again, a win-win, like in the case of loyalty programs.
Ensure that you offer referral programs to customers that have been with you for a while. This will work better as they are more invested in you and will help you get more referrals and customer loyalty.
You can consider offering attractive referral bonuses for both the customers and the referee. This will give them an added incentive to opt for the referral program.
If your referral bonuses are good and you promote them well, you are bound to convert a lot of customers into brand advocates while acquiring a lot of new customers.
Tip #6. Gather Feedback and Work on it
Listening to your customers and their responses are key to gaining the loyalty of your customers.
When you gather feedback from them and put in efforts to implement the feedback, your customers will know that they are valued. It will show them that you value their opinions. You’ll get their brand advocacy overtime.
You can gather feedback by sending out customer surveys or by connecting with them personally. You can also engage your social media and monitor your customers’ comments there. You can use sentiment analysis tools to analyze how consumers perceive your brand.
Apart from gathering feedback, it is also essential that you act on it. Your customers will expect you to ensure that you update your offering to fit their needs. And if you do that, you are bound to generate many brand advocates.
Moreover, gathering feedback and implementing them will also improve your products and services, leading to increased profitability for your business. So, make sure that you consistently work on collecting feedback from your customers, and you’ll definitely see more happy customers over time.
Tip #7. Connect with your Customers Personally
Nothing can beat a personalized one-on-one connection with your customers. Don’t you agree?
Most customers do not openly talk about their complaints and offer proactive feedback. Instead, they’ll simply churn. Research shows that for every complaining customer, there are 26 customers who don’t say anything. Instead of vocalizing their complaints, they simply cancel their subscription or stop buying.
For your customers to turn into your brand advocates, they need to put their trust in you and feel that they are truly benefiting from you. This kind of relationship cannot be built in a day or even in a month.
Connecting personally with your customers through phone conversations or live chat will make them perceive you in a whole new light. Your customers will value your brand more and wouldn’t think about opting for your competitors.
Tip #8. Focus on Customer Success
With the rise of competition, consumerism is not what it used to be a few years ago. Today, customers’ expectations are at an all-time high. So, you need to up your game to win over the advocacy of your customers. Focusing on customer success will play a vital role in that.
Right from the time when a customer onboards, you should start working towards their success. Though trying to generate repeat purchase and referral programs are good, but at the end of the day, your customers want results.
You can appoint customer success managers who can work closely with your customers and try to bring them good results. You can also feature your best customers on testimonials and customer success stories.
This will increase customer loyalty, offer great value, and drive more brand awareness. If you show your customers that you genuinely care about their success, they are definitely more likely to advocate for your brand.
Start Turning your Customers Into Brand Advocates
In the highly competitive world that we live in today, the best way to stand out and make your mark is to nurture your customers. Customers value experience now more than ever. Taking steps to ensure customer loyalty and adding utmost value to them is the key to turning your customers into brand advocates.
So, start today. Take these actionable tips and start nurturing your customers. Over time, you’ll find an increase in the number of brand advocates and a noticeable bump in your sales.
About the Author!
Gaurav Belani is a senior SEO and content marketing analyst at Growfusely, a content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO. He has more than seven years of experience in digital marketing. He likes sharing his knowledge in a wide range of domains ranging from eCommerce, startups, social media marketing to human capital management and much more. His work is featured in several authoritative business publications. Connect with him on Twitter @belanigaurav
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