Every business has to make smart choices about how they spend their time and money. Marketing decisions are particularly important to your company. If you can turn customers into brand advocates; you can make a huge impact on your business without spending much money. Consider these tips to develop brand advocates.
Your brand
In marketing, your brand is practice of creating a name, symbol or design that does two things. First, your brand identifies your product. The brand also helps to differentiate your brand from other products.
To illustrate this concept, think about McDonald’s. This food company promotes their brand in lots of ways:
- Slogan: Currently, the slogan for McDonald’s is “I’m lovin it”. That slogan has changed over the years, but it’s a method this company uses to solidify their brand in the mind of the client.
- Logo: McDonald’s has used the golden arches as their logo since the beginning. The logo’s design has changed slightly over the years. We all know, however, that golden arches logo represents McDonalds.
- Packaging: Both the slogan and the logo of a company can be used in packaging. Packaging is a big promotion tool for McDonalds because everyone that uses the drive-thru gets their food in some sort of package. Custom Boxes Now points out the variety of boxes and packaging options a business can use to promote a brand.
The power of a brand advocate
A brand advocate is a big fan of your company. In fact, these people like your company so much that they are willing to promote it for free. Forbes describes a brand advocate as a powerful weapon for a business.
The reason a brand advocate is powerful is because they add to your content marketing efforts. Content marketing is the process of adding blogs and articles to your website and social media sites. Content is becoming more important for Google search rankings, which is why marketers focus on this task.
One challenge for a marketer is to consistently post content. It can take a lot of effort to find writers for content and continually post interesting blogs and articles. That’s where the brand advocate comes in.
Your firm can promote comments, reviews and even full blog posts from advocates. Essentially, your firm gets the marketing exposure without having to pay a writer to create it.
How to manage brand advocates
You can find brand advocates by asking your prospects and clients a question: How likely are you to refer our product or service to someone else? When you get an enthusiastic response, you have a brand advocate. Keep in mind that the advocate does not have to be a client. The individual may simply be a fan of what you do.
Of course, brand advocates can contact you before your survey anyone. They may send an email or post a comment on your website or blog.
Once you find a brand advocate, encourage them to share their comments. Make that process easy for them. You can, for example, post their comment on your Twitter or Facebook page. Ask them to write a review on Yelp or Amazon. Provide a chat room where customers can post comments.
A brand advocate can be a powerful marketing tool. Do your best to make it easy for these fans to comment on what you do. You can use the testimonials to drive sales and grow your business.