First, consider your typical brand advocate. This person is going out of their way to sing your praises to other customers. They view themselves as owners of your brand, so they are acting in what they perceive to be the brand’s best interests. Here’s four examples of how your brand advocates are saving you money:
1 – Brand advocates lower your marketing costs. Marketing communications are utilized to generate sales, typically via acquiring new customers. But brand advocates do that for you. Brand advocates are spending every day promoting your brand to other customers, and encouraging them to buy from your brand. And given that it costs your brand 6-7 more to acquire one new customer than it does to retain an existing one, the marketing cost savings add up quickly.
2 – Brand advocates lower your customer service costs. As brand advocates interact with other customers, they are also answering their questions and helping them with any issues or problems they have. Additionally, brand advocates create content that can help solve questions or problems that other customers have. Every problem that another customer solves for a brand saves your brand the time it would have taken to work with that customer individually to help them. And since time is money…
3 – Brand advocates can help you diffuse or avoid a social media crisis. This is a critical benefit that your fans provide that most brands miss. If your fans encounter people attacking your brand, they will defend it. This greatly decreases the chance of other people ‘piling on’ and it also tends to ‘scare off’ the people that launched the attack. Think of your advocates as having a guard dog in your yard. If someone comes into your yard starting trouble, they will start barking and scare them off!
4 – Brand advocates lower your market research costs. Advocates proactively connect with your brand, They look for reasons to reach out to your brand, and often they do so while providing feedback. They tell you what they like and dislike about your brand. Remember that advocates view themselves as the owners of your brand, so if they see something ‘wrong’ with your brand, they will notify you of that problem. Of course, since they love your brand they will also offer a solution to the issue and want to work with you to make that solution become reality.
Why working directly with your brand advocates makes sense
Take all of these benefits that your advocates provide for you naturally. Now if you had a program in place to work directly with your fans, you accelerate each of these benefits. And since we are discussing cost-savings, then you increase the amount of money your brand saves by working with its fans. So the effort can easily pay for itself!
Here’s a few examples of how brands are working directly with their fans to see big benefits:
Pitney Bowes set up a user forum were its users provide customer service directly to other customers. PB has tracked that every 5 visits to a forum question averts one customer service call, which PB places an internal value of $10 on. You can do the math, but this is a huge cost-savings to the brand, that only happened because Pitney Bowes created a forum that allows its fans to more effectively help each other (see point #2 above).
Paper.li has set up a program where its members are given advance access to new features that the publishing platform will be rolling out. The advantage here is that when Paper.li makes these new features available to everyone, its fans can go out and help other members realize the potential of the new features and why they make Paper.li better. So this generates a marketing cost savings (point #1) as well as a customer support benefit.
The Red Cross avoided a potential disaster of a social media crisis a few years ago when an employee made a mistake and accidentally tweeted a personal tweet from the Red Cross account! But since The Red Cross does such a great job of engaging its fans on Twitter and quickly addressed the situation, it turned out to be a big positive for the brand.
If you’d like to create a formal program to work with your fans, check out this post on creating a brand ambassador program. Want more help? Then check out Think Like a Rock Star.
Not sure if it pays to connect with your fans? Try this very simple experiment: For the next five people that tweet something positive about your brand on Twitter, reply to them and tweet the following: “Thank you so much, we really appreciate that!”
Now track the responses you get to those 5 tweets. The responses you get were generated by you responding to your fans. It’s that simple to do, and even if you only have 1 response, if you do that every time then you’ve just increased positive tweets about your brand by at least 20%.
Love the people that love you. It really does pay off.
I can’t imagine why more businesses don’t have brand advocacy programs. The benefits are real, measurable and lasting, and the investment involved is minimal compared to other marketing and advertising channels. Any business that’s thinking about doing this should absolutely pick up Mack’s book, Think Like A Rock Star. Then, when you’re serious, hire Mack to help you get your program up and running: your company will reap the benefits for years to come! (And do it now, before your competition smartens up and does it first.)
Thank you Kerry! I think most businesses have the mindset that if their fans are talking about them, that they should leave them alone and let them keep doing just that. Of course many businesses simply aren’t comfortable directly interacting with their customers because prior to the internet and social media, they never had to a wide scale.
The benefits of working with your advocates are very real, I guess we just need to do a better job of helping companies realize this.
Sometimes the company itself is the hold-up: various parties within may have best intentions, but the company may not be geared to support the process or program.
This doesn’t mean it should stop them, but it can certainly slow the process down. A lot of education is needed to turn it around. That’s where you really excel at driving the point home, Mack.
This (to me) is COMMON SENSE. Treat your best customers well and they will treat your company well by advocating for you (not just sending referrals). Using digital media to find these people is easier than ever. So why don’t more companies do it??
Yes! I agree, Lynette. ^
Mack, what a great post! Just last night I finally set up a facebook page to promote Professional Painters and their SOLD work. A page where people or potential art collectors can see what type of paintings are sold by which painter all in one page. I gave a lot of thought about it as I want to be that “brand promoter” you have discussed about above in your post because I believe in the “give, give, give” that you mentioned in your earlier post. I have really high hopes about this and I am very excited to see all kinds of paintings already in collection that otherwise will not see the daylight (so to speak). It is called the “League of Professional Painters”.
Let’s add a #5 Mack — brand advocacy helps to recruit new team members as well, adding tremendous value to the hiring by lower recruitment and on boarding time and costs.
We recently hired directly from the community to fill a position early and that was a result of being aligned to our user base. We save weeks of time in not needing to engage in placing ads, spreading the word and interviewing. And, he’s familiar with the product — so we saved ramp-up! How cool is that?
And I agree with Kerry — companies should book you now for 2014! As a brand or company you need to have your ducks in a row now in order to align you strategy to the customer, not tomorrow when it’s already too late.
Two of my best investments for 2013 were working with you and purchasing 5 copies of Think Like a Rock Star for my team. (TLARS is one a mandatory team read)
Kelly fabulous point on connecting with your advocates and then screening for potential employees. A wonderful side-benefit, I know many brands have done this, but again it starts with making the effort to work with and understand your fans.
Glad you are helping Paper.li launch a robust advocacy program, very excited to see where it goes!!!
What Kelly said: “Companies should book you now for 2014! As a brand or company you need to have your ducks in a row now in order to align your strategy to the customer, not tomorrow when it’s already too late.” Absolutely! The potential reward is so great and the investment so relatively small.
Companies are leaving money on the table if they don’t have a brand advocacy program in place, and Mack’s the leading expert in creating programs that motivate your company’s fans to actively support and promote you. #TeamMack 🙂
Thank you Kerry, I am officially embarrassed, which isn’t easy 🙂
1000% agree with this post, Mack! As a community manager, it’s truly amazing how much a customer is willing to do for you, if they know the brand is truly listening and responding.
While it takes time to find and build out a scalable advocacy/ambassador program, I firmly believe it’s the single best investment a brand can make for both marketing and customer service/support.
Thank you Jessica! And I agree, if you show your most loyal customers that you are listening and value them, that only validates their loyalty to your brand.