The Benefits Of Brand Advocates

Brand Advocates are certainly a hot topic within the Influencer Marketing conversation.  We spoke about the differences between Influencers and Advocates in a previous post and thought it best to expand on the benefits of Brand Advocates and how they can effect your business.

We recently spotted a blog post by the wonderful Em Sheldon which you can view here. Within this post Em speaks about her love for Jo Malone and shares examples of her favourite products. Now we must admit we spent a good 10 minutes looking around the post to find some expression of sponsorship or collaboration, but could not find one. We even asked Em privately if there was any conversations with the brand on this one. Nope.

What is special about this post, is that it is not sponsored. The brand has not paid for an endorsement or sent products to review. This is a completely organic post, by someone who simply loves the brand.

What is also key here, is that Em is a well established Blogger and Influencer who has worked with large brands such as Adidas, JD Sports, Braun and many others on collaborative posts. Yet her affection for the brand, and her love of providing readers with quality content allows her to express her love of products she uses in everyday life and wants to share.

Across her social media network, Em has over 100,000 followers who are extremely well engaged. So not only does Em post her affection on the blog, she shares this across her vast reach on social network as well.  Starting to see the benefits of Brand Advocates?

Brand Advocacy is truly earned media. You haven’t paid for it, you haven’t committed resources to it, yet you’ve gained a blog post positively mentioning the brand, lots of shares and comments on social media, and raised awareness across a large follower group who trusts the opinion of the poster. Not to mention the SEO benefits of external links to the brand as well as referral traffic from the blog.

So how do we generate more brand advocacy? Well it starts with the people already posting about the brand. Encourage them, engage with them, thank them, like and share their posts.  Chances are they may be inclined to share more when they are recognised for their contribution.

It also starts with good customer service. How quickly do you respond to enquiries? How proactive are you at responding to concerns? How you engage with your customers and potential customers is not just how you market to them, but how you respond to their concerns.

Brand Advocates are sure to be key players within the Influencer Marketing landscape, but remember it’s not just about your customers who already loves you, sometimes you need to look at people’s concerns as well. Do this to great effect and the opportunities are endless.