What is Evangelism Marketing?

What is Evangelism Marketing?
When customers or end consumers feel so strongly and are much more satisfied with a brand or product then they will not only praise that brand to others but will work at will to persuade other consumers that the brand is reliable and durable in preference to other brands exist in the market. Evangelism marketing is an innovative practice of word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM). 

The satisfied brand lovers become your “brand evangelists” and they start preaching gospel of your products and suggest it as if it’s part of their own individuality.

History of Evangelism Marketing
During 1980s, Apple was a struggling company and then they employed Guy Kawasaki in 1983 to be their product evangelist. Kawasaki advertised and promoted the advantages and features of their newest MacIntosh to the hardware and software developers/engineers. The concept of evangelism marketing was first proposed by Guy Kawasaki in his books “How to Drive your Competition Crazy” (1996) and “The Art of the Start” (2004).

How to Build Brand Evangelists or Brand Lovers?

• Superior Customers – Who your best sales representatives are, of course, your brand lovers as they are not your compensated employees and the potential buyers or consumers will be less doubtful when they recommend your brand to them. Obviously a brand evangelist has a unique opportunity to convert and motivate potential customers into new evangelists.
• Start from within the Company by Inspiring Your Own Employees – This will prefigure fairly enough what’s coming next when attracting outdoor customers. Attraction that people have for a brand originates from the people that represent that brand.
• Social Media – Social media is an influential force in evangelism marketing. Smart product managers and marketers can use Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and other online platforms to develop a community of their brand lovers and fans where end consumers can responsively converse their experience with your brands which let them communicate the message of your company's mission. There are several success stories like Domino’s Pizza and others who studied the facts and figures from such online communities and restructured many of their business processes to be able to convert their customers into their brand evangelists.
• Understand Your Customers – Every single business needs a solid reason for their buyers to purchase only from them and not from their rivals. This is what we call a Unique Sales Proposition (USP). So we need to ask, how much we know our customers. The more we know our customers, the more chances are there to convert them into evangelists.
• Comprehensive Qualitative Research – The best approach to really understand what matters to our customers is the comprehensive qualitative research by conducting 20-to-30 minutes detailed interviews, either via phone calls, internet chat, or face-to-face to analyze what our customers think about us and how they interact our products and services.
• Brand Loyalty – To be much more ahead of the curve, our customers must select our brand as opposed to competing brands and be certain of its benefits.
• Product Adoption – Customers should certainly be satisfied and impressed with our product or service made available in the market.
• Chosen Customers – Businesses can employee product evangelists from their own customer-base. These customers can test the products, embrace its quality and recommend those products to other potential customers.
• Perceive what your Customers are Chatting over the Internet and React Accordingly – You must track what your customers’ opinions are and what they are talking about your brand. This will provide you a great understanding of how your customers are interacting with your product and what they are thinking.
• Retain and Facilitate Your Existing Brand Evangelists to Market for You – Facilitate your biggest brand lovers to do what they are already doing, preaching the gospel of your products.
• Give Existing Evangelists a Pat on the Back – Try to admire existing evangelists to tell them that they did a good job so that they go some extra mile.

Evangelism marketing is an effective methodology for the organizations looking to be ahead of the pack and be much better and successful than their competitors.

Our customers are diamonds in the rough and have a lot of potential to do effective marketing on our behalf but first we need to do some work on them to convert them into Brand Evangelists.

The contributor is Offshore/Onshore Project Coordinator | B2B/B2C Marketer | Oracle EBS Functional Team Lead | Content Writer, Visual Communication & Graphics Expert at Powersoft19.

Powersoft19 delivers complex safety-critical embedded solutions to its clients around the world. The vision of the company is to enrich people’s lives by bringing innovation in everyday business processes. Powersoft19 specialize in developing innovative engineering and technological systems with many supporting services.

The understandings and thoughts articulated in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any team, division or business unit, subsidiaries and technology partners of the Powersoft19.