Advocacy marketing for start-ups

Advocacy marketing is also known as referral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing its a strategy that focuses on leveraging your satisfied customers or brand advocates to promote your product/service to their network of contacts. It involves encouraging and incentivizing customers to share their positive experiences and recommend your product/service to others.

In advocacy marketing, satisfied customers become brand advocates who voluntarily and enthusiastically spread the word about your company's offerings. These advocates can be regular customers, industry experts, or even employees who believe in the brand and its products. They serve as influential voices in the market and play a crucial role in driving awareness, credibility, and customer acquisition.

The funnel below explains a typical customer journey funnel.

Source @harvard

Why advocacy marketing?

Advocacy marketing stands right after the customer has formed a bond with the brand. It has relatively low or zero negative outcomes compared to other strategies. Once customer completes the purchase and enjoys your service or product, the journey of the customer either ends or they tell their peers/friends about your service/product. These brand advocates are your potential influencers who can promote your brand (for a small incentive) by doing this you are not only increasing your loyalty circle but also encouraging organic influencers

New Customer vs Existing Customer

With growing business should you concentrate on new customers or existing clients?

New clients are good for business so are existing customers, Most start-ups spend most of their marketing budget on acquiring new clients while paying a minimum or little attention/ focus on existing customers. With advocacy marketing you are capitalizing on your existing customer to promote your product or service making it more efficient than other marketing campaigns. It is one of the best ways to solve leaky bucket problems, it can also be considered as a retention activity.

Making your customers as brand ambassadors

If you wish to focus on getting new customers or getting back the existing customers, advocacy marketing is the easiest way to achieve both goals. By promoting the brand from existing customers online, you not only motivate the customer to buy more, it also influences all of his friends and followers to be a customer. Making your customers as brand ambassadors helps the brand to be prominent in the loyal loop of the customer's journey.

Best way to leverage on social media

With 4.9 billion people on Social media, making it a mighty ocean to find your audience and ability to communicate with them in an effective way, is definitely a biggest gift to marketers.

An average of 2 hours daily spent on social media everyday, people end up watching 3 ads every minute. Your customer’s, employees and influencers social media filled with your target audience making it the perfect platform to implement advocacy marketing. By giving a perfect stage to your customers to share their experience online would just do to start off adm.

Things to remember when setting up advocacy marketing for startups

1. Know your advocates

Your initial customers are your brand advocates, leverage on them. Engage with them to build brand loyalty, reach out to them for feedback when you launch something new or for a campaign.

If you have no such support, find friends who fall into your target audience, write or build content for that specific target audience and ask or beg them to share it on their social media.

2. Make it easy to advocate.

While designing your social media post, have a custom design post for adm. These posts can be shared with your customers who later would share it on their social media. Also have a shareable link to all your posts which makes it easier for anyone to share on different social media.

3. Implement social media policy

Employee engagement is any day better than investing in influencers. If your employees believe in what you do and are equally motivated as others this process becomes more easy and swift. Employees are the best and easiest way to promote your brand and introduce new posts. Sharing it on minimum two social media would be really impactful. Employer adm

4. Keep a track

Things to keep in mind: who shares it and how they share it.

How did the campaign do, this will help to discover new advocates.Check your hashtag usages and type of audience who are engaging. Have a check on your audience or followers on social media, your relevant audience might be following you. Few posts are designed with your target customers in mind by not checking your followers, your post might not be reaching the audience as you expected.

5. Communicate with your audience

Engaging your audience, the more you talk to people the more people talk about you. Conduct live sessions to interact with your clients if that could be relevant to you. Run survey among your clients to get a feedback about your new features. Share and reshare the stories of your clients, a simple gesture yet impactful. By choosing such a non conventional way you are going a step ahead than just a thank you email to your customers. Creating hashtags and using them is an easy way to keep a track of your audience.

6. Plan your referral program at the early stage

Referral marketing and advocacy marketing go hand in hand. Entrepreneurs tend to skip this as they concentrate on the product development or product market fit. Brainstorm about the program with your team to come up with a referral campaign having your pricing strategy and CAC in mind. By incentivizing your customers to promote your brand in return to get new customers is a win win.