Content marketing and social media marketing can be highly labor intensive and time consuming for businesses. In fact, according to a marketing survey conducted by Curata – creating original, valuable and high-quality content on a regular basis is one of the biggest challenges that most companies are facing. Publishing content regularly, marketing content through the right channels, responding to consumers and readers, managing social media pages, etc. can become a monstrous task for a company. So how can companies ensure that their brands are being promoted effectively without too much effort? Look to your loyal and satisfied customers.
If you encourage them properly, they will create and share your content and will become your brand advocates on social media channels – all without being paid a single penny! Read on to know how to promote brand advocates from your customer base.
Locate these advocates
Firstly, you need to be able to find these customers who will become the best advocates and who are willing to become your advocates. Such people can be found from the fan and follower lists of your social media pages. Your brand advocates will be people who have already connected with you on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. To find out how loyal and how willing they are to become brand advocates, all you have to do is ask them one simple question – how likely are they to recommend your company and its products to their family and friends on a scale of 0 to 10.
You should be interested in consumers who have answered this question with a rating between 8 and10. You should pose this question to your customers and followers on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter and via online channels like blogs and emails.
Mold them into content marketers
You cannot influence such loyal customers and potential brand advocates using monetary incentives. Your products and brand will be recommended by your brand advocates only if they have had excellent experiences with your products and company. They will be encouraged to create and share content only if they think your products or services will help others. As brand advocates are not well-versed in content marketing tools and processes, you can make the job easier for them by providing them with online tools for:
• Search engine optimization
• Creating and posting testimonials and customer reviews on various social media and online channels
• Replying to questions effectively to improve conversion rates
• Creating and publishing videos, infographs, audio files, images and other rich-media content to help attract more attention
• Writing and publishing tweets, Facebook posts, Pinterest pins and boards to maximize the success of word of mouth marketing for your brand.
Show off advocate-created content
Content created by brand advocates are the best types of content as advocates invariably fuse personal stories into the content that they create. Use their content extensively and show others the kind of loyalty that your brand has been able to generate by sharing advocate-created content extensively. Your Facebook posts and Twitter tweets should link to content created by brand advocates frequently. Also, make sure to place testimonials and reviews in the shopping process so that potential customers can see them.
Keep it honest
This is the most important aspect of using brand advocates to promote your company. Never try to influence brand advocates with rewards, perks and offers that can compromise the reputation of your company. Instead of influencing customers to write good reviews, fix the flaws in your product or service and make it better.