Brand advocates are great, but do you know what’s even better? Brand Advocates that make you money! While most brands understand how brand advocates can help build awareness and drive sales by sharing your content with their friends and family (converting them into customers at a rate of 5% or higher), there is another often overlooked way advocates can help grow your bottom line: by being revenue-driving customers on top of being advocates. If you’re not creating opportunities to let your advocates also be customers, you’re missing out on a key revenue-driving opportunity.
After looking at some of our most successful advocacy programs, we’ve pulled together the four most successful tactics they’re using to drive advocate sales.
Turning Brand Advocates into Customers
1) Share Offers Through Them and To Them
Don’t put your advocates in a corner. They don’t have to be regulated to only sharing blog posts and job openings. Use your advocates to also share content promoting your latest offering, sale, or discount. When you share an offering through your advocates, you’re not only getting in front of your advocates’ audiences – you’re also getting in front of the advocate themselves.
The key when sharing an offer or sales-focused content piece is using a strong call-to-action in the email you send to your advocates. Be sure to encourage them to take part in the sale. You’d be surprised how often simply asking for the sale can result in a revenue lift.
Another opportunity is to use your advocates to help promote your clearance items. If your site or business has a set space dedicated to pushing discounted or outdated product lines, let your advocates help build awareness of this area. Remember, even though they’re your advocates, they don’t know every inch of your website. They might be surprised themselves to learn that you offer a clearance section.
2) Profile Users Through Surveys
Do you know who your advocates are? Like, do you really know them? Sure, with your advocacy marketing platform, you know doubt know their age, gender, and the city they’re currently living in. But what about things like their favorite color? Or, how they spend their Saturdays? For that level of psychographic data, we recommend that you regularly profile your advocates.
Send your advocates regular surveys that ask them specific profiling questions. Then start to segment your advocates based on commonalities in their responses. Use this data to not only influence the content you’re creating (and asking these segmented audiences to share) but also potential product lines and paid advertising targeting.
When surveying your advocates, be sure to:
- Let the advocates know why they’re being surveyed (so that you can create content they’re more likely to care about)
- Make the survey simple to answer
- Make the survey quick to get through – limit it to 5 questions max, remember you can always send another survey in a few weeks
- Reward anyone that completes the survey
We recommend rewarding with a discount or a gift-with-purchase offer that pushes the survey-taker back to your website to create the potential for a sale.
Pro Tip: SocialToaster makes it easy for your brand to survey your advocates! Our built-in survey tool simplifies the process of creating and sending surveys to your brand’s audience.
3) Make Sure to Include Your Advocates in Your Remarketing Efforts
As your advocates (and their audiences) engage with your content pieces, make sure those engagements are captured by your remarketing efforts. Remarketing is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools for driving conversions, as you’re able to target an audience of individuals that have already had at least one touch point with your brand.
Even better, export your list of advocates and turn them into a custom audience on Facebook or Google. While we don’t recommend sending more than two emails a week to your advocates, there’s no rule against also showing advocates a few ads throughout the week in addition to your advocacy emails.
Keep your brand top of mind and advertise new product launches, offers, and discounts, directly to your advocates wherever they might be browsing online.
4) Send Your Advocates Unique Offers
If you’re looking for a sudden spike in end of month (or quarter) sales, this tactic is for you. Keep in mind one of the key lessons in internet psychology: people don’t do what you don’t ask them to do. If you want action, you need to be delivering clear calls-to-action and you need to give a compelling reason why an advocate should take that action.
As part of your ongoing content mix, be sure to include regular emails to your advocates that directly ask them to buy from you. It’s that easy. Include a discount or sales code to see a correlating increase in transactions. We’ve seen clients drive dozens of sales in a matter of hours by simply asking their advocates to become customers.
Our advice, be sure the offer you share with them is unique. Make them feel special. If you’re giving a 25% discount and offering that same discount to everyone else on the internet, it’s not going to be as powerful as a sales driver as offering them a 30% discount (when everyone else is getting 25%).
Want to kick it up a level? Send your advocates a tiered-offer based on how active they are in the program. Roll out the red carpet VIP treatment for any advocates that are sharing every single piece of content you send their way. Have secondary offers ready to go for your less-committed advocates. Then make sure they know that there is a greater offer they can “unlock” if they participate more in the program!
Bottom line, if you want to fully capitalize on your advocacy marketing program, you need to be asking your advocates to also be customers at least once every month. The ask can be in an email or in an ad, but it needs to be done on a regular, consistent basis.
Target Your Advocates With SocialToaster
Want to learn more about targeting your advocates? Talk to a SocialToaster account rep today. Email or call our advocacy marketing strategists to create a program that fits your needs. Or get a free demo and test drive our award-winning software yourself.
