Brand advocacy could be likened to a brand thermometer: is your brand alive or in need of CPR?
Brand advocacy has become increasingly important to modern business marketing, with brand advocates promoting the business through word of mouth (WOM) to friends and family alike.
Without any form of coercion, they happily write positive reviews about the company’s products/services and enthusiastically promote the company to new and potential customers. These passionate brand supporters also create new content for a business by posting items on their social media accounts, eliciting feedback and interaction from their audience. What better way to boost sales!
So, how do you measure your brand advocacy?
Recording brand advocacy is a long-term action to include in your marketing strategy. This form of organic marketing is on the increase and to keep ahead of the game it’s essential to consistently monitor brand advocacy results.
You need to justify brand spend and to do this you need to assess, review and implement improvements to your budget, right?
First off, you must take a really close, honest look at your goals: Are they achievable or are they pie in the sky? Goals often need tweaking, dependent on evolving environment and sometimes, they need discarding and/or renewing. Goals, not the environment. Although, we could do with renewing our environment, come to think of it? But I digress.
Brand advocacy is based on engaging with the correct audience for your offering/s…
Goals. You need to keep reviewing them and see which social media strategies are working for you and which aren’t.
Also, note, all social media is not created equal and is not a case of one-size-fits-all. While each caters for different audiences, sometimes they overlap too, so assess which campaigns work the best for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
Consider which platform you use to generate brand advocacy:
- Can it track and record likes, views, commentary etc?
- If it can, do you understand what the stats are that they spew out?
- Are they in an understandable format?
- What is the initial interface like?
- What is the ease of use like; do you need a PhD and does the dashboard look like the cockpit of the International Space Station, or is it user-friendly?
- Can you customise the platform to suit your analytics?
- And, talking of analytics, does it have clear reporting tools that track and collect data?
Customisation is key for brand advocacy
The method you use to monitor views and likes of a blog post or article is important for measuring brand advocacy. Consider this: What reach are you achieving with your posts and articles and who is liking and/or sharing your posts?
Do you see a pattern emerging or do the ‘likes’ you are getting appear random? The results will show you whether your advocates are engaging with your brand.
Brand advocacy is on the increase as people become increasingly picky about products and services.
Maybe the Facebook posts aren’t generating as much engagement as you expected? This could be because your product/service is not correctly matched for your advocates on this platform. This type of assessment will enhance your ability to create an impact with your brand and engage the correct audience who is most likely to be interested in what you are offering.
It’s also important to review who your advocates are and if they suit your market. Although lifelong brand advocates are first prize, don’t be surprised however, if fans sometime fall away. As your organisation evolves, so will your brand advocates — and so they should!
A following of brand advocates is indication that your product/service is current and up to date, achieving what it set out to achieve — and also a clear sign that your brand is not flatlining…
