Creating Champions: A Guide to Effective Customer Advocacy
“Make a customer, not a sale.”
Some business sayings are timeless, and this is one of them. Building genuine relationships with your customers that go beyond a single transaction is key to fostering their loyalty, especially in a subscription economy.
Customer advocacy is one approach to developing these lasting relationships.
What is customer advocacy, and why is it important?
Customer advocacy is a business strategy that prioritizes fostering great customer relationships, eventually leading to customers helping drive new business growth.
In practice, it involves developing great customer service skills, then using them to create an amazing experience at every stage of the customer journey. This creates more customer advocates who recommend you to their friends, help you garner a positive reputation, and contribute to your growth through word-of-mouth referrals.
A typical customer interaction can be transactional — the customer purchases your product and moves on.
Transforming that into a memorable experience that creates a loyal customer advocate requires conscious effort, but when successful, customer advocacy is an effective strategy.
A whopping 88% of survey respondents report that they trust recommendations from people they know above all other forms of advertising. What’s challenging for most marketing teams is finding a way to measure word-of-mouth referrals, but there’s no question that it’s one of the most powerful marketing channels.
By generating organic marketing, advocates reduce the need for advertising campaigns and contribute to the company’s organic growth over time.
Customer advocacy helps businesses become more resilient because loyal customers are less likely to abandon the brand. Fifty-nine percent of American consumers say that once they’re loyal to a brand, they’re loyal to it for life.
What do customer advocates do?
Customer advocates can engage in various activities depending on the opportunities you provide. Here are some common ones:
They might provide written testimonials and reviews on websites like G2 or Capterra, sharing about their experience with your product.
A lot of them engage with your brand on social media. If you run a Facebook group or have a thriving Instagram account, you’ll notice your most engaged advocates quite quickly.
They often participate in referral programs. Many software products have robust referral programs, which reduces their cost of acquisition. While it’s hard to find recent data, some research shows that referred customers are also less likely to churn.
Advocates might contribute to online communities and forums. WordPress is especially known for its massive, thriving community, where many people offer advice, provide support, share their experiences with other users, and run meetups.
Customer advocates might also sit on a customer advisory board, playing a crucial role in providing strategic insights and feedback directly to the company.
Tips for creating a successful customer advocacy program
Customer advocacy programs look very different from business to business, but most of the strategies and techniques used are quite simple.
The key challenge is to identify methods that actually resonate with your customers. Here are some tips to get started:
Identify potential advocates.
Nurture long-term relationships with your customers.
Involve customers in the co-creation of your product.
Integrate advocacy into your business strategy.
Measure the impact of customer advocacy.
Identify potential advocates
Recognizing the types of behaviors your customers exhibit that make them advocates is the most obvious starting point.
You can approach this in different ways:
Data analytics: You can track which of your customers are most engaged with your product or are regularly providing feedback and feature requests.
Customer segmentation: Different types of customers may have different expectations of your product, meaning they should be engaged in different ways.
Gamification: Products that have leaderboards, award badges, or track streaks have an easier time identifying advocates because these naturally rank your customers for you.
Social media: Social media is a great place because people who interact with your profile or provide completely unsolicited feedback and recommendations are highly likely to be engaged customers.
Support team interactions: Support teams often receive contacts from advocates. Some of the best interactions while working on the frontlines are from customers who reach out to share fun and touching stories about how your product has helped them.
Once you have an idea who your advocates are, you can look for ways to deepen that relationship. That might mean offering them a discount, asking them to participate in a webinar, providing a testimonial, or inviting them to fill out a UX research survey.
Nurture long-term relationships with customers
Long-term relationships are really about building a connection with people. This is why initiatives that don’t feel authentic or sincere don’t have the same impact as ones that do. Implementing those at the very beginning of your customer journey is especially impactful.
Mimi Nguyen, founder of Cafely, tries to build this sense of connection from the very beginning. Club Cafely is a subscription product where customers receive a rotating selection of ground coffee or teas.
When a customer receives their order, tucked inside is a handwritten note thanking them by name and recommending a brewing recipe based on what they purchased. This is followed up with personalized emails with a more detailed brewing guide.
“It’s a small touch, but we found that it sparks that connection,” says Mimi. “We’ve seen customers posting pictures of these handwritten notes online, raving about their experience, and organically promoting our brand.”
Spreading these small yet thoughtful touches across the customer journey is a very effective way to build these connections over time. One way to make this easy is to add a custom customer property to your conversation sidebar.
You can start with something as simple as an “Advocate” field that helps your support team identify existing customer advocates. When they see that field populated, they can adapt their approach to the conversation to encourage even more advocacy (of course, you’ll also want them to encourage advocacy from all customers).
Involve customers in the co-creation of your product
Finding the right balance between listening to customers and following a clear product vision can be challenging.
Many companies make unpopular product decisions consciously, with the belief that these changes will have a positive impact on the product in the long run, even though it leads to many tricky short-term customer service scenarios.
However, when customers’ interests and passions are channeled in the right direction, companies can greatly benefit.
One of the best examples of this is the LEGO Ideas platform.
Fans can submit ideas for new sets and vote on their favorites. Successful submissions are turned into official LEGO products, with the original creators credited and rewarded. This initiative has resulted in highly popular products and a deeply engaged community — and it’s easy to see why.
This is the type of co-creation that’s fun and leads to great outcomes for both the customers and the business. Involving customers in the process goes way beyond being customer-oriented and into the realm of building customer loyalty that could last across generations as parents outgrow LEGO but still share that passion with their children.
Integrate advocacy into your business strategy
Real customer advocacy is a holistic approach that connects all business units.
That means marketing, sales, customer service, and product development should all be aligned. Each team plays a vital role:
Marketing can create advocacy campaigns.
Sales can leverage testimonials to close deals.
Customer service can identify potential advocates through positive interactions and customer feedback.
Product development can use feedback to improve the product and co-create future developments.
Embedding that type of connection to your customers into the company culture isn’t easy — it requires buy-in on all levels.
Hospitable, a platform for short-term rentals, hosts a town hall every other week that all customers are invited to and welcome to attend. These meetings are streamed live on YouTube, accessible to everyone, and attended by the company’s leadership, including the CEO.
They’re an opportunity to share product and company updates, and they’re also a way for customers to ask questions and share feature requests — which obviously requires members from every team to participate and assist in moderating the discussion.
It’s a great example of maintaining customer focus as a cornerstone of the company’s culture.
Measuring the impact of customer advocacy
You can measure the impact of customer advocacy in a variety of ways.
The easy and obvious metrics are NPS and CSAT, but they are a little harder to translate into direct business impact.
Another great metric to work with is customer lifetime value (CLV), which calculates the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer. It can help you determine whether the people you identify as customer advocates are more valuable customers for your company and track the impact of referral programs.
A much more sophisticated and time-intensive way to measure impact is using attribution models. Multi-touch attribution models consider all the touchpoints a customer interacts with before making a purchase, attributing a portion of the conversion credit to each interaction. This approach recognizes the cumulative effect of various advocacy efforts, like social media mentions, word-of-mouth referrals, and testimonial-driven sales.
That said, many companies have a good sense of what’s working.
James Heartquist, a real estate consultant at Modern Property Solutions, has invested a ton in creating and sharing case studies.
“Measuring the value of these advocacy efforts goes beyond traditional KPIs. I look at the long-term relationships built with clients, and I pay close attention to their feedback during and after transactions,” he explains.
He once tried to offer discounts to reward referrals and didn’t see a ton of success.
“The key learning here is that genuine advocacy cannot be bought; it must be earned through trust and proven results. It's essential to avoid shortcuts in building customer advocacy and to invest in authentic relationships that encourage clients to become natural ambassadors for your brand.”
Creating customer experiences that resonate
Customer advocacy isn’t just a marketing tactic. It’s a philosophy that dictates how you interact with your customers.
The businesses that will thrive in the coming years are those that genuinely understand and value their customers. The rewards are manifold: more customer loyalty, increased lifetime value, and a brand reputation that resonates far and wide.
Nouran Smogluk
Nouran is a passionate people manager who believes that work should be a place where people grow, develop, and thrive. She writes for Supported Content and also blogs about a variety of topics, including remote work, leadership, and creating great customer experiences.
