5 Ways to Find Your Best Brand Advocates

Finding individuals, customers and non-customers alike, to refer your product or service may come quick -- and even easy! However, identifying the cream of the crop, acknowledging them and finding more of those superstars, might not be as simple. We break down the best way to engage with this valuable audience and retain your best brand advocates. 

Quality > Quantity

When you launch your advocate marketing program, you most likely cast a wide net to be able to create a critical mass for your research and testing purposes. Reaching such a large pool of possible ambassadors is definitely interesting in terms of data, but take what you’ve learned and identify your most valuable players. These MVPs fit into your target demographic and geographic location and have sizable audiences of their own. Take the time to properly groom campaigns for these specific audiences and tap into the “quality over quantity” mentality.

Always Be Optimizing

The goal of launching your advocate program is to gain referrals to your product. But what about referring ambassadors as well? Some of the highest quality advocates likely have a strong social presence, a healthy knack for marketing, innate sense of leadership -- and probably, in really good company. As part of your overarching customer referral goal, use your advocate to not only refer you to potential new customers, but potential new advocates as well. Use your advocate marketing program to adapt your incentive structure to reflect this new referral goal.

Be Selective

Your product isn’t run of the mill or generic, so your ambassadors shouldn’t be either. Creating the right advocate marketing campaign is very similar to selecting a team for your business. A strong ambassador for your product should be knowledgeable and passionate in marketing, a relevant online presence, professionalism, leadership skills, the passion to connect and grow relationships, the ability to deduct insights. Your product deserves ambassadors that exemplify an extension of your brand. Don’t be afraid to seek out exactly those traits for your superstar ambassadors.

Get Social

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of your best advocates are uber-connected. However, you could potentially be missing out on those advocates that are connecting with you only on social. For example, a customer might be a huge fan of your service, but never opted into an email, or be in your database. They may however tag your service on Instagram and use your hashtag...all the time. Social media can be a goldmine for ambassador candidates. On top of identifying your potential advocates, you can see their style and voice first hand on their social channels. There’s definitely something special about connecting to potential customers and ambassadors on a personal channel such as social media. A study shows that 53% of marketers say ongoing, personalized communication with existing customers shows an impact in revenue growth.

Leverage Your Employees

Here at Ambassador we tend to look at the pool of advocates as divided into two groups - external and internal. External advocates will be those referrers you seek out through email campaigns, using your advocate marketing tactics. However, internal advocates are cultivated through really strong company culture. Your employees are absolutely able to be your most valuable advocates!

Your best advocates might not always be exactly where you think they are, so it is important to create an advocate marketing campaign that is multidimensional and as interesting as your product. Keep your standards high and attract passionate, driven ambassadors.