Brand Advocates, Influencers and Champions

Wanna increase or protect your business reputation?

Wanna increase your sales team’s reach and revenues, without increasing your headcount?

Wanna reduce customer support costs?

Want great product ideas?

(Disclaimer: We do advise Microsoft, and our founder is a honorary Microsoft Regional Director)

If you answered YES to any of the above, then you should read on…

Influencers and advocates are the perfect solutions for all the above listed questions. Advocates, evangelists, early adopters, loyal customers, brand champions, influencers, promoters and fans, the super users, we all want more of them.
Getting your voice heard across the myriad social channels can be challenging. Most advocates fit in here perfectly, as they are highly passionate contributors, leading the conversation or responding to queries across various social channels.

 

Additionally,

For most organizations, it is impossible for your customer support or marketing, or product personnel to reach out to, and respond across all the various social channels and build relationships with customers. Additionally, using online channels only misses out completely the offline physical world interactions between people.

Advocates and influencers are not only your key promoters, they can be your first line of defence in this growing space with new channels and new people joining these social channels. Additionally, your internal personnel can’t possibly build relationships with thousands of customers, however hundreds of advocates can!

 

Why build an influencer, evangelist or champion program for your business?

Influencers and brand champions help in promoting your brand via word of mouth marketing, thereby reducing your costs of marketing and enabling you to reach more potential customers, thereby driving your revenues up. Additionally, they provide third party validation, building up your reputation, which is invaluable compared to your business marketing activities.

Advocates and evangelists passionately reach out and help others, thereby reducing your support costs and helping in building brand confidence.Moreover, they’re present in places where at times it’s impossible for your internal personnel to help or reach out in time.

Listening and filtering the volume of social conversations can be challenging. Your brand advocates however, provide a much more captive source of information and insight as they are passionate users of your products and services. Brand advocates & champions can be excellent as a sounding board helping your product teams by providing insights on new features or products you should be building or even feedback to your marketing teams about your proposed advertising and marketing campaigns.

Being passionate about your products means that they willingly participate in early stages of your product development. Investing considerable time in trying out your beta products and services and reporting on bugs they save you invaluable time and costs in getting your products ready to market. This almost acts like a feedback loop in a way, as getting them early on to test your products means they typically have better knowledge of the innards of your products and hence are able to help others better by often suggesting workarounds to limitations.

Why you should not yet start a brand champion program

Building brand advocates is all about building a relationship with a person(s). Unless you have the resources and time to commit, it’s foolhardy to start a program.

If you’re ready to start your brand champion program – Read This First

OR

Watch the video on Creating a Community Brand Advocate Program

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