With the decline of traditional media, and the explosive growth of social media, brands have been turning to social media users to find influencers and brand advocates to get their brand across to potential customers.
In part one, we explore ways to engage with influencers and brand advocates.
Choose the most effective drivers of advocacy for your brand
Take a look at your brand. Choose the most effective drivers of advocacy: your service, products, pricing, maybe your business ethics score highly too.
Identify, distinguish and engage with your target audience
Brand advocates are by definition individuals that promote and embody a brand’s core values and ethics, below are key ones;
Employees: Remember, they are most important advocates and an invaluable resource who will support, promote and defend your brand.
Customers: They are satisfied customers and committed to your company and your offerings. They create trusted recommendations that echo across the internet, can help turn back a wave of negative sentiment and drive action.
Influencers: Typically, online personalities with a high Klout score and a large following. Or as trendsetters or micro influencers with a smaller-yet-highly-active followers. They can help you drive awareness but are less likely to have the depth of conviction your employees or customers have. If you choose to work with either of those be sure to do your research. Be clear to find (micro) influencer who have all or the following attributes: relevancy, context, reach, actionability and passion for your brand. Watch the video on How to Work with Micro Influencers below.
Make it easy for brand advocates to share your content on social media
Today, brand advocates express their attitudes towards brands through social media by ‘sharing’, ‘liking’ or ‘tweeting’ about a brand. Include those share buttons and give customers the opportunity to generate organic content around your brand.
Harness the value of your employees as the most powerful brand advocates
Recognise that your employees and their advocacy is often correlated to happiness of employees. If employees believe in the values and ethics your brand promotes, customers are sure to take notice and action. Harness their support and activate employees to share to their personal social profiles on behalf of your brand.
Create content in the right format for your advocates to share
Content you create should be produced so that brand advocates can use to personalise and re-purpose it across their own social media accounts. With the explosive growth of rich media and visual media -photos, videos, images – they should be included.
Have the right tools to manage and grow your brand
Thanks to some great online tools, it no longer takes huge amount of your time or money to monitor what’s being said about your brand, who is saying it or what is hot topic for your target audience. Check out Social Mention, Google Alerts or Monitor This and get insights. If you are looking for the ideal Twitter audience to engage with or see how you stack up to your competition, then try Followerwonk.
Nurture and develop your loyalists and encourage new ones
To do this, you have to build authentic relationships with your advocates and fans long-term. There are many phases and steps to move customer from ‘knowing’ to ‘loving’ the brand. Stay tuned, we’ll discuss this in part two.
To make sure you are able to do all this, it’s best to be fit and ready to do it. As they say; fit body – fit mind. For fit body a daily workouts are recommended. Try it by reading the article about Weslo Cadence G 5.9 Treadmill Review. It will help you to choose the right Treadmill for your daily workout.
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