What's a brand advocate?
Brand advocates are customers who recommend products and companies to their peers. Some do it for free, others are paid. Many do it without knowledge of the company they are recommending. A late 2006 survey by Yahoo! and comScore painted a profile of brand advocates: they're young, online and highly influential. Sixty percent of them believe that good brands are worth talking about and they spend far more time promoting brands than trashing them. The research found that 90 percent of advocates will write something positive about a purchase experience. In consumer electronics, for example, 21 percent of advocates convinced a friend to buy the same product they did, compared to just 6 percent of non-advocates according to the survey.
Brand advocacy makes good business sense. "We know how much it costs to find and recruit a brand new customer," says Patty Seybold, author of several books on customer engagement, including the recent Outside Innovation. "If you have fans out there doing it for you, then your costs of acquisition go down."
The entertainment industry has leveraged brand advocates for years. Rock bands offer fan club members preferred seating at concerts and distribute T-shirts, buttons and bumper stickers to turn followers into walking billboards. Perhaps the most successful beneficiary of brand advocacy is Harley-Davidson, whose customers have been known to tattoo the company's logo on their bodies.
With the internet, brand advocates have the potential to influence far more than just people in the neighborhood. Successful bloggers and podcasters may have audiences numbering in the tens of thousands, and search engines can quickly land a potential customer on the site of even the most obscure blogger.
There are lots of ways to engage and support these committed customers. Here are three you should consider.
Bestow widgets
Internet widgets have been around for years, but they're now experiencing an explosion of popularity. In its most basic form, a widget is a small visual doodad that links to another website, a kind of linkable eye candy. One of the most popular examples is the Amazon Associate widget, which promotes books of the site owner's choosing, with Amazon paying a small commission for sales that result.
All commercial blogging services support widgets, which can be easily added with a few lines of HTML code. Social networks like MySpace and Facebook also support a limited range of widgets.
Widgets are becoming more diverse and sophisticated, offering information about local real estate prices, sports scores and optimal dog-walking weather, for example. Web-tracking firm comScore just reported that nearly 178 million people viewed web content in April through some kind of widget. Service-provider Widgetbox has thousands of examples of widgets that its customers have created. Other widget makers include Clearspring, Slide, and RockYou.
Widgets are an inexpensive and effective way to promote your brand and generate incremental sales. You can combine them with RSS feeds to display up-to-date information related to your business, product demos, videos and audio. The more interesting and dynamic the content, the better.
Next: Blog for business