What is Brand Advocacy and Why Is It Important for PR?

Brand advocacy happens when customers, employees, and other stakeholders actively support and promote a brand through recommendations, word of mouth, positive reviews, or by sharing content about the brand.

The key element? They promote the brand voluntarily.

Today, we'll show you what brand advocacy is, why it matters for any business and how you can get it started.

What is brand advocacy?

Brand advocacy can increase trust in a business and help promote it with extreme efficiency, and can be done at a very low cost. This makes brand advocacy campaigns crucial for PR teams looking for efficient ways to promote their clients or businesses.

With tools like Prowly, you can easily create brand advocates and find opportunities for strong brand advocacy programs.

Understanding brand advocates

A brand advocate is anyone who actively supports or promotes a brand by sharing their positive experiences, like recommending products and services or encouraging the people around them to engage with that brand.

These are some of the most common types of brand advocates:

• Loyal customers
• Employees
• Partners or affiliates
• Influencers
• Casual fans

Here's how you can picture them in the form of a pyramid:

In recent years, influencer marketing has become a major trend driving business results.

This led to the confusion between what we call an influencer marketing campaign and a brand advocacy program.

So here are the main differences between influencers and brand advocates:

To break it down further, let’s explore how influencers and brand advocates differ in the following areas:

Relationship with the brand

Brand advocates are loyal customers, employees, or fans who genuinely love the brand because of their positive experiences and emotional connection. Influencers are typically individuals with an online audience who have a contractual obligation or a sponsorship deal to promote a brand.

Main motivation

Brand advocates are mainly led by personal satisfaction, emotional attachment or enthusiasm for the brand. Influencers are motivated by financial incentives, free products, and business opportunities.

Scale of influence

Brand advocates can usually promote your products to a smaller group of friends and acquaintances. Influencers have larger, more public followings, and their voices are louder.

Type of promotion

Whether it's an employee or customer brand advocacy, the content created is typically unstructured, such as recommendations, reviews, or other forms of unsolicited feedback. Influencers have structured formats for promotion, such as sponsored posts, hashtags, or promotional messages.

Cost to the brand

A customer or employee advocacy initiative is almost always free because they genuinely love the brand. Influencers charge for their services in money, free products, or other means of payment.

Why brand advocacy matters

There are plenty of reasons why brand advocacy can benefit any business. But if you're still on the fence, here are the main reasons to invest in customer and employee brand advocacy.

Authenticity and credibility

The difference between an average marketing campaign or an influencer PR post and a brand advocacy campaign? No one paid your employee or customer to publicly speak nicely about you. The only motivation is their genuine love for the brand.

Since this is the kind of recommendation you can't purchase, it's an excellent way to become more credible and be recognized as authentic among the competition.

Word-of-mouth marketing

You don't need a brand advocacy platform to get started with a program. Word of mouth means that the good word spreads organically, in person, through social media, on websites, in phone calls, and anywhere your employees and customers are.

Emotional connection

When other customers or team members see the emotional attachment someone has with your brand, they're likely to develop those feelings too. Since the promotional messages are heartfelt and without incentive, they can inspire others to promote you or participate in a brand advocacy program.

Long-term engagement

Great brand advocacy programs keep customers engaged in the long run. Loyalty programs, rewards, special offers, insider access, exclusive content... These are all ideas to keep customers and employees returning and turn them into brand ambassadors.

Cost-effectiveness

The average Instagram influencer post costs around $1,300. Prices vary depending on the influencer, their audience and reach, the industry you're in, and the product you're promoting. For example, micro-influencers won't charge as much and they can bring you extremely relevant leads.

However, regardless of the number, the influencer stops posting and promoting as soon as you stop paying.

On the other hand, time and money invested in brand advocacy can keep giving returns for months and years on end when done right.

Humanizing the brand

You no longer have to fear sounding robotic or appearing dishonest whenever customers see your logo. When real customers and team members speak about you positively, your brand becomes more human and relatable.

Why PR is important when building brand advocacy

Public relations shape the perception that the general public has about a brand. PR can set a strong foundation for any brand advocacy initiative when done right.

Here are some reasons why PR is crucial when building up brand advocacy:

• It helps you build and maintain trust by communicating the brand's values, mission, and reliability through transparent and consistent messaging, helping you do reputation PR effortlessly.
• It creates emotional connections between your brand and your audience by telling compelling stories that resonate emotionally with the target audience, helping them form deeper connections with the brand.
• It amplifies positive experiences by showcasing positive reviews, testimonials, and case studies to a broader audience, leveraging the voice of satisfied customers to inspire further advocacy.
• It helps manage brand perception by ensuring the brand is positioned positively in the media, helping customers feel confident about associating with and recommending it.
• It supports employee advocacy through internal PR efforts, like employee newsletters, recognition programs, or sharing success stories, which can motivate employees to become brand advocates.
• It helps generate awareness by introducing the brand to new audiences and turning awareness into loyalty by presenting it in a favorable light.

How brand advocates boost your PR

Brand advocates can amplify your public relations efforts as an boost to bring in new customers to your business. Here are a few ways brand advocacy boosts PR:

• It amplifies positive messages as advocates share press releases, announcements, or campaigns with their networks, increasing visibility beyond the brand’s official channels.
• It builds credibility through authenticity since advocates are trusted more than corporate entities. Their endorsements give PR campaigns a human touch, making the messaging more relatable.
• It helps with user-generated content (UGC) as advocates create photos, videos, reviews, or blog posts that support PR campaigns. This UGC improves the campaign's authenticity and provides additional content for the brand to share.
• It supports crisis management because advocates often come to a brand’s defense during crises, countering negative press with their positive experiences.
• It strengthens employee advocacy as employees who act as brand advocates can amplify internal PR campaigns, such as new product launches or corporate milestones, by sharing them on professional platforms like LinkedIn.
• It drives word-of-mouth PR because advocates naturally discuss and promote the brand in their daily lives, creating ongoing PR without additional effort from the brand.
• It increases campaign effectiveness since advocates actively engage with and share brand campaigns, driving up metrics like clicks, shares, and overall reach.

How to build brand advocacy

Just like there are countless ways to do marketing and PR campaigns, there are plenty of ways to build advocacy for your brand. However, these are some great starting points.

#1 Identify and engage loyal customers

Find out who your happiest customers are so you can ask them to speak nicely about you in front of others. You can do this by:

• Running surveys (such as NPS)
• Asking on social media
• Analyzing your internal data (such as CRMs)
• Monitoring and listening to social media to see who mentions you in a favorable context

These are excellent ways to spot people likely to promote you and most of these initiatives can be set on autopilot.

#2 Create formal programs

Brand advocacy can be an umbrella term for many different programs. However, you need programs in place to create standard operating procedures, set metrics, and track the success of your campaigns in a formal framework.

Great examples include:

• Referral programs
• Exclusive communities for loyal customers
• Rewards for advocacy, such as discounts, extra features, gift cards, promo codes, and more

#3 Leverage social media

Just because your brand advocates are not influencers does not mean that their voices don't count. When they promote your brand on their accounts, it's an authentic representation of your brand and its values.

First, encourage those users to create posts about your brand, i.e., user-generated content. Give them basic guidelines and let them do the rest to make the message heartfelt and authentic.

Once they do their part, use your official accounts to shout them out and share their content. If a customer has solved a significant pain point with your product or service, consider turning their testimonial into a full-blown case study.

#4 Empower employees as advocates

When employees speak nicely of their company, it can often feel forced. This is because many businesses force their employees into promoting a brand with specific guidelines. Don't do this.

Instead, encourage your employees to create and share content that promotes company values. Let them determine what this content will look like and when and where they will share it.

How to measure brand advocacy

There are tangible ways to measure the effectiveness of your brand advocacy program. Specifically, these are the key metrics to monitor:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): a number that tells you how likely a customer is to recommend you to people they know. It's super easy to collect and there are industry benchmarks for NPS to compare against.
• Social media mentions and shares: how many times have people mentioned your brand and product across different social media platforms and shared your content?
• Referral rates and word-of-mouth leads: how many new customers come to you because existing customers referred them to you?

Tracking these is actually fairly easy.

You can use survey tools such as SurveyMonkey to track NPS scores. With various survey templates you can choose from to best suit your needs to embed in emails, social media posts, live chat messages and similar content.

Prowly can measure your media mentions across social media and websites. Pick your preferred terms and Prowly will send you real-time updates as new mentions roll in. With features such as sentiment analysis and detailed analytics, you can track the success of your brand advocacy program in minute details.

As for referral rates and word-of-mouth recommendations, every good CRM can track them. Simply add a point in the customer journey where they have to report how they found your brand and you'll get a quick overview of your brand advocacy program results.

Conclusion 

Brand advocacy is a cost-effective, highly effective way to promote your brand organically. If you have customers and employees who are excited that your company exists, you are halfway to creating successful brand advocacy initiatives.

And at Prowly, we can help you across the other half. With media monitoring, sentiment analysis, and detailed reporting, it's easy to spot who loves what you do so that you can recruit them as brand advocates.