Do you wish more people were telling their friends about your company? When people are looking for recommendations on LinkedIn, you wish your name was being tagged.
When someone at an industry event is asking for examples of people in your niche, you want your brand to come up in the conversation.
What about when things do not go to plan? A network of trusted people can also help test your response in a crisis and help you out of a reputation hole.
One way to do this is through finding brand advocates, those who rave about how good you are when the going is good and when it’s not so good.
Today I delve into this topic with a focus on crisis management and stakeholders and give tips on what to think about before you start, whatever your programme.
Let’s dive in!
Full Transcript (unedited)
Do you wish more people were telling their friends about your company? When people are looking for recommendations on LinkedIn, you wish your name was being tagged.
When someone at an industry event is asking for examples of people in your niche, you want your brand to come up in the conversation.
What about when things do not go to plan? A network of trusted people can also help test your response in a crisis and help you out of a reputation hole.
One way to do this is through finding brand advocates, those who rave about how good you are when the going is good and when it’s not so good.
Today I delve into this topic with a focus on crisis management and stakeholders and give tips on what to think about before you start, whatever your programme.
Let’s dive in!
Let’s start at the beginning.
There are multiple applications of brand advocacy. For example, as a form of advertisement, to create a sense of community and to persuade others to buy the company’s products. Industry partners can help with policy or regulatory issues; staff can help tell stories of your company first-hand for recruitment purposes.
Whatever your purpose, It is essential to consider the goal when conducting advocacy because the desired outcome will vary depending on the brand.
It can also be a powerful tool when things don’t go to plan, and a crisis hits.
A strong brand can help the company weather the storm by having powerful advocates. For this to truly work, companies need to have transparency and a strong circle of people they can trust, that can be a sounding board and relay critical messages in a crisis as brand advocates.
The company will also need to have built up a good relationship with its target market and different industries before the crisis hits. And in some cases, brand advocacy can help a company to come out of a crisis more robust than before. Brand advocacy could arguably also help to build up a company’s reputation and make it easier for the company to weather a crisis.
What is a brand advocate?
A brand advocate can be anyone who participates in brand-promotion actions and, therefore, supports your company’s growth.
Types of Brand advocates
The four most common groups of brand advocates include:
- Employees: Your employees have the most knowledge about your existing products and services and can be your best brand advocates.
- Business partners: Strong partnerships and affiliate programmes can also be a great source for widening the customer base and brand awareness.
- Influencers: Influencers are famous people with a lot of followers on different online platforms such as social media and/or people who carry a lot of weight in your industry.
- Customers: Many prospects rely on existing customers’ reviews and word-of-mouth; customer advocacy is a powerful way to attract and close new clients.
How do you find brand advocates?
Make a list
Start by asking yourself these two questions:
What is your purpose, and how can brand advocates help this cause?
Who do you want and need on your side?
Those will give you a pretty good idea of who you need to target. Include individuals that matter to your business success and be thorough.
This will take some desktop research as well to identify people or organisations that could be beneficial to your cause.
Ask your suppliers, and ask your staff what they think.
Be really honest about this and include people you need to build relationships with, not only those that are known to you already.
So once you have an idea of who you need and why here are three things you need to know before you start a brand advocacy programme:
- 1. Be really clear on your goals – you need to know what the destination is. Keep track of how far you’ve got with building those relationships and whether you feel like you’re succeeding.
- Your whole management team needs to be on board. It would help if you were really clear about where you’re headed and what your message is. And because of that, you need to make sure the management team is completely aligned with sharing information with people outside your organisation. (I’ll come onto why this is important in a crisis)
- Make sure that you understand what you want from each opportunity and that you can articulate this. And think about how you will engage people – it’s a two-way street. Think about the ‘what’s in it for me’ question.
Writing a letter saying ‘please be a brand advocate’ isn’t going to cut the mustard. This is a long game, and the activity programme will need to nurture relationships with each of your groups, the tactics of which will be very different depending on who that is. For example, building customer champions vs getting an MP or a member body on board as a brand advocate will be very different.
Traditionally these roles would sit with someone in big organisations like banks, called Industry Relations. PR would handle other relationships like MPs and media, and marketing would handle customer relationships. Everyone needs to be joined up for this to work, so this is easier in a small organisation or business where one person can do this. But if you are in a large organisation, then this will take some work and project management to get right.
This is why it’s important to have brand advocacy as part of your communication strategy. It’s not just a business development tool or an add-on.
What about when things go wrong?
In my post-graduate diploma in crisis communication, I read a lot of work in this area and authors such as Gehrke, P. J., in The Crisis Fallacy: Egoism, Epistemology, and Ethics in Crisis Communication and PreparationGehrke, who argues that ‘early engagement’ with stakeholders that can not only be a way of pre-empting a crisis but a tool for recovering trust afterwards. – And I think this is about building brand advocates, in a sense.
Gehrke (and others agree) that a truly two-way approach is the only way to build mutual trust and values, and warns that this must be genuine and stakeholders must also have a voice if trust is to be established and maintained. Gehrke also argues that engaging with stakeholders too late, either during or post-crisis for the first time, can actually be counterproductive.
My face-to-face interviews with Senior Leaders as part of this research agreed that good relationships with key stakeholders could help gain trust if an issue becomes public from a national perspective, which mirrors the view of published works in this area.
Building a broad range of brand advocates for your business means that it’s a two-way process, letting them into your world and helping with decision-making, whether that’s focus groups on improvement processes or industry partners that are helping shape approaches to the business by aligning policy.
This group can also be an excellent sounding board for when there is an announcement to be made to the public, and it needs a sense check or by using the process of ‘stealing thunder’ to lessen the blow of bad news.
ESG and other corporate tools are fleshing out this need for two-way dialogue. Traditional Corporate PR is now somewhat lost on the “new civil society” as they are more media savvy and are designed to justify a corporate policy which is not currently set up for two-way dialogue either.
So we need to change our approach to how we think about brand advocates; it’s not all about customer reviews and recruitment.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. If you want to discuss this topic in more detail, drop me an email or DM me on social channels.
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