Building a Business Case for a Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform

Happy customers are repeat customers. They’re also the ones who will go out to bat for you, telling the world how great you are.

But it can be hard to quantify the effect of outstanding CX and high levels of customer engagement, so convincing the rest of your organisation of the business case can be tricky. 

That’s why we’ve built the world’s first Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform:

What is customer advocacy? And how can you sell it to your boss?

Customer advocacy describes the actions your customers take to promote your business. That could be in the form of referring you to their friends, leaving a positive review or sharing your brand on social media.

These advocacy actions drive revenue - directly through referring other high-value customers to your brand and indirectly by boosting your profile with a wider audience. 

Mention Me’s Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform takes a systematic approach to referrals and advocacy, maximising the impact they have on revenue and growth. With it, you can:

• Identify which customers are doing the most to advocate for your brand.
• Engage them to increase and extend their advocacy actions.
• Nurture your customers, turning more of them into advocates and increasing their value to your business.

The key to building a business case is understanding customer advocacy is a measurable and optimisable thing. 

Think of your Net Promoter Score (NPS). Through surveys, you can understand how positively or negatively your customers feel towards your brand. Once you’ve understood this, and where different types of customers sit on the satisfaction spectrum, you can take action to influence it. 

The same is true when it comes to customers referring and promoting your brand. 

The creator of NPS, Fred Reichheld, said “The future of profitability and growth is to get customers coming back for more, and bringing their friends.”

Whether they’re buying from you again or referring their friends, your existing customers are the only place to start if you want to achieve sustainable, organic growth that doesn’t rely on expensive paid channels for customer acquisition.

The business benefits of customer advocacy

In a tough economic environment, finding innovative and efficient ways to sustainably grow your business is a necessity.

A customer advocacy strategy increases revenue

On average, when compared to other customers, referred customers spend 25% more, have twice the lifetime value and are 3x more likely to refer again.

But averages are not enough to run a business, so we’ve developed a metric called Extended Customer Revenue (ECR):

• ECR tracks the revenue your advocates bring to your business through their own spending and the spending of the customers they refer. 

• You can influence your customers’ ECR rate by taking actions (personalised messaging, gifts, targeted campaigns, rewards) to increase their advocacy activity. 

• In a single metric, ECR shows you the value of your marketing and CX initiatives.  

Precise, data-driven segmentation

When you track ECR and use referral data, you can segment more scientifically. Segmentation has always been important to marketers, now it helps you make a business case too. Our platform lets you group customers based on the amount of revenue they represent, now and in the future. It means you can see:

• If your customers are still bringing in revenue through their referrals, even if they’re not buying themselves.
• Where to allocate advertising spend to get the biggest return on investment. 
• How much your campaigns have moved the needle. 

By incorporating advocacy data into their customer segments, leading brands have increased:

• Engagement rates by 80%
• Referrals by 36%
• Conversion rates on reactivation campaigns of 27% 

Customer advocacy drives sustainable growth

The cost of acquiring customers has risen sharply in recent years and continues to rise. What’s worse, these customers are often not high-quality. 

Customer advocacy brings down the cost of customer acquisition at the same time as increasing the quality of your new customers, pushing your lifetime value to customer acquisition costs (LTV:CAC) in the right direction. 

Compared to other customers, referred customers have a 2x higher LTV, 11% higher AOV and 1.8x higher repeat purchase rates.

What’s more, referred customers are themselves more likely to refer others, building organic growth into the fabric of your customer base. 

Mention Me’s Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform takes this logic and runs with it, helping you develop a systematic approach to these high-quality, high-value customers. Nurture them to win their loyalty and engage with them in a way that helps you acquire new, similar customers.

Earned Growth as a core business metric

The vision behind the platform is of your customers as the engine room of growth. We quantify this as Earned Growth. 

Earned Growth is the amount your business grows without the help of marketing or advertising spend. It’s the total amount of revenue your customers, through their purchases, referrals and advocacy, bring to your business. 

The more you can grow through Earned Growth, the healthier the underlying economics of your business will become.

Customer advocacy reduces the costs of your paid marketing

Because we’re so focused on your existing customers and how to drive value from them, it reduces the need to spend as much on paid advertising and marketing. 

And the money that you do spend can be used much more efficiently. 

The Audience Builder feature lets you create audiences similar to your best customer advocates. You can feed this data into Meta and paid channels and connect with much more valuable audiences.

Unlock the hidden value in your customer base with Mention Me

We understand the challenges you face in convincing your organisation of the importance of exceptional customer experiences and stronger customer relationships. That's why we've developed this groundbreaking platform to empower you.

Customer advocacy is about turning your satisfied customers into your most powerful advocates, fuelling organic growth and reducing your reliance on expensive customer acquisition channels.

Your customers are not just buyers; they are your greatest advocates and partners in success. They’re waiting to help you write the next chapter of your story.

To understand how to deploy customer advocacy marketing for your brand, watch a demo of the world's first Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform: