Customer advocacy
Read time: 6 mins
With all the tools, tech and talent we have at our fingertips, you’d think being a marketer in 2022 would be simple.
But – as you’ll be all too aware if you’re on a Marketing team — that’s far from the case.
Digital costs are rising. Teams are shrinking. You’ve got piles of data you’re not leveraging.
The obstacles stopping you from reaching your target consumers seem to be multiplying and expanding at an uncontrollable rate. And these challenges – shared with us by clients in a recent survey – are set only to worsen in the looming economic downturn.
Data dilemmas
Despite the many technological innovations of the last decade, there’s still one question leaving marketers scratching their heads.
“How do we get more of our data?”
Whether you’ve got too much of it, not enough access to it, or you simply don’t feel confident using it, data is a pain point for even the savviest of Marketing teams.
Before long, brands will be exclusively relying on zero- and first-party data as third-party cookies are shelved once and for all.
But many marketers aren’t equipped to make the most of these customer insights. That might be down to a lack of expertise, or the absence of intelligent tools that can leverage this data to its full potential.
The customer data you do have access to has the potential to transform your strategy by delivering experiences that keep customers coming back (and bringing their friends). You just need the right channel to harness it…
Marketers are overstretched (and undersupported)
As Marketing teams grapple with new tools to hit increasingly tricky-to-measure metrics, the role of a marketer seems to become more and more of a catch-all.
Today’s marketers are expected to take on an excess of responsibility while working with tight budgets that are a dwindling fraction of their company’s total revenue.
According to data from our partner Emarsys, a third of marketers are tasked with owning the customer experience, brand, digital marketing, CRM and customer retention.
Meanwhile, the budgets you’re working with have dropped from 11% of your company’s total revenue to a slim 6.4%.
With the pressure cranked up to boiling point, you might not have the time (or resources) to step back and look at the bigger picture of your strategy. Instead, you feel forced to resort to short-term tactics that guarantee quick — but unsustainable — results.
In reality, taking a new approach to your strategy that considers the long-term impact of your efforts will have a domino effect that hits all your short-term KPIs.
Combatting soaring digital costs
As you try to acquire and retain customers in an increasingly crowded market, it's tempting to keep pumping budget into paid search and paid social.
But while these channels used to be a wise investment, they’re now delivering less and less ROAS. Meanwhile, costs are soaring.
In addition to iOS changes making it harder to strategically target your ideal consumers, a key factor behind the declining impact of your previously go-to paid channels is that consumers are simply more sceptical of traditional ads.
Social media in particular has been tarnished with a reputation for displaying ads that are inauthentic and misleading. In fact, 31% of consumers say it's the channel they trust the least.
So why continue to up your budget on channels that are costing you more, but your target consumers are trusting less and less?
The solution: thinking advocacy-first
While these challenges might leave you feeling in a marketing rut, there is a way out.
A way out that keeps your ad costs down, tells you more about your customers, and drives organic growth directly from your core.
You need to think advocacy-first.
By putting customer love at the heart of everything your business does, you’ll create a powerful community of brand fans that market your business better than you ever could.
Our CEO Andy Cockburn discussed this radical mindset shift at our Advocacy Engineered event, which you can catch up on here.
That’s why we’ve launched our Optimise package. To empower you to maximise customer love and make advocacy your primary source of growth.
It equips you to turn referrals into an optimised, multi-channel acquisition strategy — and transform the way you engage with every single customer.
With Optimise, you can harness your most valuable data (your advocacy DNA) and use powerful machine-learning to identify tomorrow’s best advocates, today. All the while, you’ll be amplifying your entire martech stack and smashing your key business goals.
Want to find out how? Read on.
Smart Experiment (powered by Propensity to Refer®)
A precision-engineered referral programme provides you with a goldmine of first-party data that reveals your truly most valuable customers (aka, your referrers).
But what if you could predict how likely every customer is to recommend your brand, and tweak your strategy accordingly to nurture even more advocacy?
That’s where Propensity to Refer® comes in — and it changes everything.
Smart Experiment lets you segment customers based on whether they have a high or low propensity to refer, and you can serve them different content to drive the best action.
For customers with a high propensity, you can encourage them to refer and introduce more high-value customers, with referred friends being 5x likely to go on and refer someone else.
For those with a lower propensity, you can experiment with driving other actions (such as a newsletter signup or an NPS survey) that nudge them closer to becoming an advocate.
Best of all, you’ll have gained these key learnings without having to run costly tests on paid search and social, slashing your CPA.
Forget having a mountain of data that you don’t know how to use. This AI-powered segmentation tool leverages your rich first-party referral data to nurture advocacy from your whole customer base and reach your most ambitious growth targets.
So you can stop wondering how to use your data, and start driving results from it.
Smart Audiences
With 47% of marketers believing they’ll be “priced out” of Facebook ads if costs continue to rise, the race to find an alternative solution is on.
Smart Audiences equips you to use first-party referral data to target lookalike audiences on paid social that look like your best customers: those referring you to others.
These lookalike audiences have high conversion rates, so you can be sure you’re reaching the consumers you want to target.
As these high-converting audiences interact with your brand on paid social, you’ll start the cycle of long-term advocacy that keeps them returning (alongside their friends).
When SPOKE fed its referral data into its paid social channels to create lookalike audiences, the menswear brand increased conversion by 65% while reducing CPA by 12%.
Better still, you won’t have to give your overstretched Marketing team the hefty task of uploading rows and rows of data to your paid social channels.
Referral data travels between platforms seamlessly and in real-time, syncing seed audiences daily so they can reach an ever-evolving audience.
As a result, your paid social channels will make maximum impact with minimal costs and effort. What’s not to love?
Marketing Automation Integrations
When your budget is feeling the pinch and your resources are tight, you need your existing marketing channels to be working in harmony.
The right integrations will turn your martech stack into a KPI-hitting machine that runs like clockwork. That’s why we integrate with partners like Klaviyo, Emarsys and Ometria.
By feeding your first-party referral data into your other platforms, you can segment, automate and personalise communication with customers across every single channel.
These slick omnichannel experiences will empower you to drive engagement, retention and revenue by nurturing advocacy throughout the customer lifecycle.
Your referral data will enhance your other channels, and you can turbocharge referral performance by promoting it at as many touch points as possible. It’s a virtuous cycle of long-term growth — all kicked off by the power of advocacy.
Become a winning business
As marketers seek out solutions to their challenges, AI-driven, data-powered technologies will become critical for long-term success.
Propensity to Refer® is the first segmentation model of its kind, but we’re not stopping there. We’re continuing to explore innovative solutions to today’s challenges that help you accelerate growth through an advocacy-first approach.
Ready to turn customer advocacy into your most potent source of growth? Get in touch or head over to our Product page to learn more.
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