Unfortunately, once companies decide to build a customer advocacy program, they often jump straight to the tactics to build programs, like implementing a sampling program, launching a blogger outreach campaign, creating gamification, or starting a social media page on a new platform.

But there’s steps to take and questions to ask yourself before diving in. Before we get into that though, there’s one question that first needs answering.

What is customer advocacy?

Customer advocacy is the method of nurturing relationships with your existing, loyal customers so that they champion your brand, products, or services in return. A strong customer advocacy program will turn your loyal customers into vocal ambassadors for your brand. Why is this important?

Because according to Gartner research, over 75% of B2B buyers consult three or more sources of advocacy before they make a purchase decision.

So the more acts of advocacy you have, the higher your chances of making a sale. But it’s not just new sales that are impacted — the customer advocacy cycle impacts every stage of the buyer journey.

Customer advocates want to share their experiences with your business and help other customers get the most value out of your product or service, which includes upselling and cross-selling. Advocates are who shoppers want to hear from, which is why at Bazaarvoice we have a strong focus on customer advocacy.

Types of customer advocacy program

There’s multiple customer advocacy strategies you can use to enhance the voice of your customers, from simple case studies to guest speakers on webinars.

• Speaking engagements. What better way to advocate for someone than to hear it directly from the customer’s mouth? Inviting a customer to speak on a webinar or at an event is a powerful form of advocacy, which also provides your customer with a brand promotion opportunity.
• Reviews. 88% of shoppers turn to reviews when evaluating a product or service, so having customer reviews on your website and social pages inspires confidence in potential customers. Platforms like G2 are a great source of business reviews.
• Case studies. Probably the most common customer advocacy program, case studies tell the success stories of your existing customers. Prospects don’t need to hear your sales pitch, they want to see how other similar businesses have performed and the potential ROI they could see too. Case studies to just that
• Customer quotes. Often easy to source and even easier to display, quotes are a quick way for customers to share their experience with your brand. They can (and should) be shared across websites, social channels, and email

What to consider when building a customer advocacy program

When there’s more than one strategy on offer, it can be difficult knowing where to start or which is best for your brand. Taking a step back to consider the three points below can help you choose tactics that work best for your advocates and your company — and build a successful program from the start.

1. Why do customers buy your product or shop in your stores?

Often, the answer to this question will be based on research you have already done or insights gained through social media monitoring. As you build your advocacy program, you’ll start to clarify why customers shop with you. But it’s important to have an idea in the beginning to see how to best interact with your consumers.

For example, advocacy programs for a business that knows that people buy its products to belong to a group versus one that knows customers choose its products because of convenience will be completely different, with different messaging and tactics.

2. What motivates customers to be advocates?

This is key for your customer advocacy program. Step into your customers’ shoes and ask why they would want to interact with you. Understanding this will help you bring what’s valuable to your customer to your program.

For example, if you look at what Sharpie did to engage with its fans online, you can see that they know that its customers want to show off their creativity. So Sharpie provides a place for advocates to receive recognition for their creative powers.

Sister company Prismacolor engages its audience in a slightly different way: Prismacolor loyalists define themselves as artists who want to give advice and learn from other artists, so the Prismacolor studio provides an avenue for artists to collaborate.

The tactics are similar, but the messaging and interactions are different, based on differences in their advocates.

3. How do I make it easy for my customers to advocate?

The big question. The easier you make it for advocates to talk about your products or services, the more volume you’ll see. Consider how customers interact with you today and where you could easily add a new touchpoint to encourage them to advocate. Or, how are they already advocating? Are they using particular hashtags or sites more than others? These behaviors might be ones you can noninvasively participate in, too.

Often the easiest way to build customer advocacy is through a brand community. These communities provide a platform for customers to engage with your brand and encourage them to share stories about you.

Customer advocacy examples

Diving down into these three areas can help you get the most of your customer advocacy program and help you decide on your next steps. The answers to these questions can help you decide which tactics would be most effective — and which to avoid. So, what will your advocacy program look like?

But with so many different types of influencer out there, not to mention the sheer volume of influencers, it can be difficult knowing how to put influencer marketing into practice. The best way to get ahead is by looking at case studies of those who have already achieved influencer marketing success.

According to our influencer research, there’s four types of influencer to work with:

1. Subject matters experts are experts in a specific industry or topic
2. Celebrities who have become known outside of what they’re famous for
3. Social media stars are well-known with large followers, often paid to promote products
4. Every day social media users like me and you who post authentic user-generated content

While different influencers have different influence for different audiences, it’s the everyday social media users who have the most sway with audiences. It’s easy to assume that more followers = more sway, but according to the 9,000 global shoppers we asked, that’s not the case.

So then when it comes to getting started with influencer marketing, where do you begin? Because there’s multiple avenues to go down. Let’s take a look at three of the best influencer marketing case studies we’ve seen, for the best strategies for you to emulate.

Top 3 Influencer marketing case studies

The following case studies all use influencer marketing, but all use a different type of influencer and a slightly different strategy. But they all have one thing in common: success.

1. BEMZ

Have you ever spent a lot of money on a piece of furniture only to stop loving it after a year or two? A lot of customers have. Which is why they turn to companies like Bemz to update their pieces. Bemz is a Scandinavian design company that specializes in creating made to order, high-end covers for IKEA furniture so people can update pieces in their homes to reflect their personal style better.

Over the past year and a half, Bemz has been populating its marketing channels with more visual user-generated content (UGC) to show potential customers what its products look like in real-life homes. A crucial part of Bemz’s strategy is its use of influencers. The brand relies on them to create evergreen content that Bemz continually collects and integrates into marketing programs.

But, the way Bemz partners with influencers is a little different than some of the other brands out there. 

A unique partnership

Bemz mainly works with influencers in its core markets, like Sweden, the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. However, it doesn’t go after the biggest names in interior design like you may think it would. 

Instead, Bemz chooses to work directly with influencers that already have an Ikea product in their homes to make for a more natural collaboration and build trust with customers. Many of the influencers it works with are in the interior design space, but it also goes after those in other sectors like fashion and beauty. 

“We pick influencers on a case-by-case basis depending on what the profile looks like, if we can get content out of it that matches our brand aesthetic, if they have great engagement, or if are really relevant in a certain sector,” said Alexandra Öhrlund, Social Media Manager at Bemz. 

Seeking out influencers who already own Ikea products is a more natural fit for Bemz. The brand ensures that its covers are shown repeatedly when the influencer posts photos of them hanging out at home on the couch, even if it’s not a Bemz sponsored post.  

Capturing the authenticity movement

In some cases, Bemz will work with influencers who don’t match the brand’s aesthetic. For example, the brand doesn’t showcase shabby chic looks or farmhouse interiors on its own site and channels. But they still choose to work with a leader within an influencer’s sector to build brand awareness and trust within that influencer’s community.

“It’s not necessarily something that we then incorporate into our content strategy, but we work with them because they have a great profile. They’re very genuine within their field,” said Öhrlund. 

This strategy works because it taps into the rising authenticity movement. 72% of shoppers now choose products based on a brand’s reputation. Consumers are fatigued by insincere, fake, untrustworthy content and crave authentic UGC from real people — partly why they consider every day social media users the most trustworthy influencer.

Bemz has found that this kind of content resonates much more with its followers. The brand continues to collect this evergreen content and display it on social media, which has seen click-through rates increase by 41%.

You can read the full Bemz influencer marketing case study here to learn more.

2. QUIZ

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, global fashion brand Quiz primarily focused on the in-store experience at its 250 brick-and-mortar locations. However, when stores started to close, Quiz knew it needed to focus more on its social and e-commerce strategies to increase engagement. 

To start, the brand began posting more user-generated content (UGC) images from customers on its social feed, because those types of posts have always had a very high engagement rate for Quiz.

The team also knew that they needed to make these images shoppable to guide interested consumers from the social feed to product pages on Quiz’s site. But they didn’t stop there. 

A micro and macro strategy 

One unique aspect of Quiz’s new social media strategy is its use of micro- and macro-influencers to increase engagement.

• Micro-influencer: Has a social media following between 1,000 and 100,000
• Macro-influencer: Has a social media following over 100,000

For a recent winter party collection, Quiz put together a list of micro- and macro-influencers it wanted to get UGC from for that collection. Then, Quiz shipped those influencers outfits from the new collection, and the influencers took photos of themselves in the clothing and tagged Quiz in the images.

“As soon as the collection is live, we can look through our gallery feed and pull the strongest images into the homepage gallery to showcase different influencers,” said Megan Ashurst, Senior Social Media Executive at Quiz. 

Quiz uses a mix of micro- and macro-influencers to maximize the impact of campaigns. Macro-influencers have a lot of followers, so their posts see a wider reach. But micro-influencers have smaller fanbases, so their followings are typically more loyal and tend to engage more with posts. Instagram’s own research of 8000,000 accounts supports this:

“We tend to find that we do get really valuable content and engagement from smaller influencers as much as we do from the big influencers,” said Ashurst. 

Quiz’s use of influencer content — on its website and social channels — led to a 276% increased time on site, a 23% higher average order value, and a 154% increase in conversion rates, making them one of the great influencer marketing case studies we’ve seen.

You can read it in full here.

3. RIMMEL

There’s only one thing better than an influencer marketing strategy: an Influenster marketing strategy. The Influenster App is a community of over 7.5 million every day creators, eager and willing to create authentic content about your brand.

Actually, they’re already creating this content. You just need to activate the community, which is exactly what British beauty brand Rimmel London did.

Rimmel activated the Influenster community through a hyper-targeted sampling campaign, where samples of products are sent to community members in exchange for honest reviews, product imagery, and social posts.

Because of the ability to choose a highly-specific audience, Rimmel was able to send products to an audience of 18-30 year old beauty enthusiasts in key markets. Recipients were asked to share their thoughts and feedback through reviews and social media posts.

The campaign led to over 1,200 product reviews and 15.7 million impressions on social, driving brand awareness and sales along the buyer journey. Incidentally, the campaign led to a 44% higher sales lift for the featured products.  

Learn more about how the campaign led to increased advocacy, brand awareness, and a 69% higher sales lift for the product categories in which the sampled products compete by reading the full case study here.

Become an influencer marketing case study

Play your cards right and it could be your brand featured here amongst the other successful influencer marketing case studies. We continue to see the rewards our clients have from working with influencers and content creators, so we know it’s the way forward.

Last year, influencer marketing spend jumped from $3.69 billion to $4.14 billion in the U.S alone, according to HubSpot. It’s past time to get started with influencer marketing. But whatever avenue you choose, you’ll first need to know how to reach out to influencers and get a yes in return.

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How to create an effective influencer marketing strategy

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“Without a doubt, there’s a strong correlation between customers interacting with reviews and conversion rate.”

Online shopping has, somewhat unsurprisingly, hugely increased over the last year. In 2020 alone, e-commerce sales surpassed 4.2 trillion USD worldwide. The convenience alone of being able to make purchases without leaving the house is too appealing, especially in a year where leaving the house wasn’t even an option. But there’s something online shopping can’t replicate – interaction.

Whether that be interacting with a sales associate or interacting with a product (particularly the touch and feel aspect that consumers love), interactions that persuade the customer to make a purchase are missing from the online shopping journey. Your brand’s content needs to fill in this gap instead. 

Digital window shopping

To do so, you’ll need to make your website a digital brick-and-mortar store. That’s where user-generated content (UGC), like customer ratings and reviews, comes into play.

Almost 80% of consumers say UGC highly impacts their purchasing decisions, and ratings and reviews are at the center of that. In fact, in 2020 a whopping 87% of consumers said they read online reviews for local businesses before making a purchase. In short, reviews matter.

One brand that knows full-well how much they matter is Appliances Online (AO).

AO is Australia’s largest online appliance retailer, with over 8,000 unique products from the world’s best and biggest brands. How did they get to where they are today? Easy – through their legendary customer service. But it’s not just how they deliver products to their customers. What really sets them apart from the rest is how they deliver content to their customers. 

AO knows that ratings and reviews, and visual and social content (like photos or videos) from other customers are the strongest ammunition in the content arsenal. Which is why getting more reviews has always been a top priority for them.

Reviews also impact how the AO website merchandises products. Every time a supplier asks AO how they can ensure the success of their products, they’re given the same answer: Grow your review volume. And they’re right to say so, given that 70% of shoppers always look at available reviews.

Reviews reviews reviews

In our latest customer success story, we look at how AO worked with Bazaarvoice to reach out to different suppliers and increase their review intake. So far, they’ve already managed to gather:

• 83,000 native reviews
• 304,000 syndicated reviews from 60+ brands
• 386,000 total reviews

We detail how AO utilizes these customer ratings and reviews to fill their product display pages and, in turn, directly achieved a 3x higher conversion rate.

read the full case study now

Appliances Online uses Bazaarvoice to boost sales and improve the shopping experience

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Established in 1999, Sealskinz empowers outdoor enthusiasts with its waterproof, windproof and breathable products. As an emerging brand in an industry most shoppers aren’t familiar with, and with few competitors making similar products, reviews from users provide potential customers with product insights that traditional marketing can’t match.

“We’re a relatively new brand in a space that very few companies occupy,” explains David Richards, Head of Marketing at Sealskinz. “We have to educate people about the benefits of our products to win them over, and user generated content is crucial to doing that.”

Publishing reviews dramatically boosts Sealskinz sales conversions

Since Sealskinz began publishing reviews on its website using Bazaarvoice Conversations, the company gained a dramatic rise in shopper-to-purchaser conversions. In December 2014, there was a 102.6% conversion increase in shoppers who engaged with reviews compared to those who didn’t.

“It’s phenomenal what we see on conversion reports,” says Dave. “It’s better than we would have ever thought it could be.”

Review qualification, syndication boosts effectiveness

Collecting reviews and posting them online is just one advantage of Bazaarvoice Conversations. “Some review companies will only capture content from purchasers, and that’s their way of qualifying reviews,” explains Dave. “But Bazaarvoice doesn’t limit the amount and type of information we can collect. They’re able to also validate content that’s captured from people using our products who aren’t necessarily online purchasers.” This allows Sealskinz to collect content not only from online purchasers but also customers who purchase via their retail partners.

Bazaarvoice also provides content syndication, which lets reviews be shared across different websites. Sealskinz recently shared reviews of 34 products on 106 product pages on four retailer websites, greatly enhancing the reviews’ visibility and effectiveness.

Seller ratings promote Sealskinz company credibility

Bazaarvoice Conversations offers a Google seller ratings feature, which lets Sealskinz collect and share reviews about the company itself. Once company ratings are sent to Google, they can appear in search results as Google Seller Ratings and Google Product Listing Ads.

“We’re a small company from the UK, and we don’t have millions of dollars to advertise how great we are,” says Dave, “so it’s important people have the trust of knowing we are a reputable worldwide company. That’s what Google seller ratings do for us.”

Use reviews to learn about customers, and improve products

While reviews give Sealskinz customers buying confidence, they also provide valuable knowledge about the customers.

“With Bazaarvoice, we have the ability to access data we’ve never been able to get before,” says Dave. “We can see which products people are buying, how they’re using them, what their experience has been, and other information we can use to make them better and sell them more effectively.”

Sealskinz meets regularly about customer feedback on lower-rated products, and determines how to address the concerns. Based on review feedback, Sealskinz made manufacturing changes to two products and eliminated the issues causing lower rankings.

Reviews also enhance marketing and sales 

Knowledge gained from reviews helps Sealskinz improve sales and marketing in ways not previously possible.

“Content from reviews helps us identify key wholesale markets,” says Dave “We have one general-purpose outdoor glove that reviews indicated was being used extensively for mountain biking. So we started targeting cycling retailers with it. At one store alone, they ordered 2,000 pairs. We would have never known to do that without reviews.”

As Sealskinz demonstrates, reviews provide a vast range of benefits for customers, retailers and and businesses. Small businesses in particular gain benefits from reviews that were previously unavailable using traditional sales and marketing.