You hear a word once and then it’s everywhere: customer advocacy, employee advocacy,… What does it actually mean?

In one word: championship!

Customer advocacy

provides your business with free marketing. Customer advocacy examples include: reviews of your product, social media, testimonials, and other forms of engagement.

Set up alerts and do social listening* to find out who is endorsing you – you should be finding ways to both share their endorsements, and reward them for their efforts. Consider creating special offers just for them. Some of the ways in which you can harness customer advocacy include case studies and partnerships.           

You get to a place of customer advocacy by nurturing your customers and delivering a great service.

It’s definitely worth putting in the effort as word-of-mouth is still a powerful lead-generator. You are more likely to go with a product or company recommended by a friend or someone whose authority you trust, than a company simply telling you they’re great.

*There are various tools for this, but even just a simple search on Twitter of your brand can yield interesting results.

Employee advocacy 

is when you allow your whole team to promote your business, not just your marketing and sales teams. Essentially, it makes the team into brand ambassadors on social media.

The advantages of your team sharing your content and promoting you on social media is that you will be extending your reach organically.

It also looks good – if employees are enthusiastically promoting their workplace it’s a sign that they love working there and believe in the work.

To be successful, you need to agree on some guidelines and install a process that makes the latest info easily available. This includes graphics they can share, hashtags they should use, new articles, etc.

At the same time, you have to give your employees freedom to post as they want to – otherwise they’ll sound like identikit robots, that’s not a voice you want on your team.