What is Customer Advocacy? A How-To Guide with Examples

Suppose you’re looking to buy a new laptop. You get an email from Best Buy touting a popular HP model, but your friends all praise their reliable Dell laptops. Who are you more likely to believe? Probably your friends. And that’s exactly why customer advocacy matters.

Because 90% of customers consider reviews and ratings, and 73% consider recommendations from friends or family before making a purchase decision. So, as customers turn to trusting authentic users over brands and paid adverts, it only makes sense to introduce customer advocacy product marketing.

This guide will help with that, exploring everything you need to know about customer advocacy, including:

Defining customer advocacy and customer advocates.
Understanding the importance of customer advocacy.
How to build customer advocacy programs.
Effective customer advocacy strategy examples.
How to measure customer advocacy and other FAQs.

What is customer advocacy?

Customer advocacy is the act of building and nurturing relationships with loyal customers, who then act as spokespeople for your brand and promote it to the rest of the world.

Customer advocacy initiatives revolve around providing an excellent customer experience. Businesses that prioritize customer advocacy build trust, deliver great customer service, boost customer satisfaction, and provide a seamless product experience.

What is a customer advocate?

Customer advocates are loyal customers who share their positive experiences with your business, typically in the form of testimonials, recommendations, ratings, and reviews. The idea is to help other customers who are looking to maximize the value they get from your product or service.

Oftentimes, customer advocates may approach your company themselves to partner up through a formal advocacy program. Other times, you may have to identify advocates yourself, using tools like customer relationship management (CRM) systems, in order to foster stronger connections with them.

What is the role of a customer advocate?

Advocacy is often the highest form of customer loyalty, and as such it naturally comes with certain responsibilities. Let’s go over what these are:

Promotion: Help promote products or services through various channels, such as online reviews, case studies, and backlinks.
Provide feedback: Offer valuable insights and customer feedback on products or experiences to improve the entire customer journey.
Test features: Oftentimes, customer advocates are the first to test new features to ensure they align with customer needs.
Market research: Assist in identifying trends and preferences within the customer base to inform product development and business decisions.

Why is customer advocacy important?

Customer advocacy is a key element in helping companies build long-lasting relationships (and consequently drive sales). But beyond sales, there are several other benefits advocacy offers as well, such as:

Improves brand awareness: Customer advocates amplify your message by sharing their experiences, helping to build trust and credibility among potential customers.
Offers assistance to other customers: Advocates contribute their expertise by supporting other customers, particularly in community forums. They can address questions, post tips, and share feedback, enhancing the customer experience.
Boosts customer retention: Satisfied customers turned advocates are less likely to churn. For this reason, advocacy especially helps subscription-based B2B SaaS companies, where the power lies with the customers since they can easily switch to competitors.
Drives engagement through social proof: Positive testimonials and word-of-mouth marketing from advocates significantly influence potential buyers, especially for SaaS and B2B businesses.

How to build a customer advocacy program?

A customer advocacy program is a joint marketing and customer success initiative designed to convert loyal customers into advocates for your brand. Let’s explore how you can create one!

Outlined steps to build a customer advocacy program — The 5 basic steps to build an impactful customer advocacy program that transforms loyal customers into brand advocates.

Step #1: Define the goal of your customer advocacy program

The first step is always clear goal-setting to outline what you want to achieve. Whether it’s increasing customer engagement or generating greater referrals, specific goals better guide your strategy.

However, you must ensure that your chosen objective is well-aligned with your overall business aims for maximum impact.

Step #2: Define the advocate persona

While buyer personas paint a picture of prospective customers, advocate personas detail the key traits, needs, and motivations of existing customers.

There are various types of advocate personas to consider, including examples like:

Status seekers: These customers have a wide network and aren’t afraid to speak their minds, providing honest feedback that resonates with their followers. They excel in public speaking, making them perfect for podcasts, webinars, and live events.
Educators: In online forums, some customers naturally take on the role of teachers, offering tips and answering queries. Their patience and willingness to help others make them great spokespeople, ideal for community-building initiatives.
Collaborators: These customers view advocacy as a two-way street, helping you out and expanding their networks in return. As influential advocates, they are best suited for business reviews and joint ventures, like content co-creation or affiliate programs.
Validators: These are loyal customers who have spent months or years using your product, lending credibility to their experiences and feedback. This accumulated experience makes them trusted voices in their networks, likely to do well at webinars and industry events.

Customer advocate personas — All these advocate personas are enthusiastic customers eager to help you improve, so they’ll happily provide in-depth feedback on their experiences with your company.

Choosing the right persona type helps you decide your approach to recruiting suitable advocates by providing them with opportunities that support their goals. For example, for status seekers, you can leverage them for demand-generation webinars. This helps them excel at their career goals, establishing greater credibility, while benefiting your audience too.

Step #3: Use data to find your happy customers

Once you define your advocate persona, it’s time to find the right customers that fit the bill.

To do that, you can gather data in several ways, such as:

Conducting NPS surveys to find your promoters.
Share emails from happy customers with your team.
List down customers who have left you positive reviews online.
Reach out to customers who have previously done case studies with you.
Contact customers who recently served as references, providing endorsements to others.
Utilize user data analytics to shortlist highly engaged customers based on their product usage.

Step #4: Think of how to implement your customer advocacy strategy

No good deed must go unrewarded. So, along those lines, it’s time to think of how you’re going to compensate your customer advocates in exchange for their time and effort.

Here are a few incentive options you can consider:

Physical rewards: Offer tangible items relevant to the customers’ interests. For example, trigger a follow-up that offers incentives, like gift cards or premium feature access, for feedback to customers with NPS from 8 and above.

Offer gift cards to entice customers to answer your NPS follow-ups — You have to know what type of incentive will be most effective for your customers. Gift cards, like the one above, are always a reliable bet in exchange for deeper customer insights.

Recognition: Acknowledge advocates’ customer loyalty and ongoing support by showing them a bit of gratitude. A common example is how most companies like Nike or Dunkin send a special discount code email for the customer’s birthday.
Empowerment: Loyal customers want to play a part in improving the product they love. So, allow them to do so. For instance, invite them to participate in surveys and focus groups, just like Southwest Airlines regularly does to unearth top customer problems.
VIP experience: Create tiered rewards programs where customers earn loyalty points to unlock new tiers. Each tier brings exclusive benefits, like early access to features or greater discounts. For example, Sephora’s Beauty Insider program offers tiered perks based on customer spending.
Influencer: After a certain degree of loyalty, advocates reach influencer status, acting as brand ambassadors, creating content for you, and speaking at sponsored events as your promotional spokesperson. The perfect example of this is Microsoft’s MVP program, designed to recognize power users who advocate for the company across various channels.

It’s important to keep in mind that these implementations should be considered in the context of how they help other teams in your company reach their goals. So, if the goal is to get more reviews, physical rewards make sense. But if the aim is account expansion, consider tiered reward programs with a VIP experience.

Step #5: Collect customer and internal feedback for improvements

To continuously iterate and improve your customer advocacy strategy, it’s important that you focus on both external and internal feedback. This ensures your strategy evolves effectively, addressing customer needs while aligning with company goals.

For internal feedback, you could create a dedicated communication channel to exchange ideas and ask each team about their goals or customer advocacy vision.

For customer feedback, you can segment loyal customers to regularly deliver surveys, such as by using in-app surveys with Userpilot.

Segment loyal customers to ask them for feedback — Segmentation allows targeted feedback collection, ensuring insights are relevant and actionable for improving advocacy efforts.

Successful customer advocacy program examples

Now, let’s go over some standout examples to better understand what effective customer advocacy programs look like.

Result-driven customer advocacy program from HubSpot

HubSpot’s Victoria LaPlante succinctly captures the company’s journey toward building a successful brand advocacy strategy. It started with HubSpot trying to scale its customer reference program, where advocates helped new prospects, to support aggressive growth goals since it was preparing for an IPO.

Challenges:

However, reaching that goal wasn’t so straightforward, with several challenges emerging:

Limited brand advocacy program, with only 25 “VIP” customers as advocates.
Customer advocates soon burned out due to a lack of variety, having the same conversations with prospects on repeat.
Advocates weren’t familiar with HubSpot’s latest onboarding processes since many were old customers who had purchased products years ago. This caused problems, as most prospects were interested in these exact processes.

How they improved:

To turn things around, HubSpot opted for a unified brand advocacy program using Influitive’s AdvocateHub platform. This approach allowed them to:

Engage a broader audience by inviting existing satisfied customers to participate in various advocacy activities.
Encourage diverse contributions such as references, referrals, testimonials, and product feedback. This removed the risk of burnout due to a limited variety of tasks.
Create a structured feedback loop through regular communication with advocates, including “Ask Me Anythings” (AMAs) with leadership.

Results:

Ultimately, the program implementation paid off, leading to significant outcomes, including:

Increased customer references from 2–3 calls per month to 25–40.
Generated millions in revenue growth with referrals closing at 3X higher rates than regular leads.
Enhanced HubSpot’s visibility on review platforms, surpassing competitors on sites like G2 Crowd and TrustRadius.
Improved customer NPS scores and created upsell opportunities, driving additional revenue.

Data.com’s customer advocacy program for boosting references

Facing an overwhelming demand for customer references, Data.com’s Katie Yeigh outlines how the company sought innovative ways to deepen relationships and scale its reference program.

Goals:

Data.com had a limited group of customer advocates participating in reference activities. But it wasn’t enough, because they wanted greater reach. With that in mind, they set out to:

Increase customer participation, increasing the number of customers engaged in reference activities.
Strengthen customer relationships, creating meaningful connections with both new and existing customers.
Enhance customer loyalty, encouraging customers to share their success stories and actively advocate for the company.
Personalize the customer experience to make interactions more memorable during large events like Dreamforce (the annual technology conference hosted by Salesforce).

How they improved:

Data.com launched the Ohana Hub, an advocate marketing platform designed to engage customers at Dreamforce through:

Personalized experiences, like welcome baskets with tailored gifts and handwritten notes.
Gamified engagement, where customers earned points for completing activities, like sharing event information or participating in discussions.
Community building, by encouraging networking among customers through collaborative challenges and sharing experiences.

Results:

The campaign’s impact was evident, as showcased by these impressive results:

44% increase in customer references.
31 customers volunteered to share their success stories publicly and speak at events.
Double the amount of customer story slides for sales teams to use as collateral.
7 new case studies created.
3 customer success story videos produced, improving emotional connections.

Gamification experience so people earned points during Dreamforce — Incorporating gamification elements, like points collection, boosts participation and just makes the whole customer experience much more enjoyable.

Conclusion

Just one final bit of advice to leave you with. While focusing on customer advocacy to improve retention, don’t forget the integral element that lies at the base of it all: the customer experience.

If you prioritize creating seamless experiences across all customer touchpoints, loyalty and advocacy are by-products that will automatically follow. Only after you refine the foundational experience does it make sense to build and implement a customer advocacy program.

Looking to drive greater customer advocacy by improving the overall customer experience? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can remove friction to optimize the customer journey.

Customer advocacy FAQs

What is an example of customer advocacy?

An example of customer advocacy is when a loyal customer participates in a webinar to share their success story using your product, demonstrating its benefits and providing product experience insights to potential users. This personal endorsement does wonders at successfully influencing new customers.

How to increase customer advocacy?

Here are some best practices for increasing customer advocacy:

Actively collect and respond to customer feedback.
Incentivize customers to leave reviews and referrals.
Deliver exceptional customer service, resolving issues quickly.
Create a frictionless customer experience across all touchpoints.
Continuously improve based on customer suggestions to show responsiveness.
Highlight positive customer experiences through testimonials and success stories.
Build deeper customer relationships by regularly communicating via multiple channels.

How to measure customer advocacy?

Here are all the commonly used ways you can measure customer advocacy:

Measure changes in customer lifetime value (CLV).
Conduct regular surveys to analyze customer feedback.
Employ social listening tools to monitor brand conversations.
Analyze customer sentiment from testimonials and reviews.
Track the number of referrals coming from existing customers.
Use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to gauge recommendation likelihood.
Monitor social media engagement and interactions, like comments or shares.

How to track advocacy program ROI?

To track your advocacy program’s ROI, record monthly metrics such as referrals, references, upsells, and renewals. Next, compare these figures against the program’s running costs, like rewards, admin time, and software expenses.

This comparison shows ROI by illustrating the revenue generated from customer advocacy efforts against the costs incurred to maintain the program. If the value exceeds the program’s costs, it indicates a positive return on investment.

What is Customer Advocacy? A How-To Guide with Examples