Following my first blog post covering platform-specific social media tips, I want to touch on an aspect of social media that a lot of my professional and consulting clients ask about, influencer marketing.

Like most marketing activities, working with influencers can be very beneficial for a brand when done correctly. From helping spread word-of-mouth through a blog or social content to driving an increase of overall awareness for a brand. Influencer marketing enables a company to insert itself authentically through the interests of its target audience.

Let me guess when you think of influencer marketing, you think of well-known brands like Nordstrom, Crown Royal, and Target, but that shouldn't scare you, and I'll tell you why.

One of my content shoots from 5411 Empanadas, a Chicago restaurant with multiple locations.

One of my former consulting clients is a co-owner of a multi-location, quick-service restaurant in Chicago, 5411 Empanadas, and was interested in influencer partnerships to promote a new product launch. But it needed to happen with a limited budget in mind. With some determination and social listening, I was able to do just that for my client.

I did it by identifying and reaching out to up and coming food and beverage influencers in Chicago with smaller follower counts; we're talking less than 3,000 on Instagram, similar to a micro-influencer.

In exchange for a free meal and the opportunity to capture some photo and video content at one of the restaurant's locations, my client received User-Generated Content (UGC) to share on their restaurant's social channels, and we earned additional reach through the influencers' social channels as well.

To wrap up this section on influencer marketing, I wanted to share a more tactical approach to building brand advocates for small businesses.

Brand Advocates

Like user-generated content, brand advocates are low-cost, and if you're lucky, a free marketing tool can help your business. Brand advocates are your most faithful and intense customers, who will take action if asked. The customers leaving positive feedback on a brand's comments or the Amazon review section are brand advocates.

Most small to midsize businesses lack the resources to either hire a large client success team or pay for chatbots to handle the heavy lifting. An absence of either can result in lost leads and lost sales, but you can level the playing field by utilizing brand advocates. They can be vital to the success of businesses, especially those with limited marketing budgets. Here's how:

Unlike influencers or brand ambassadors, brand advocates engage with a brand because they genuinely love it. These brand advocates can have a sphere of influence themselves but on a much more micro level.

A Fireball Whisky brand advocate, excited about our “Surprise & Delight” kit we sent him.

Like this Fireball Whisky fan above, brand advocates are people who find a way to talk about their experiences and satisfaction with your brand, no matter the scenario. Brand advocates often lead to new customers through word of mouth marketing (WOMM).

They can help build brand affinity, increase overall awareness, and assist in supporting new product launches.

So let's talk about the benefits of a brand advocacy program in the real world and how it can benefit your business. I think a brand that does a great job at building brand advocacy is the shoe company Toms. Those who don't know the company, Toms started in California with both a unique style of shoes and a great category differentiator.

How Toms continues to do social good, even during COVID-19.

Tom's will donate another pair of their shoes to a person in a developing country for every pair of Toms shoes purchased on their site. Even now, during COVID-19, Toms is finding ways to take their profits and turn it into a social good by purchasing personal-protective equipment (PPE).

When thinking about what "reward" your customer could receive for buying your product, it can be something tangible like a coupon for a future visit or points towards a loyalty program. But it can also be something intangible, something that evokes an emotional feeling.

For Toms, the reward is knowing that your purchase will help someone in need with every shoe you purchase. Toms’ brand advocates then take that brand story about why this particular shoe brand is such a great company, and they tell everyone they can, their friends, family, co-workers, and even the person they sit next to on the plane.

Those individuals happen to be potential customers for Toms. Now in an ideal world, those potential customers will go out and purchase a pair of shoes as soon as they hear about how great Toms is as a company, creating new revenue streams.

Leveraging Word Of Mouth Marketing (WOMM)

As a marketer and consumer, there's often some lag time between when someone hears about an exciting product or company and acts on it. We’re talking about multiple touchpoints before a consumer becomes a customer. Sometimes you may not get a direct sale through your brand advocates, but you will gain word of mouth and hopefully convert later.

If you dedicate time to building a brand advocacy program, you also can provide a baseline of customer support without adding to your bottom line, requiring additional resources. For one of my previous agency clients, when we'd see a customer leave a negative comment about issues with their products on Facebook, other users, aka brand advocates, would come out of the woodwork and provide advice or tips to remedy the situation.

One example of a successful brand advocacy program that sticks out in my mind to this day was from a book I read when I was first starting in advertising called "Fizz: Harness the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth" by Ted Wright.

Fizz: Harness the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing to Drive Brand Growth by Ted Wright

In his book, Ted talks about how his marketing agency in Atlanta, Fizz, helped the U.S. Dairy Association through brand advocates and word of mouth marketing. One of their goals was to get pre-teens and teens to keep drinking milk through high school. And to do that, they needed a story worth telling. That story was a research study concluding that chocolate milk was the best drink following strenuous activity for recovery. Better than Gatorade, water, and everything in between.

Now they needed to change how their potential audience, pre-teens, and teens think about chocolate milk. And who leaves a more significant impression on middle schoolers more than anyone? High school kids. So now, Ted and his team needed to identify and partner with brand advocates who have an authoritative voice on this particular subject, fitness. When it comes to fitness and playing your best in high school, most students look to the football coach for guidance.

Through direct mail, leveraging the study and benefits of chocolate milk, and partnering with professional athletes, the agency convinced coaches in Ohio that chocolate milk should be their players' post-workout drink of choice. Over time, more and more coaches started recommending chocolate milk to their players. Those players then asked their moms for it at home, driving purchase intent at the grocery store. And before long, that local Ohio story gained national coverage, increasing overall sales of chocolate milk.

Takeaways

What are some takeaways from a brand advocacy program, albeit at a much larger scale, that applies to marketers, regardless of skill:

1) Identify your existing brand advocates; they're the people talking about your brand constantly on social or online. You probably already know a couple and could identify more easily with just a little bit of time

2) Establish your goal for partnering with these brand advocates. Is it direct referral, is it app downloads, is it product reviews?

3) What is the creative way to reach those goals? For example, for direct referrals, what can you offer more exciting than a basic "Earn $5 for each referral?"

4) Monitor test and learn. Regarding reporting and analyzing content, we're fortunate to be in an industry where trial and error are not only accepted; and championed when done correctly.

Follow these four takeaways, and as a bonus, you'll be able to build an emotional connection with these potential brand advocates, while also establishing a trusting relationship with your brand or your client's.

With these takeaways, you can create a brand advocacy program with the ability to scale up or down as necessary, that can assist from a content creation standpoint and help you receive product feedback or reviews if your business requires that.

Looking Ahead

We've gone over a lot in the past few weeks, and yet, we've only scratched the surface of the current social media ecosystem. Social media is ever-changing and requires a mixture of both art and science. You need to understand both the qualitative and the quantitative when reviewing content and understanding performance.

And even as social media continues to evolve, we still know that consumers across all of the major social media platforms want to share aspects of their lives and engage with the brands that make it possible for them to do that. So how can your business or your clients engage with its consumers in a natural and non-invasive way? ‘

In my career, we typically mine for insights across the Internet and in the real world, discovering how a brand's products live in everyday consumers' lives. We do this to ground our social strategy in actionable insights.

From a cultural standpoint, what culturally-relevant moments can my brand show up authentically? When thinking about our business category, are we seeing any trends that seem to separate some businesses from others within the category?

Next, we look from a consumer perspective. Can we do social listening to uncover any insights relevant to our brand?

And from a company standpoint, what's truly different about our brand, and how can we maximize that advantage across every relevant media?

During my time at The Escape Pod Group, we took a four-step approach to our social media process. That involves listening to our community, our target audience, and the competitive set for any insights.

1) We look to create original branded content per an editorial calendar.

2) To help supplement that content, we curate and share user-generated content and 3rd party testimonials.

3) We then look to connect with influencers, micro, and macro, to help grow our social following and raise overall awareness.

4) Finally, we take a look back to measure and analyze our results to optimize future content. Like any campaign or activation, review how your content is performing throughout the campaign for better success.

That includes everything from an A/B test using the same creative but different post copy on two paid social posts, all the way to flighting several pieces of content over a more extended period and having them compete against each other.

This A/B testing is sometimes known as race tracking, where you're using the performance of those paid ads to determine which has the best creative to run long-term.

Next week, we're going to continue looking at the organic and paid social content.

Can’t wait and want to learn more about organic and paid social media? Check out my “Organic vs. Paid Social Media: Part 01” blog post.