How to co-create content with your customers to generate advocacy

Advocates can be the silver bullet to helping your B2B business grow. From our experience, the key to successful customer advocacy programmes is showcasing client’s voices in creative ways. Here’s five ways to use your customers stories to build stronger relationships, and turn your client’s into advocates.

Talk to your customers about their challenges

Schedule in time, either as a marketing or senior leadership team, to talk to them about what’s going on in their world. What are their pain points? And how can you work together to solve them?             

Overcoming problems together helps you better demonstrate your expertise in the field, whatever your service is. Even if a solution isn’t found immediately, your customers will feel genuinely listened to; thus increasing their loyalty to your brand. When you show your customers you care, they’ll want to help you too. If you’ve done the work and helped them overcome some big obstacles, use their story in your PR.

Customer success stories

When something goes well, shout about it, EVERYWHERE. Integrating your client’s success stories into both your internal and external PR activities further demonstrates your expertise to a wider audience, as well as inspiring your own team with real-tangible-wins. Showcasing just how badass your business is. 

We encourage our clients to celebrate when their own customers reach key milestones in their projects; whether that’s in a punchy LinkedIn post, or an email to your team.

Nominations and awards

Celebrate your customers nominations and awards. A win for them is a win for your business too. Work together to form a game plan to co-nominate each other.

Invite your customers to talk to you: LIVE

Ok fine, it doesn’t have to be live- prerecorded is completely acceptable. Podcast interviews and LinkedIn Live can be wonderful methods of sharing real conversations with your audience. Humans interacting with humans!? Not a mind blowing concept- but one often forgotten in B2B marketing.

It’s important not to try and turn your interviews and conversations into a lead generation activity. That could break your customer’s trust. Using a demand generation approach maintains your client relationship, even strengthens it, whilst giving you both an opportunity to build an audience and grow awareness of your products in a non pushy way.

Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose…

Those client conversations you captured so beautifully can be used for more than just a sexy quote on your website. Oh yes. Consider repurposing that content into resources. For example, downloadable Linkedin carousels or one pager guides. Once again, think about talking about your client’s challenges and how they overcame them. Everyone loves a success story.

In summary, anything that genuinely celebrates your clients and raises their profile is worth doing. You don’t need to be a kiss ass about it, just be a business that cares about their customer’s doing well. Keep doing that and they’ll love you for it.

That’s how we turn customers into advocates. Team hug anyone?

Want to build an advocacy programme for your business? Let’s do this.