Quick wins when you want to build customer advocacy

Everyone loves a quick win when it comes to working with their customers on any kind of marketing campaign, and for those looking to build customer advocacy it’s no different. From reviews, case studies to being allowed to use someone’s logo, we’re all on the hunt for a quick win.

What should those quick wins really look like when it comes to customer advocacy?

Worrying about quick wins in customer advocacy

Marketing tend to spend a lot of time anxiously trying to find quick wins in advocacy before they’ve built strong ties and trust with customers. “Can we convince that customer to do a case study”, “how many G2 reviews can I get” or “maybe if I just get their logo on the website that’s enough”. However, you’ve got to consider whether these quick wins fit in with the rest of your advocacy and wider marketing strategy. How do these quick and dirty asks potentially impact the relationships with your customers?

Does generating loads of G2 reviews feel like a quick win to you? Of course it does. What happens when you’ve got a major marketing campaign coming up and you just smashed your customer lists with review requests? And now you’d really like to feature your customers within a wider, broader reaching campaign… ugh oh.

So you’ve successfully generated loads of online reviews from amazing, happy customers. But, now they won’t respond to your email asks about deeper more meaningful content creation opportunities. It’s ok we’ve all been there!

Quick wins vs long term relationships

We have to walk a very fine line between what will make us look great in the short term and how you build and foster long lasting relationships with customers. We want them to be open to being part of major marketing campaigns. Here are our top tips on how to balance this:

Segmentation – if you want reviews or something quick, have at it! But try segmenting your customers by: usage, NPS promoters, CSAT promoters or admin levels. This way you don’t bombard your entire customer database with the same request.

Tracking – asking customers to do things is great, but by implementing a customer advocacy programme with a tracking system you can ensure you aren’t overwhelming people with too many asks.

Look to your community – if you’ve got a customer community, ensure you’re giving those within it value and in-turn those in your community might be more easily persuaded to take up an easy ask!

Weigh up the pros and cons of the ask – if you have already got customer advocates and you’re tracking activities they participate in, then make sure you are comfortable with the ask. Even if your leadership team want to see a quick win, it’s not worth damaging a relationship over logo usage or a G2.

Customer experience is part of creating customer advocacy

As a marketer you always have to ask yourself why and what the purpose of any ask is. Will getting as many case studies as humanly possible mean that anyone will read them? Probably not. Quantity is no substitute for quality. You might feel under the gun for a quick win, but don’t compromise on creating a lasting relationship with a customer.

Internal relationships can be repaired and reasonable pushback is respectable. Customer trust and experience cannot be repaired.