Recommendations from friends and family remain the most impactful form of brand endorsements, and their influence has only increased in the past ten years. In a new wave to its Social Recommendations Index, TINT, the leader in Community Powered Marketing, uncovered new insights in online brand advocacy tracked from 2013-2023.

Ninety-six percent of consumers say friends and family are the most trusted source for product recommendations, up from 86% in 2013. The impact of content creators has also increased to 62%, up from 39% in 2013 who were influenced by “bloggers” at the time.

The study found a recommendation from a friend who tried a product for free was still considered impactful and credible. However, the data indicated that trust in incentivized reviews by content creators has decreased. In 2023, 65% of consumers say they trust content creators who have received a free product to review, down from 76% in 2013 – reflecting a growing weariness of sponsored creator content.

“For brands looking to achieve authentic word-of-mouth online, the bread and butter will still be friends sharing with people they know,” says Sameer Kamat, CEO of TINT. “Consumers have only become more discerning about product recommendations with economic uncertainty on the horizon, and mobilizing and scaling everyday advocacy and reviews from real people is paramount to cut through the clutter and drive real conversion.”

Other findings from the survey include:

• 76% consider online communities influential in product recommendations
• Trust in product reviews shared on retail websites has increased 25% in the past ten years, from 63% in 2013 to 88% in 2023
  .
• Baby/Child is one of the top categories where reviews/recommendations are most influential
  .
• 96% of consumers say they conduct research after they discover a new product for the first time
  .

Methodology:
Research was conducted via an online survey issued to the peer influencer community, Smiley360, by 4,045 U.S. respondents between December 14, 2022 – February 28, 2023.

Need to boost your word-of-mouth advocacy, Ratings & Reviews and user-generated content? TINT’s Community Powered Marketing platform makes it easy to harness your community of fans and consumers to share their brand love with friends and family.

Schedule a demo today.

The post [STUDY] Word-of-Mouth Greater Impact on Purchase Decisions appeared first on TINT.

Thankfully in the midst of so much change, the best solution is a familiar one. Brand advocacy remains the gold standard of marketing strategies for a reason. Mobilizing your biggest fans to go to bat for you and recommend you to their friends and followers has the benefit of trust, relevance, authenticity, and efficiency, making it one of the most effective marketing strategies. 

And at the heart of brand advocacy campaigns is user-generated content, or UGC. After all, seeing is believing. 

For CPG brands in particular, brand advocacy efforts focused on UGC can help breakthrough in crowded categories and organically amplify your messaging to reach mass audiences. It can also personify your brand in new, relevant, and authentic ways to create buzz and elevate consideration from target audiences.  

Below, we’ll highlight how to generate UGC for CPG. But first, let’s talk about why UGC is important for all CPG brands. 

What are the Benefits of Leveraging UGC for CPG Brands?

Increasing reach and brand awareness

Easily one of the biggest benefits of leveraging UGC for CPG brands is the ability to expand your reach. When consumers who rave about your products create shareable content, you can use that content to get the word out about your brand, a new product line, an existing product line that needs some love, or any other aspect of your brand that you want to reach the masses. 

This strategy has nearly limitless potential for scaling, too. As you reach more and more people with shareable UGC, some of these people become fans of your brand and, in turn, will create UGC on their own, and the cycle continues.

Improved trust in your brand

84% of consumers trust recommendations from their peers over all other forms of advertising, such as paid media. 

There’s no type of content that your consumers put more trust in than word-of-mouth. And as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. User-generated images and video bring your brand to life, capturing the interest and imagination of your target consumers. 

UGC’s importance in improving the overall authenticity of your brand can’t be overstated. And its impact is real: According to a recent study by Edelman, consumers said trust in a brand (88%) is even more important than love (81%) in deciding what brands to buy or use.  

Collect valuable insights

UGC for CPG isn’t only about getting the word out about your brand and bringing in new customers. You also get the opportunity to collect valuable insights from your consumers, such as why they love your products. 

These insights can be used to fuel future marketing efforts and product development. 

How an Online Brand Community Helps Generate UGC for CPG Brands

One of the primary draws of an online brand community is how useful it is in all aspects of UGC, from curating the content to measuring brand advocacy.

For CPG brands looking to generate more user content, your online brand community is the best place to start. Here’s how your online brand community helps generate UGC for CPG. 

A ready-made pool of raving advocates

One of the best parts about your online brand community is that you’ve cultivated a group of consumers who are crazy about your brand. Not just the products you provide, but the lifestyle created by your brand and your overall mission. 

These are exactly the kind of people that you want to mobilize to create more content. 

Community platforms make it easier than ever for these brand advocates to share their UGC. For example, the TINT community platform amplifies advocacy by incorporating Single-Click SharingTM technology, giving your advocates a seamless experience for sharing their UGC across all types of platforms, from TikTok to Instagram and Bazaarvoice. 

Simple and effective sampling programs 

Easily the most effective way to generate UGC for consumer packaged goods is with product sampling. By giving your consumers the opportunity to try your products for free, you’re providing value to them in exchange for UGC in the form of testimonials, authentic reviews, and other important content. 

Although product sampling can be done without the help of an online brand community, your community provides several benefits that can help with the effectiveness of your sampling campaigns. 

For starters, sampling campaigns need proper audience targeting. With a community platform, such as TINT, you’ll have ready-made customer profiles that are enriched over time, allowing you to hyper-segment and target the individual needs of each customer with your sampling. 

Once consumers have received their samples, your online brand community is used to generate UGC in real-time as community members post their experience through images, videos, testimonials, and reviews. 

Lastly, many community platforms have robust reporting capabilities. By analyzing sampling data, you will discover ways to optimize and improve your campaigns over time. 

Sampling campaigns powered by an online brand community make generating UGC for CPG easier than ever. 

Providing incentives 

Product samples aren’t the only way to activate brand fans to advocate on your behalf. With an online brand community, you have even more options to incentivize your consumers to take part in UGC campaigns. 

Some of the ways brands incentivize advocates to generate more UGC with a community include:

• Discounts and special offers
• Social recognition (shout-outs, etc.)
• Points and badges
• Exclusive events
• Contests and sweepstakes

For example, let’s look at Drip Drop. With the help of TINT’s community platform, they were able to activate 1,800 community members to share UGC of the product by providing a special $2 off coupon good at key retail websites. In just 8 weeks, the campaign delivered over 5,900 pieces of UGC and increased share of voice by 1450%. 

With a high-value incentive, this campaign resulted in high-quality UGC that delivered results, as the DripDrop Brand Manager shared: “We were thrilled to see not only an abundance of content that drove an increase in online share of voice, but also an increase in sales at our key retail partner.”  

Seamless reporting and analytics

It’s not enough to simply generate endless UGC.  If you want to measure your progress and stay on track with your goals, tracking certain metrics is essential.

Your online brand community can be a one-stop shop for these reports.

Many community platforms allow you to track advocacy and UGC-related metrics such as quantity and type of UGC, impressions, friend and follower engagement, ratings and reviews, and more. 

TINT’s online brand community platform makes it easy to not only capture but track all the UGC your advocates create in one convenient place. You’ll also be able to sort through content to identify high-quality pieces, flag creators of effective UGC, tag and organize UGC for future use, and more.

Conversion tracking is made easier using your online brand community as well. By arming your advocates with a specific link, you can enable tracking on that link and get an accurate representation of conversion metrics.

These analytics will enable you to better understand the impact of the UGC your advocates are creating and can fuel future marketing strategies.

Questions About How to Generate UGC for CPG?

The TINT team are experts in the unique needs of CPG brands, from UGC and review generation to building brand equity and more. Reach out to us. We’re here to help. 

The post How to Generate UGC for CPG with an Online Brand Community appeared first on TINT.

• A brand ambassador program can be a powerful tool for marketers looking to build strong relationships with their consumers and drive growth.
  
• Brand ambassador programs can also yield significant value by helping to increase brand awareness, credibility, and trust.

Let’s explore exactly what an ambassador program is, how to find brand ambassadors, how to run an ambassador marketing program, and the key ingredients of success. 

What is a Brand Ambassador Program? 

• A brand ambassador program is a marketing initiative in which a company partners with a group of targeted and enthusiastic individuals to spread a brand’s message. 

• Brand ambassadors help deliver specific business goals such as increased sales and conversion, brand awareness, promoting a positive brand image, and overall word-of-mouth conversation. 

What is the Difference Between a Brand Ambassador, a Brand Advocate, and a Brand Influencer? 

When it comes to driving social conversation for your brand, there are a lot of buzzwords thrown around by marketers. You might be asking questions like, “Is a brand ambassador the same as a brand advocate?” or “What is the difference between an influencer and an ambassador?” 

While there is always overlap in how each role operates, there are some distinct differences that can help you determine which one aligns best with your brand needs. Let’s walk through the difference between each group. 

Brand Ambassador

A brand ambassador is a dedicated spokesperson who embodies your brand’s values and who has credibility and trust among particular social circles.

• Brand ambassadors have a clear partnership or formal commitment to represent your brand for a set period of time.
  
• Sometimes there is a traditional payment arrangement, but monetary compensation is not always a necessity.
  
• Many brand ambassadors receive free products or exclusive product experiences as compensation for their participation.
  
• A brand ambassador is typically someone who is heavily involved in your brand’s industry or a particular lifestyle.

Brand Advocate

Brand advocates are consumers who have a strong positive connection with your brand and are ready and willing to sing your praises to their friends, followers, subscribers, and other social audiences.

• Brand advocacy campaigns are often deployed by companies to mobilize brand advocates at scale and spark them to create user-generated content (UGC), write product reviews, and share branded content. 
• Brand advocates are also an excellent resource for gathering product feedback, gaining consumer insights, and crowdsourcing new ideas.
  
• Brand advocates are often rewarded with free products, special perks, or fun gamified rewards like badges and points.
  
• Brand advocates can also recruit other brand advocates and boost loyalty, purchase frequency, and overall brand equity.  

Brand Influencer 

Influencers are people with a substantial social reputation online and have an established following that mirrors your target audience. Influencers can range from a few thousand followers to millions of followers. 

• Similar to brand ambassadors, there is typically a formal partnership created where each party understands what is expected of them.
  
• Influencers will create different kinds of content for your brand – a video review, a dedicated blog post, a creative expression of an online trend, or just engaging visual content featuring your brand.
  
• Influencers differ from brand ambassadors in that influencer programs are often viewed as campaign-based partnerships, while brand ambassador programs are seen as relationship-based partnerships.
  
• Ambassadors are also far more knowledgeable about your product than influencers will be, and influencers will often partner with many different brands. 

What Do Brand Ambassadors Receive in Return for Their Participation?

Brand ambassadors are incentivized for their participation in a number of ways, and there isn’t necessarily a “correct” way to go about it. It’s based on your specific organizational goals and internal processes. 

• Some brands will enter a financial contract with their brand ambassadors and will pay them money for their efforts. Others might design a structured commission or affiliate marketing arrangement so the ambassador will earn money for every sale they help facilitate. 
• Another way ambassadors receive value is through exclusive experiences. This can include things like accessing new products before anyone else, trying products for free, and receiving brand swag or brand-related gear. They can also receive special discounts, exclusive giveaways, and VIP sneak peeks. 

Don’t underestimate the power of public recognition – having their voice heard is a huge incentive for many ambassadors. This can include:

• Having their content featured by the brand
• Conducting a special interview with the ambassador
• Asking your ambassadors to help with a design idea or product feature that can then be showcased to the public. 

How Do You Find Brand Ambassadors?

So you’re sold on doing a brand ambassador program. The next question is always, “How do I find brand ambassadors?” Here are three ways that we’ll go into next: 

• Look for ambassadors among your existing customer set 
• Seek out authority voices in related communities 
• Enlist your employees to find and recruit ambassadors

Look for Ambassadors Among Your Existing Customer Set 

Some of your best ambassadors are hiding in plain sight, and all you need to do is give them the opportunity to step forward. Look within your own customer database or social media following to identify those with the greatest potential.

Example in Action: Pura Vida 

• Pura Vida, a company that sells hand-crafted jewelry, invites their existing customer base to apply for their brand ambassador program, the Pura Vida Crew, from its brand website. 
• The brand then qualifies each applicant to make sure they fit specific needs. Pura Vida is most concerned with finding those who are genuinely passionate about the brand’s mission and who are highly trusted among their peer groups.

Seek Out Authority Voices in Related Communities 

Brand ambassadors can be people with certain expertise that aligns with your brand’s product or overall lifestyle, and they can often be found in already-established online and offline communities. 

These prospective brand ambassadors are usually existing customers who believe in your brand but also are trusted voices in specific social circles.

Example in Action: Veggies Made Great

• Frozen food brand, Veggies Made Great, is on a mission to offer healthy, delicious food choices for the whole family. As part of their strategy to drive awareness and credibility, they’ve cultivated relationships with a network of dieticians and nutritionists.
• They tap into this network by inviting them to be ambassadors in their online brand community, the “VegHeads.” Nutrition experts are then activated to share their praises of Veggie Made Great products. 
• Veggies Made Great ambassadors also write articles, do Q&A sessions with consumers, and give feedback on new products by sampling. 

Enlist Your Employees to Find and Recruit Ambassadors

Your internal team of employees is often an overlooked asset that has huge potential. There are usually many highly connected and vocal employees sitting at the desk next door. 

• Employees are incredibly knowledgeable about your product or service, and it’s safe to assume that if they are working at your company, they believe in what you’re selling. 
• A large part of utilizing employees as brand ambassadors is training and arming employees with the right messaging, but also allowing for authenticity and their unique voice.

Example in Action: Adobe

• Adobe noticed that their employees who shared on social media were generating more sales for the company than their own marketing efforts. They created an employee strategy to educate employees about becoming a social media brand ambassador. 
• In exchange for their participation, employees get rewards and incentives. The marketing team also seeks out high-quality employee content to promote on brand-owned channels. 

When asked about the best impacts of its employee ambassador program, Head of Employee Advocacy at Adobe is quoted saying, “It’s the fact that it humanizes the brand and helps us achieve our various campaign goals around social volume, engagement, share of voice, impact in the community, as well as getting out the Adobe story beyond just the corporate jargon. In addition, and maybe even more importantly, it is helping us facilitate a global workplace community that unifies us as a company and connects us as people.”

How Do Brand Ambassador Programs Work? 

A brand ambassador program typically works through these steps: 

1. Identify and mobilize brand ambassadors: Create a digital gathering place for brand ambassadors. Online brand communities are excellent “homes” for your brand ambassador programs to foster emotional connection and long-term participation.  

2. Outline specific tasks and activities: Be clear and transparent with what you are asking your brand ambassadors to do. This could be a combination of online activities (visual content, product reviews, video demos) or offline activities (local events and groups, in-store demonstrations, or tradeshow participation).

There should be a clear understanding between both parties that always emphasizes how the ambassador will benefit from participating.

Be clear with ambassadors about your company goals. Everyone works better when there is a common task – whether that’s driving more brand awareness, boosting presence on a specific social media site, or generating product reviews and sales on ecommerce channels.

3. Provide training, education, and necessary tools: Make sure your brand ambassadors are armed with helpful information and the latest features and are knowledgeable enough to answer frequently asked questions. While you may want your ambassador to be 100% “on brand” all the time, it’s important to give them room for authentic expression.

Additionally, ambassadors do some of their best work when they come bearing gifts. Equip your brand ambassadors with product samples, discount codes, sweepstake entries, and more to boost their credibility among consumers and drive conversion. 

4. Relationship-building and ongoing ambassador engagement: Making your brand ambassadors feel special and valued is not an optional part of a brand ambassador strategy. Be sure to have a thought-out plan in place to foster a relationship. This could be anything from featuring their content on brand channels, sending personal letters from company executives, inviting them to exclusive events, or even a trip to company headquarters. 

5. Deliver rewards and incentives for participation: Many brand ambassador programs will have defined rewards or compensation for participating. This could be brand swag, free products, gift cards, or monetary payment. Make sure to deliver on promises you’ve made to brand ambassadors in a timely manner. This will build trust and boost their engagement in the program. 

6. Measure and optimize ambassador impact: Tracking and measuring a brand ambassador program is similar to measuring a brand advocacy strategy. It includes measuring both the participation of the ambassadors as well as their ability to acquire new consumers.

Generally, ambassador programs can be measured by the amount of activity they generate, the number of people reached by an ambassador, and the number of conversions yielded. There is also enormous value in measuring the quality of content generated and repurposed, the insights gathered from feedback, and the overall brand-positive conversation online. 

What Makes a Great Brand Ambassador Program?

A great brand ambassador program will have three key elements: 

• Authenticity and genuine self-expression 
• Clear and simple expectations 
• Dedicated management and relationship-building 

Authenticity and Genuine Self-expression 

One of the biggest benefits of a brand ambassador program is that brand ambassadors will promote your products and services without being too “salesy” about it. They help humanize your brand and make brand values come to life. 

A brand ambassador cannot be a brand robot. You must train and educate your brand ambassadors, but make sure to leave plenty of room for creative self-expression.

Example in Action: Gymshark

• Fitness brand, Gymshark, has a wildly successful brand ambassador program.
  
• They enlist a variety of fitness video influencers and created a close network of long-term ambassadors.
  
• Some ambassadors even have collaborations to create their own Gymshark lines. 

Authenticity is a big focus for the brand. As Gymshark’s Head of PR explained to Fashion Monitor: “It’s all about being authentic. The vast majority of Gymshark ambassadors were once fans and consumers of the brand. Who better to represent the brand than those who actually love Gymshark? It’s all about the vision and what they stand for. We are more interested in how [potential ambassadors] engage their followers rather than how many they have.”

Clear and Simple Expectations 

Well-run brand ambassador programs leave little room for confusion. While being a brand ambassador does require effort, it shouldn’t require a headache. Make your expectations clear from the beginning and make them easy to complete.

Example in Action: Xbox

• Gaming platform, Xbox, is clear about its goals of providing an inclusive, community-driven experience and how its brand ambassadors can help further those objectives. 
• Xbox ambassadors are tasked with connecting and assisting other gamers and keeping the community welcoming and safe.
• Ambassadors gain points for completing certain activities like making friends with other members, sending encouraging messages, or starting conversations about Xbox games. 
• As they accumulate more points, they can “level up” their ambassador status and put their points towards exclusive swag or earn a chance to be featured. 

Dedicated Management and Personalized Relationship Building 

A successful ambassador program will involve planned steps to make your ambassadors feel special and valued for their contributions. This goes beyond compensation or just saying “thanks!” It’s about getting to know the ambassadors on an individual level and delivering tailored and personalized engagement opportunities. 

Online brand communities are an excellent place to collect zero party data to fuel personalized experiences. Unlike first party or third party data, zero party data is information that is proactively shared with a brand and is primarily related to personal preferences, emotional leanings, lifestyle behaviors, and more. 

Using this data, brands can deliver a personalized ambassador experience for each participant. This creates a positive feedback loop between the data they share, the activities they do, and the value they get in return.

Example in Action: Clio Snacks

• Fast-growing frozen yogurt company, Clio Snacks, knew they had a passionate set of fans. Like many brands, they turned to Facebook and Instagram, creating and engaging with a limited group of targeted consumers in private groups. They asked their followers to complete challenges, from taking “shelfies” of the product in-store to posting reviews. 
• The Clio team tracked the activities in Excel and rewarded their ambassadors with swag on a monthly basis. The problem was 100 ambassadors quickly overwhelmed their team. In an effort to streamline their ambassador strategy and cultivate long-term relationships, they created an online brand community, The Clio Cravings Club.

In an episode of the Community Powered Marketing podcast, CMO Rachel Moore shared her thoughts on designing a quality ambassador program. “A lot of ambassador programs out there are really based on purchase behavior. If you buy, you get a discount, or if you buy, you get swag. And for us, we felt like that is a piece of the pie.  We do have a dotcom. We do sell products on our website. But what was more important to us was sharing and learning, and using our ambassadors not only as kind of an internal insight group, but also as a megaphone for the brand to share with our friends and family.”

How Can TINT Help With Your Brand Ambassador Program? 

Online brand communities are a prime channel for connecting ambassadors together. This helps ambassadors feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves while also creating efficiencies and streamlining efforts for marketing teams. It’s truly a win-win scenario. 

TINT’s ambassador marketing platform empowers you to mobilize your brand ambassadors in a dedicated branded destination and cultivate lasting relationships. With more than 30+ engagement activities available to brands, ambassadors can be assigned a wealth of activities to participate in – from writing product reviews, creating user-generated photos and videos, completing surveys and polls, participating in discussions, amplifying ecommerce and in-store efforts, and much more.

Using TINT, brands can drive new customer acquisition significantly, secure emotional and long-term brand loyalty, and “future proof” with agile insights and ongoing data collection. 

The post What is a Brand Ambassador Program? – Guide & Examples appeared first on TINT.

Snapple Straight Up Tea Assures Product Launch Success

Whenever a brand launches a new product, there’s always risk involved. It’s estimated that 70-80% of new grocery store products will fail. Snapple wanted to ensure it would beat the odds when they launched their new product, Snapple Straight Up Tea. They needed to make sure that their new product was fresh in the minds of consumers everywhere, and to support sell-through at key retailers like Target. So Snapple turned to social advocacy to amplify retail promotions and boost conversions. They used targeted peer influencers to drive in-store awareness and conversion of a mobile app coupon specifically for their brand new product. With their own guerilla marketing team of 1,200 influential Target shoppers generating buzz and excitement, Snapple was able to stand out on the shelf in a highly competitive retailer.  As a result of its social advocacy campaign, Snapple increased its online share of voice by 25% and achieved a coupon redemption rate double the industry standard.  Read the case study here!

Hero Cosmetics Creates Pipeline of Ratings & Reviews

Driving reviews is one of the most important benefits of brand advocacy, especially when you consider that 93% of consumers are influenced by a product’s online reviews.  Hero Cosmetics understands this, and with their online brand community, the Hero Skin Squad, they were able to mobilize consumer engagement efforts to drive retail reviews. Through a combination of branded content and targeted sampling efforts, they are able to generate consistent and authentic reviews.  It all started with the creation of their online community, a “home base” where the brand’s relationship with members are nurtured through engaging, interactive brand experiences such as social sampling, promo offers, surveys, and more. This ready-made pool of advocates can be called on to deliver authentic ratings and reviews to power e-commerce and retail success.  Hero Cosmetic’s brand advocacy campaign drove over 400 authentic reviews in just the first 100 days, as well as a 19% increase in Net Promoter Score.  Read the case study here!

Adidas Builds Relationships To Build Referrals

Adidas is up front about the impact that brand advocacy has on its business.  Their 2016 Annual Report highlighted its benefits:   “We firmly believe that advocacy will create sustained growth for our brands, underpinned by the fact that brand advocates, on average, buy more than non-advocates. In addition, a large part of our consumers rely on referrals from friends or family when making purchasing decisions.” Adidas cultivates this advocacy by making consumers feel special and giving them buzz-worthy content to share. The Adidas vision for brand advocacy is reflected in their online community—The adiClub. The club rewards loyal customers with exclusive access to special products, experiences, and services. The program doesn’t just reward Members for purchases: Advocates receive rewards for engaging with the brand by attending events, sharing referrals, and uploading user-generated content, among other things.  Adidas has also launched the Creator’s Club Week, a digital festival to show off the latest innovations, freshest designs, and sustainable products to the world. Participants have access to the brand’s largest drop of limited edition shoes, as well as raffles for unique creations.

Tesla Incentivizes Word of Mouth Referrals

How did Tesla reach the pinnacle of brand awareness despite having zero advertising budget?  The answer: Brand advocates.  Tesla’s success doesn’t solely revolve around its mission-driven and dynamic CEO. The company understands the importance of word-of-mouth marketing and how consumers trust the word of friends, co-workers, and family members over the brand itself.  So Tesla developed a tailored referral program that incentivized its customers to become active advocates. Owners could share referral links that awarded them and the new buyer with prizes upon purchase, including free Roadsters for super-referrers.  Tesla also connects with its community through customer forums and an owners club where they make consumers feel valued. All of this has helped turn their customers into raving advocates. 

Questions About Brand Advocacy Campaigns?

The TINT platform is all about providing brands with the tools they need to run their own brand advocacy campaigns. Reach out to us with your questions—we would love to help. 

Interested in more?

Sign up for a demo today.

The post 4 Brand Advocacy Campaigns That Got it Right appeared first on TINT.

But how do you define and measure “success” in largely organic, multi-objective, multi-channel, qualitative campaigns?

This is a critical question for marketers who navigate by metrics, measuring their progress, mapping KPIs against campaign goals, and course-correcting as required. How do you prove ROI if you don’t have the right metrics? 

As a platform that powers hundreds of brands to activate millions of consumers in brand advocacy, we know how to calculate the value and impact of programs. We’ll cover how you can measure brand advocacy below. But first, let’s talk about some of the other reasons it’s important. 

Why is it Important to Measure Brand Advocacy?

Beyond enabling you to prove the ROI of your efforts, measuring brand advocacy empowers you to know what kind of brand advocate generates the most conversions and sales. When you understand this, you can double down on what’s working best for your brand. The same goes for figuring out which channels are most effective, and what type of user-generated content most resonates with friends and followers. 

These insights allow you to fuel your future brand advocacy campaigns and find success. 

What Metrics are Important to Track? 

There is no one-size-fits-all measurement for Brand Advocacy because there are multiple ways that your consumers will be having a positive impact on your brand.

So we’ve come up with six crucial metrics that track the WOM, social proof, and influence of your advocates. 

Quantity of posts and channels

One of the primary goals for brand advocacy campaigns is the creation of UGC—user-generated content. 

It’s quite simple: More UGC means more chances of increasing your overall reach. This means that it’s important to track how many new pieces of UGC are created by your brand advocacy efforts. 

Tracking where advocates are posting and the types of posts is important as well. This data can fuel future marketing strategies and help you understand which platforms work best. 

Consumer-generated impressions

In addition to measuring the creation of content, you need to measure how many people it is reaching.  Your consumer-generated impressions measure how many people see your advocates’ content. Each person that consumes some of the UGC created by your advocates is a potential new consumer, and may even become a raving brand advocate.

Friend and follower engagement

Beyond impressions, you’ll want to measure how your audience engages with this content. By engagement, we mean likes, shares, clicks, and comments. 

Engagement levels can help you determine the quality of the content. If one piece of UGC is being shared on a viral level, you might have stumbled across a recipe for success for future content.

Ratings and reviews

Effective brand advocacy campaigns can be used to drive more authentic review generation, such as with sampling campaigns.  Measuring the creation of authentic reviews is important since they have such a substantial impact on purchase decision-making and consumer acquisition. 

Share of voice

Share of voice involves social listening and can help you track your brand advocacy when compared to your competitors. Some community platforms track this using a third party. For example, the TINT Community Platform tracks share of voice using Salesforce Social Studio. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net promoter score is a measurement of both customer loyalty and satisfaction. It’s a score that measures how likely your customers are to recommend your product or service to their friends, family, and peers. The higher your score, the more likely you are to have raving advocates spreading the word about your brand. 

NPS is one of the most widely known and accepted metrics for measuring overall brand advocacy. 

If you want to raise your NPS, an online brand community is one of the best ways to do it. It’s a place to cultivate consumers to become advocates and boost your score. On average, our clients see a 48% lift in Net Promoter Score within the first 100 days of launching their new community.

Speaking of community…

How an Online Brand Community can Help Measure Brand Advocacy

We previously shared why an online brand community is one of the best tools for managing brand advocacy marketing efforts. So it should be no surprise that it is also one of the best ways to measure your campaigns as well, providing you with a single tool to accurately track brand advocacy, double down on what’s working, and eliminate what isn’t. 

When choosing a community platform, you need to take ease of use into consideration. TINT, for example, has a client success team ready to set you up for success—with brand advocacy campaigns and other acquisition and loyalty-building efforts as well. 

Communities allow you to empower brand advocates to use brand-supplied social sharing tools. When you ask brand advocates to share on their own, you’re relying on every advocate to remember to actually report back. When advocates use tools powered by your brand community, you skip the guesswork and get a clearer picture of your sharing statistics. TINT’s Single-Click Sharing tool is a great example of this—it allows advocates to post reviews and share to social channels without ever leaving the platform. 

You’ll also be able to track a sizable portion of your user-generated content in one convenient location. UGC can be shared across a wide variety of channels, so the ability to monitor connected channels from your community increases overall efficiency.

Conversion tracking is made easier using your online brand community, as well. By arming your advocates with a specific link, you can enable tracking on that link and get an accurate representation of conversion metrics.

Lastly, your community can act as your own sourcing engine for shared content. For example, you can identify high-quality content and flag the creator of the content to focus on activating them again in the future. 

Similarly, you can use your community to tag and organize content to repurpose in advertising or other brand content. 

When figuring out how to measure brand advocacy, your online brand community is one of the most valuable resources at your disposal. Not only does it allow you to more accurately measure campaigns, but it also helps increase efficiency in the process.

Questions About How to Measure Brand Advocacy?

The TINT team is always here to answer your brand advocacy questions. Reach out to us—we’re happy to help.

Interested in more?

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The post How to Measure Brand Advocacy appeared first on TINT.

But as with most things of value, it takes work. Creating the product or service and customer experience that produces brand fans is only the first step. Inspiring them to advocate for your brand, and doing it at scale, is where Brand Advocacy Marketing comes in. 

Thankfully there are many strategies to increase brand advocacy, and we’ll get to them later in this piece. First, we’ll cover what it is and why it is so important. For seasoned marketers and those ready to get started now, scroll down for the tactics.

What is Brand Advocacy, and Why is it Important to Your Brand?

Brand Advocacy is the proactive promotion of a brand by individuals. It’s the actions of fans that love your brand enough to spread their excitement and passion to others. Once you’ve cultivated genuine connections by showing your consumers you care about them, they will go out of their way to generate positive word-of-mouth (WOM) to support your brand across a wide variety of channels: 

• Online reviews
• Social media
• Brand communities
• Blogs
• UGC (User-generated content)
• Youtube
• Face-to-face

Brand advocacy isn’t only limited to your most loyal consumers either. Employees, company partners, potential vendors, and even influencers can all become brand advocates. 

So, what makes brand advocacy so important for your brand?

For starters, brand advocacy is considered the most trusted and most credible form of advertising. Customers trust their peers above all else.

Let’s look at paid media, for example. Word-of-mouth marketing by brand advocates is up to 5 times more effective than paid media campaigns. When potential customers hear about your brand from your advocates, they’re far more likely to make a purchase (and possibly become a brand advocate themselves!)

Brand advocacy also personifies your brand. Instead of interacting with a faceless company, customers have the opportunity to engage with advocates and hear personal and meaningful stories that they may be able to better relate to. 

There’s also the overwhelmingly positive return on investment. While some investment to implement a brand advocacy campaign may be required, they can produce a tremendous amount of ROI since brand advocates are not paid to champion your brand. Plus their passion often leads them to be active promoters for the long haul.  

How to Find Brand Advocates

We know this all sounds great. But to have brand advocacy, you first need brand advocates. 

So we gathered some tips on identifying and cultivating consumers to evangelize for your brand.  

1. Seek out organic brand advocates in online channels

You already have consumers that are excited about your products or services. Now you just have to find them. 

Searching social media platforms, discussion boards, and forums are a great place to start. This is where you can find advocates that are already getting your name out there and painting your brand in a positive light. 

Pro Tip: Use social listening to monitor for mentions of your brand and identify potential advocates.

2. Identify existing advocates in your consumer database

Your existing consumers are another great place to start finding brand advocates.

Look for repeat purchasers, those who’ve left glowing reviews on your site, or those who reach out via email or social channels to engage with your brand. 

If you have an online brand community, you can use it to easily gauge who your most active members and consumers are. From there, it’s only a matter of mobilizing them and nurturing them to become brand advocates. 

Pro Tip: Use NPS surveys to identify your brand advocates and encourage them to spread the word about your brand.

3. Nurture consumers to become advocates

Speaking of nurturing, this is a great way to turn happy customers into brand advocates. 

It all starts with providing a superior customer experience. For consumers today, that means showing them that you know them through personalization at every touchpoint, staying connected to them between purchases, and engaging them in an active two-way dialogue. If you want to cultivate consumers into advocates who are willing to promote your brand to the masses, you need to provide an experience worth raving about. 

Providing incentives is a great way to mobilize your brand advocates quickly. Even though they love your brand, some additional motivation can’t hurt to give them an extra push to spread the word. 

There are many options that will not only reward your advocates but will build their connection to your brand, including giving them behind the scenes or first access to news and updates, sharing their UGC and recognizing them on your site and social channels, or inviting them to join a VIP council or become an official brand ambassador. 

Pro Tip: Everyone likes to feel recognized. Look for people already promoting your brand and send them something special as a thank you. You’ll thrill your advocate and give them more good news to spread.

How to Scale Brand Advocacy For Business Success

Brand advocacy sounds like an amazing investment. After all, who wouldn’t want people spreading the good word about their brand? 

However, there can be some hurdles for marketers in scaling a brand advocacy program. It takes an investment in time and resources to cultivate and activate advocates. 

It can be tempting to go with a paid influencer campaign that can be more quickly initiated and provide you with more control over the content, even though there is less trust in the content and more limits in regards to the scope of their advocacy.

There’s also the measurement factor. Without certain tools, like an online brand community, it can be hard to measure overall results and ensure that you’re getting to where you want to be. 

One approach to brand advocacy marketing is to run single advocacy campaigns, like sending an email to your consumers post-purchase with an offer of free samples in exchange for a product review. 

While this can be effective, one-off campaigns require consistent monitoring and management. We all know most marketing teams are short-staffed, so scaling your ability to reach consumers while minimizing the added work for your team is a top priority.

Thankfully there are better options that make it easy to nurture and scale your consumer’s WOM. 

With a platform such as an online brand community, you can give potential brand advocates the opportunity to experience your brand in a way that is meaningful to them outside of their purchase, while also giving them a way to easily share that experience with others. 

Mobilizing brand advocates with an online brand community

Online communities make scaling your consumer outreach activities easy. They give you a platform to assemble all of your die-hard, loyal customers and mobilize them to become brand advocates. 

It’s possible to do some of this with channels you may already employ, such as a Facebook group. However, there are a number of benefits that differentiate a social media community from a true online brand community platform. An online brand community can give you access to features that you’ll want for scaling your brand advocacy strategy, such as activities and discussions to build your consumer relationships, reward systems to provide incentives, and ownership of your zero-party data, proving value for so much more than brand advocacy campaigns alone.

Delivering personalized experiences and making it easy to share

Personalization is key when nurturing community members to become advocates. 

It’s important to look for a platform that makes it easy to target and personalize offers and experiences. Let’s say you want to generate word-of-mouth and reviews for a product targeting newer parents—you wouldn’t want to send it to someone with older children or no children at all. Delivering these personalized experiences helps create excitement and passion for a brand that sparks meaningful advocacy.

Your platform should also make it easy to help advocates get the word out. For example, TINT’s Single-click Sharing tool allows advocates to seamlessly share UGC, recommendations, and reviews from right within the platform.

Prompting friends and followers to act and convert

Scaling your brand advocacy campaigns means harnessing the power of your advocates to share offers from your brand with their network. 

As an example, TINT ran a campaign for a health & beauty aids (HBA) brand where members were provided with a link to share with friends and followers to opt-in for a free sample. We initially activated just 4,800 community members to participate in the campaign, and over 150,000 samples were redeemed using the link, demonstrating the power of advocates to amplify messaging. 

Product trial campaigns like this one can also help create brand new advocates for your brand, continuing the cycle. 

Building Brand Advocacy is a Crucial Step For Brands Looking to Grow 

The importance of having advocates spreading the good word about your brand can’t be overstated. 

From building authenticity to personalizing your brand on a whole new level, building brand advocacy is a marketing channel that provides tremendous value.

Our tips can help you get the most out of your brand advocacy campaigns and ensure that you’re getting the maximum ROI possible.

 Your audience is waiting. 

Questions about How to Build Brand Advocacy?

If you have questions about how to build brand advocacy or how the TINT community platform can help, reach out to us. We’re here to help.

Interested in more?

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What is brand advocacy? 

Simply put, brand advocacy is a fancy term for good ol word-of-mouth. When you have a cohort of satisfied consumers advocating for other consumers to buy your product or service, you’ve got brand advocacy. These actions then influence brand awareness, brand reputation and ultimately, drive purchase decisions.  

Why is brand advocacy important? 

Make no mistake, a brand absolutely positively cannot succeed without brand advocacy. It is vital to a business that consumers recommend, talk about, refer, and share your brand with other people. 

The biggest benefit of brand advocacy is driving authentic content for your brand. Today’s consumers have more ways to learn about products and services anywhere at any time and they demand more authentic and relatable content to help guide purchase decisions. Research shows that word-of-mouth is behind 20-50% of all new purchases. There’s a reason why many people consider brand advocacy the holy grail of marketing. 

And while many brands already know this, oftentimes brand advocacy is viewed as simply the byproduct of producing a quality product or service or executing a good marketing campaign. While that is certainly true in many cases, many marketers miss that brand advocacy doesn’t have to be just an organic aftereffect. You can proactively organize, scale and measure an advocacy marketing strategy that can skyrocket customer acquisition, secure loyalty from existing customers, and help you dominate your marketing positioning over competitors. 

How do you build brand advocacy? 

The steps involved in building brand advocacy are to focus on mobilizing brand advocates (i.e consumers who are eager to share about your brand), activating them in an engaging way, and optimizing the strategy to encourage the highest levels of conversion. 

Step 1 – Mobilize Brand Advocates 

One of the great things about brand advocates or brand ambassadors is that they love to identify themselves if given the opportunity. Your job as a marketer is to create as many opportunities as possible for brand advocates to step forward. Mobilizing brand advocates can be done through either short-term campaigns or long-term relationship-building. 

Short-Term Advocacy Activation vs. Long-Term Advocacy Building 

One of the key times to spark short-term advocacy is directly after purchasing and experiencing your brand. This is especially relevant for direct-to-consumer brands and those whose revenue is driven through eCommerce channels. Delivering brand advocacy call-to-actions on thank you pages, email confirmations, and delivery updates is an easy way to foster short-term advocacy. 

Other short-term advocacy strategies can include things like referral promotions or sweepstakes for sharing reviews. Short-term brand advocacy can also be generated through compelling social media activity and let’s not forget the elusive viral video. While these short-term strategies are great, they are typically one-off campaigns that build highly transactional engagement. 

Long-term advocacy is about fostering a relationship with brand advocates where they feel valued and heard. This is hard to achieve through an email database or loyalty program, which is why many brands are turning to online brand communities. 

An online brand community offers an engaging destination to mobilize brand advocates and can elevate their connection to your brand overall. In a study of brands who use TINT to power their online brand community, Net Promoter Scores increase by 63% among advocates in the community. If you’re thinking about starting a brand community, here’s our guide on knowing if you’re ready. 

Step 2 – Activating Brand Advocates in an Engaging Way 

If you talk to any economist, they’ll tell you incentives rule all. And while brand advocates love your brand, they do still appreciate some motivation to grab the microphone and start singing your praises. 

Incentives are often viewed as the material rewards obtained for behaving in a certain way, but incentives can also be more intrinsic, such as social incentives (gaining a certain kind of reputation) and moral incentives (gains in our conscience from doing the right thing) or fulfilling a need for self-expression or curiosity. The key to getting it right with brand advocates is finding out what motivates individual consumers and delivering tailored communication that grabs their attention. 

Each consumer has unique interests, values and is experiencing different life stages. Personalization is a core foundational element in building a strong brand advocacy strategy. If you can find the match between your brand objectives and your consumer’s values, brand advocates are more motivated than ever. 

Do you have a cohort of brand advocates with a passion for photography? Set up a photo challenge and ask them to show off their talents. Do you have brand advocates who enjoy being involved in local events? Create a sample and review products campaign for them to introduce your brand at their next community get-together. Do you have brand advocates who value eco-friendly business practices? Inform them of your latest sustainable innovations to share with their online networks. 

Step 3 –  Optimize Strategy and Maximize Results 

Like any good marketing strategy, it’s important to be agile. Brand advocacy can involve a lot of testing and learning to see what works and what doesn’t. When measuring your brand advocacy efforts, here are three things to keep in mind. 

Participation from brand advocates

Brand advocates like to talk about your brand so when they don’t jump on the chance to do it, there’s likely something missing. Is your incentive engaging enough and is it a good mixture between material rewards and values-based recognition? Is what you’re asking of them clear and easy to complete? Are you tailoring your campaign based on your advocate’s preferences? Have you taken steps to make sure your brand advocate feels valued and heard? Like any relationship, marketers should make sure they are maintaining a good balance.

Quality of user-generated content 

Not every brand advocate is going to be an Instagram or TikTok star, but that doesn’t mean their recommendations won’t drive immediate action from friends. User-generated content works because it is trusted and authentic. Encourage your brand advocates to share personal stories in their content and how your brand positively impacted their lives. Showcase UGC from other brand advocates to help spur inspiration. 

Conversion from friends, followers, and social circles 

Word-of-mouth is one of the most impactful forms of advertising. With social media and ecommerce, it is easy to arm brand advocates with digital codes, coupons, sweepstakes or digital experiences to drive engagement from their audiences. This also helps brand advocates feel like they are the “hero” of their social group. 

Examples of Great Brand Advocacy 

Veggies Made Great 

Veggies Made Great, a fast-growing frozen food brand activates its community of advocates (aka VegHeads) to drive awareness and conversion at specific retailers. The brand identified advocates who are frequent shoppers and who also love to share deals with friends. Armed with coupons, brand advocates participated in a Plant-A-Coupon campaign where they visited their local specified retail location and “planted” coupons directly on Veggies Made Great product. The brand saw its coupon redemption rate skyrocket 30% above average.  

Adidas Creators Club

Adidas is upfront about the impact brand advocacy has on its business. The brand’s leadership has said “We firmly believe that advocacy will create sustained growth for our brands, underpinned by the fact that brand advocates on average buy more than non-advocates. In addition, a large part of our consumers rely on referrals by friends or family when making purchasing decisions.” Their Creators Club aims to reward consumers with exclusive access to the best products, experiences, and services. They’ve also launched things like a digital festival with its Creators Club Week to show off the latest innovations, freshest designs, and sustainable products to the world.

Grubhub Tastemaker’s Community 

Grubhub recognized that word-of-mouth promotion is a powerful tool for driving conversions and strengthening their brand. This was the inspiration for creating their “Tastemakers” communities: Online brand communities for general diners and for college campuses that have generated thousands of brand engagements and authentic user-generated content. With their new communities, Grubhub has been actively encouraging members to participate in campaigns that spark social sharing. This could be anything from simply posting and sharing photos on Instagram to hosting a full virtual dinner party with friends.

Brand Advocacy is a crucial element of any growth strategy

For any brand to grow, it must have the support of consumers – those who can advocate for your brand in ways that your brand cannot do itself. With an effective brand advocacy strategy, your brand will witness growth at scale. 

Questions About Building Brand Advocacy?

At TINT, we can help answer your questions about building brand advocacy and how our consumer advocacy platform can help build and inspire it. Reach out to us here

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Veggies Made Great, the leader in unique veggie-rich foods, was selected for its robust engagement and advocacy efforts which focus on its Veggies Made Great Community, built on the Vesta Communities platform.

“We are honored to have been recognized by Loyalty360 with a Customer Engagement & Advocacy Award,” said Christine Luongo, Senior Brand Manager at Veggies Made Great. “We love working with Vesta to build a community where we can interact directly with our consumers to get valuable insight as well as reward consumer loyalty.”

The Loyalty360 Awards recognize brands that build more robust and deeper loyalty with their customers in a proactive, meaningful, and measurable way.

“We congratulate the team at Veggies Made Great for the well-deserved recognition of their creative and tireless efforts to establish and cultivate authentic and meaningful relationships with their passionate ‘Veg Head’ consumers,” said Vesta CEO Susan Frech. “We are proud that our Vesta Communities platform has enabled Veggies Made Great to create an engaging and scalable online Community where their customers feel appreciated and understood, and are naturally inspired to advocate for the brand.”

According to Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty360, this year’s awards were the most competitive yet, showcasing brands committed to building strong and long-lasting customer relationships. “For our 2020 Loyalty360 Awards, we are amazed at not only the quantity but the quality of submissions we received this year,” said Johnson. “We are thrilled to recognize the Veggies Made Great team for their amazing work in the Customer Engagement & Advocacy category.”

To watch the Loyalty360 Awards ceremony on-demand, the recording is now available here on Loyalty360’s YouTube page.

To learn more about driving best in class customer engagement and advocacy, we hope you’ll drop us a line or contact us.

Interested in more?

Discover how Veggies Made Great revolutionized their brand with their online community.

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By Susan Frech, CEO and Co-Founder

On a very basic level, the definition of being loyal to a brand means you repeat the purchase of a product or service rather than taking your business elsewhere. Marketers are often focused squarely on the financial aspect of being loyal. They regularly design new ways to solicit the next purchase, to stay top-of-mind through targeted advertising or to upsell other products or services in the brand portfolio, with offers of points or discounts as an enticement.

However, many marketers are neglecting the relationship a brand builds with its audience in between purchases – the emotional part of being loyal to a brand. Emotional loyalty transcends transactional behavior, tapping into underlying motivations and deep-held beliefs. Research has found that on a lifetime value basis, emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as even highly satisfied customers. So while many marketers are busy gathering mounds of data and analyzing activity across various systems like brick-and-mortar stores, e-commerce, loyalty programs, and third-party channels – all in the name of improving satisfaction – they are missing the opportunity to obtain the real competitive differentiator.

Emotionally-connected consumers buy more products and services, visit more often, exhibit less price sensitivity, pay more attention to content, follow advice, and recommend the brand to others. In another study, it was found that 70% of consumers with a high emotional engagement spend up to twice as much with those brands as consumers with low emotional engagement. In fact, they found that retailers could see a 5% boost to annual revenues by driving emotional engagement with consumers. Marketers who deploy emotional loyalty strategies and prioritize the customer experience will find it drives meaningful financial outcomes.

I know what you may be thinking. How can I create emotional connections when I can barely get a consumer to open an email? People are constantly bombarded with content vying for their attention. When you finally break through the clutter and get a consumer’s eyes or ears, how can you not seize the opportunity to ask for the sale?

The truth is emotional connections are just as critical to maintaining market share as traditional loyalty strategies designed to encourage repeat purchase. For brands to have long-term staying power, marketers must embrace a dedicated strategy for this “in-between place.”

Make Your Website a Personalized Engagement Destination Fueled by Zero-party Data

In the past decade, brand websites have evolved from being information-gathering hotspots to elegant digital productions that host a variety of functions like e-commerce, video-sharing and social integration. However, this central digital asset is often stuck in broadcast mode, which leads to flat, uninspiring interactions that lose a consumer’s attention. In order to deliver engagement that speaks to emotional needs, brands must first understand what those needs are. This is why a zero-party data strategy is critical throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Marketers are becoming increasingly wary of using first and third-party data as it can be particularly unreliable. As a result, zero-party data is coming to the forefront, and it thrives on capturing insights like values, preferences, and behaviors. Better yet, it is data that is fully owned by the brand.

This is an opportunity to transform your brand’s online presence into a positive, transparent feedback loop between the data given and the value received. In order to provide a tangible value exchange that triggers emotional motivators in-between purchases, marketers should provide enjoyable experiences that enable them to collect values-based personal information at the same time. This can include polls, quizzes, surveys or customer stories. Then, marketers can use this information to deliver brand interactions that highlight values shared by the consumer, creating one-of-a-kind experiences that make people feel valued, special and appreciated.

With all this said, marketers need to be very thoughtful about how they personalize experiences or they run the risk of frustrating and alienating people or leaving the impression that their data is being mistreated.

A Winning Community Strategy is a Winning Emotional Loyalty Strategy

Beyond assessing a brand for the efficacy of its product or service, an emotionally-connected consumer will view a brand as a reflection of their lifestyle. Researchers have found hundreds of emotional motivators that impact consumer behavior, but one of the most prominent is feeling a sense of belonging. Others included “feeling secure,” “confident in the future,” “standing out from the crowd” and “succeeding in life.” This is why it’s important for marketers to provide tools for meaningful community connection. Your brand’s online presence needs to appear alive with activity and energy. When consumers interact with your brand, they will look to engage with other consumers who are like them.

Many think of community-building as focused entirely on brand fandom, with the brand at the center of attention. But a community is about empowering people to tell the story of who they are and what they stand for. A successful community is built around a common purpose and it is an effective way to embody the brand’s core values (87% of consumers overwhelmingly choose brands that match their values.) The most significant step a brand can take is setting the background and building the foundation for the community to flourish. Without community, a brand set on capturing the hearts of consumers will sputter.

Keeping consumers from abandoning your brand is difficult for today’s marketers. Brands must always be listening and making improvements and appealing to the higher-order benefits that consumers truly seek and value. By setting emotional connections as the “true north” of a brand’s investment in pre and post-purchase interactions they will, in turn, reap significant financial rewards and a committed base of engaged consumers.

Interested in more?

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#6 Social Influence in the ’20s Will Be About Connection, Not Clout

In 2019, it was announced that Instagram planned to remove “likes” from its public-facing newsfeed. Twitter is also playing with this concept when they released a beta prototype “twttr” that is putting engagement counts on replies behind a user tap, with the goal being to make Twitter a little friendlier. These moves created a shockwave across the marketing industry and spurred a flurry of philosophical debates on the future of social. Instagram’s CEO stated that removing likes was “about creating a less pressurized environment where people feel comfortable expressing themselves.” While the late 2000s was social media’s infancy stage, the 2010s only progressed it to toddlerhood. The 2020s will (hopefully) result in a maturing from both consumers and social networking companies on the positive potential and purpose of social. For the better part of the decade, influencer marketing was largely defined as brands partnering with content producers who have a large following and high engagement metrics. In the 2020s, consumers will be highly skeptical of traditional “influencers.” Marketers will need to define new criteria for what makes someone “influential.” Peer-to-peer influencers and authentic user-generated content will continue to be highly influential, with 85% of consumers saying friends or family have prompted action.

What Can You Do to Prepare? 

1) Redefine What “Influence” Means for Your Brand Being considered influential in the 2020s will be less about how many followers and likes you can garner and more about creating enticing content and building a trusted audience. What are the influencer qualities that will trigger the most awareness or conversion for your brand? While some brands will achieve the best results with the most popular TikTok star, other brands might have the best results with a grassroots marketing effort of getting consumers to recommend your product or service to friends or family members. 2) Create an Influencer “Path to Purchase” Influence is not a one-size-fits-all term and most of us interact with multiple influencers throughout the customer journey. Map the various influencers a consumer might interact with and how each drives business goals. A consumer could learn about a new product from a blogger, vet its efficacy through product reviews, but not pull the trigger until they see a friend recommend it. Mobilizing peer influencers to create a groundswell of one on one interactions will be critical to conversion.

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