Chapter One. What Brand Advocacy Is.
End Goal: Understand brand advocacy and the hybrid approach.
Brand advocacy is the process of getting influential people and organizations to talk about your, brand through omnichannel media. It also leverages what is called “ inbound marketing ” to nurture your advocates and your customers.
Let’s take a closer look at each of brand advocacy’s components:
Influential people use media channels to discuss your brand. Unlike straight PR, they usually will reference an advertising campaign that we design for you but do not pay an outside organization like Facebook or TV network to distribute.
Inbound marketing is not the first step in brand advocacy but instead the final step that allows you to continually refine your marketing materials and fulfill the needs and wants of your of brand advocates.
As you read our book we will spend a great deal of time discussing the pros and cons of the media mix. Without understanding media, its harder to understand how brand advocacy works.
Why Brand Advocacy is Free
While nothing is absolutely guaranteed about brand advocacy, it can increase the “reach and frequency” of your message (measured in Gross Ratings Points GRPs) very fast and often for free.
Figure 1: Chart that shows the typical Reach and Frequency of brand advocacy measured in Gross Rating Points.
Brand advocacy generates free awareness because it is driven by shareable content that is freely distributed. Creating the content, however, requires hiring professionals to get you started. (Unless you do it yourself).
You will also need to work at keeping your advocacy alive (most important) and your advocates happy (although they change a lot) which once again means paying a few people to help you out.
Let’s put this into perspective however. We still live in a world where brand A spends $130 million on advertising while brand B relies on free media, a few ads, and a hairdresser.
We all know how this story ends.