Contrary to popular belief, the goal of digital marketing is not just acquiring more customers for your business—it is also establishing a long-lasting relationship with your customers and giving them enough reasons to keep doing business with your brand.  Furthermore, developing a strong and loyal customer base is crucial to improving your brand reputation and revenue. After all, if customers have a good experience with your brand, from start to finish, they are then more likely to leave positive reviews online and recommend your brand to their friends and family. This is extremely crucial since a significant number of consumers rely on online reviews and personal recommendations to make their final purchasing decisions.

All this is why the final stage of the customer journey map—the advocacy stage—is one of the most difficult stages to achieve. Fortunately, Assist90’s Business App has several built-in features that will help your brand ensure that customers have a pleasant and memorable experience at every stage of the customer journey, including after they’ve made their initial purchase. Keep reading to find out how our Business App can improve customer experience and encourage brand advocacy.

How the Business App Can Help Promote Brand Advocacy

Create a Brand Advocacy Strategy

As with any other marketing endeavor, improving customer retention and brand advocacy also requires extensive planning and clear end goals. You need to visualize what a successful brand advocacy strategy looks like for your brand—whether it is more website traffic, better leads, positive reviews, increased social media engagement, or product sales.

Once you’ve decided on a metric, you can devise a strategy that is optimized to achieve your particular goal. For example, if your goal is to get more positive Google reviews, you can employ tactics like post-purchase SMS and email reminders to encourage customers to post reviews. If you want more qualified leads, you can provide your customers with unique referral codes and incentivize them to actively recommend your brand to others.

Another important step in developing a successful brand advocacy strategy is to identify your brand advocates. You need to take a look at customers who are already talking about your brand online and engaging with your content. The Business App has tools that allow you to monitor mentions across social media platforms for this very purpose.

You can also set up surveys to find out how customers feel about your brand and if they’re likely to recommend it to friends and family. This will give you an insight into what your brand is currently doing right and what you need to improve in order to win your customers’ hearts.

Improve Your Customer Service

To ensure your business’s success, you need to go beyond providing customers with the products and services they need—you need to ensure that their journey with your brand is seamless and memorable right from the awareness stage. Blogging, cultivating a social media presence, and sharing positive reviews on your website can make a favorable impression on existing and prospective customers.

In addition to ensuring that your website is easily findable online, you also need to make sure that it is fast, responsive, and easy to navigate. This is even more so important if you’re an online retail business. In addition, you also have to focus on upgrading customer micro-interactions on your website. This not only includes improving your website design but also paying attention to the payment portal, chatbots, and other features that will make online shopping easier for your target customers.

Apart from this, you also need to focus on your post-payment experience. This can refer to SMS follow-ups of updates regarding the purchase and informing your customers about new offers and sales. Remember, the whole point of the customer journey map is to cultivate a relationship with customers that goes beyond their initial purchase. You need to create an experience that will not only make your clients come back for more but also recommend your services to others.

Routinely Collect Feedback and Reviews

According to an online survey, 91% of people between the ages of 18 and 35 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. This is why you need to actively encourage customers to share their feedback on platforms across the internet.

The Customer Voice feature on our Business App will allow you to reach out to customers the way you want to. You can capture customer feedback right at the point of sale when they’re more likely to leave one. You can also create customized email or text messages using our email signature widget to proactively ask for reviews. This will also ensure that your brand stays in your customers’ minds long after the initial purchase.

Leverage the Power of User-Generated Content

If you’ve already built a loyal customer base for yourself online, it will be better for you to encourage them to post about your products online. After all, 92% of consumers trust user-generated content more than advertisements.

User-generated content can take the form of videos, photos, reviews, or any form of content that customers create and share about your brand. It is a powerful tool that you can leverage to build an authentic connection with your customers and get the word out about your products or services.

You can curate user-generated content with the help of the social media listening tools in our Business App. You can discover conversations and reviews about your brand by just setting up alerts for keywords and phrases related to your brand. You can then share positive feedback on your social media platforms and website, but remember to ask permission from the consumer before you share their content.

Set Up Referral Programs

As a brand, you need to provide customers with the right channel to share their experiences and feedback. You also need to show appreciation to clients who’ve shared their feedback. If there is no engagement from a brand’s side, customers will eventually lose interest and stop posting content about the brand. You can also incentivize and motivate consumers to post stories on Instagram and other social media platforms by holding contests and offering free giveaways. You can also set up customers with a unique referral code that allows them to get discounts on your products.

Wondering how to improve your customer retention rates and boost referrals? Assist90’s Business App is just what you need to optimize your customer experience and encourage brand advocacy. We’re located in Chesterfield, MO, and offer full-service digital marketing solutions for businesses looking to improve their customer journey. Visit our website or give us a call at (314) 560-5649 today to book an assessment.