This is a guest post by Rhys Williams, a freelance content marketing writer specialising in B2B SaaS, martech and personalisation. 

While there are plenty of positive economic signs, substantial headwinds remain. The sustained falls in customers’ buying power will take time to recover from, and businesses are cautious about spending. In short, the economy is still very tough.

Adding to the pain are the long-term trends of diminishing returns from traditional marketing channels and declining customer retention rates.

But is it possible to sustainably expand your revenue at a time when customers continue to keep a close eye on the purse strings — as long as you listen closely to what your customers are telling you..

Let your customers do the talking

Customer advocacy is when customers help promote your business: either by referring their friends, or through word-of-mouth and online engagement.

Mention Me has launched the world’s first Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform as a way to help businesses understand and nurture your customers’ advocacy actions and brand sentiment, revealing the driving forces behind buying decisions.

Using this understanding to create a unique and compelling customer experience is the key to success: a customer will only refer you to a friend or leave you a positive review if they’ve had an outstanding experience with your brand.

The better, more deeply personalised your CX is, the more referrals customers will make.

A customer advocacy marketing strategy takes a systematic approach to acquiring and retaining high-quality customers who want to promote your brand.

If you get customer advocacy right, not only will your customers help spread the word, they’ll also be happier, more loyal, and more likely to keep on spending with you for longer.

Improvements in lifetime value

Customers brought in through referrals are where the real value for your business lies. Referred customers:

• Have double the LTV of other customers
• Spend an average of 11% more per order
• Have a 1.8x higher repeat purchase rate

Reductions in acquisition costs

The cost of acquiring customers through advocacy is typically 40% lower than paid channels.

There are two ways you can use advocacy marketing to reduce your acquisition costs:

• Acquire more customers through referrals
• Use advocacy data to build lookalike audiences in Meta and Google

Using advocacy insights, fashion brand MOSS increased their ROAS by 90% and boosted conversions by 61%

What a systematic approach brings to the table

When you can identify customer advocates, the path to acquiring high-value customers at low cost opens up.

How, when and why customers make referrals has traditionally been regarded as a mystery. With the Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform, we want to change that.

We’ve incorporated some key functionality into the platform that allows CFOs to appreciate the value of customer advocacy just as much as marketing teams.

Referral networks

The Network Insights feature pulls back the curtain on how referrals work.

This visual tool shows you who’s making the most referrals, where these referrals are clustered, and how and why referral networks develop.

These insights mean you have a greater understanding of who’s bringing the most value to your business. Observing factors that led to the growth of one network means you can repeat the process with other customers.

Predictions that help develop advocacy

As a leading referral platform, the wealth of data and insights Mention Me has built up allows us to make accurate predictions about which customers will spend the most, make the most referrals, and represent the most value to your business over a 12-month period.

These insights are valuable as they allow you to include advocacy data when creating customer segments.

The value your customers bring is not set in stone and you can increase it with a careful calibration of your customer interactions.

Whether a customer has never referred before but thinks highly of your brand, or whether they have referred 10 friends but are in danger of churning, allocating them to the right customer segment means you can provide CX that fits their needs.

For one leading brand, using advocacy data in this way increased engagement rates by 80% and led to a 36% boost in referrals.

Earned Growth

This concept, developed by Bain and Co., expresses customer advocacy as a single metric.

Earned Growth is the amount your business would grow by if you stripped out all the effects of advertising and marketing spend. It captures the goodwill and enthusiasm customers have towards your brand — all the word-of-mouth promotion, positive reviews and social engagement — and calculates the net effect of customers promoting your business.

The more you lean toward earned rather than paid-for growth, the healthier the underlying economics of your business become.

Mention Me is the only platform that lets you track Earned Growth and the effect your advocacy strategy has on it.

The best way to grow your business is advocacy-first

Over time, it’s possible to use customer advocacy to transform your business. What starts as a simple referral programme can blossom into a customer-centric, organic growth strategy.

Customer advocacy lets you reduce customer acquisition costs and more efficiently spend your marketing budget.

Data-driven improvements to your CX result in the acquisition of high LTV customers and help you rebalance away from paid channels.

The high-quality customers you attract will put your business on a more stable financial footing, provide an immediate and sustainable boost to revenue, and drive profitability now and into the future.

If you want to find out more about how Mention Me can help you achieve sustainable growth through customer advocacy, say hi at hello@mention-me.com.