In the first three parts of our Brand Advocacy Essentials series, we explained the impact that brand advocates have on building awareness, loyalty, and driving sales for your brand. Today, we’re pulling back the curtain to show you the best ways to start your brand advocacy program; from recruiting and training your advocates to activating the program and analyzing the results. 

Determine Your Strategy 

Before your brand advocates are selected, onboarded, and trained, it’s important to figure out where to deploy and activate them. Using our proprietary data and Dimensional Deployment process, plus taking your brand goals and activities into consideration, our experts strategically determine which markets will benefit the most from your brand advocate’s presence. The end result? A customized deployment plan that does the hard work for you. 

Personalize Your Brand Advocate Recruiting Process 

With planning and finding the right resources, creating an effective brand advocacy program can take time! In retail marketing, the best resources are the people who become brand advocates within the markets you’ve selected for your brand.  

How do you find ideal brand advocates? First, we recommend creating a profile of the brand advocate that includes their soft and hard skills, such as charisma, salesmanship, emotional intelligence, and category knowledge. Once the ideal brand advocate profile is developed, you can screen, assess, and select your perfect candidates.  

Onboard & Train Your Team 

With your markets and top talent selections in place, it’s time for in-depth brand, category, and product training. The most successful brand advocates speak about your brand from a voice of genuine fandom, which is where a customized training plan comes in. Your brand advocates should love your brand and be confident that your brand or product is the best solution for customers.  

On top of that, your advocates should have an authentic excitement about your product that gets passed onto the shopper. When advocates are effectively trained to deliver a memorable experience, you’ll see new customers leave the store, not only with your product in hand, but also with greater enthusiasm to share their experience within their circle of influence.  

Performance & Insights 

Now that your brand advocates are spreading brand love and building loyalty, it’s time to gauge the effectiveness of the program. Through a set of integrated and proprietary data reporting tools, we gain insight into which strategies are effective, and which strategies should be reconsidered. Understanding the data takes high-level retail strategy and insight to identify performance and success.  

This is where our experts come in – we know each aspect of the in-store experience and will calibrate your program based on what the data provides us, making necessary improvements, and increasing conversion at every turn! 

Thanks for reading!  

That concludes our Brand Advocacy Essentials Series! Now that you understand how passionate brand advocates can transform your brand, schedule an appointment with us to take your brand to the next level!