How Brand Advocacy Begins: From Customers to Superfans (ft. Glossier & SKIMS)

As the influencer marketing landscape evolves, so does the definition of who an influencer is. While celebrities and mega-influencers once dominated the market, now people are turning their attention toward brand advocates, who have become the new influencers – regardless of their following size.

Take me, for example. I may have fewer than 2,000 followers, but as a die-hard foodie, people look to me for restaurant recommendations. I advocate for establishments that serve good food, and my followers take these recommendations seriously. The best part? I don’t even get paid to recommend those places.

Similarly, brand advocacy can be a powerful marketing tool to build trust and draw in customers. In this post, I provide you with a guideline on turning customers (and influencers) into superfans, so they become your biggest brand advocates.

What Makes a Brand Advocate?

A brand advocate is someone who actively promotes a brand’s products because they genuinely love them. They share their positive experiences within their network, typically through word-of-mouth or social media, even without being paid or prompted. In other words, they help to organically promote the brand and build trust with a relevant audience.

In some cases, these individuals may be a part of an official brand ambassador program, where they get something in return for promoting the brand. This could include exclusive discounts, loyalty points, or early access to new product launches. But ultimately, there’s no monetary compensation, resulting in promotions that are organic and authentic.

UGC Campaigns: Invite Real Users into Your Storytelling

As mentioned above, brand advocates don’t necessarily have to have a large following. In fact, everyday customers could be your biggest advocates because they have a genuine affinity for your brand. Since they’re real users of your products, their opinions come across as more trustworthy and relatable.

That’s why user-generated content could play a key role in your brand advocacy efforts. Encourage real customers to help with your brand storytelling. Have them share their genuine experiences, tips, recommendations, and more.

This is a great way to tell your brand story through the perspective of an everyday customer. Moreover, including your customers in your storytelling efforts will help you foster a loyal and engaged community. So a robust UGC campaign is essential for effective brand advocacy – whether you choose to make it an ongoing effort or for a specific campaign.

SKIMS fosters brand advocacy through their “Try-On Hauls,” where real customers create Reels sharing their experiences wearing the brand’s products. The brand doesn’t necessarily turn to influencers for these campaigns but real, everyday users who bought the products themselves. Seeing the positive reactions and authentic experiences encourages other customers to buy the products and share their own experiences.

Leveraging Community-Led Initiatives to Power Brand Advocacy

For a more targeted approach to engaging your brand advocates, you can nurture a close-knit community of your biggest fans. Create community-led initiatives where your most active customers get to participate in exclusive groups, events, and more. The idea is to reward them for their support and foster a stronger affinity for your brand.

In other words, you’re nurturing them to become loyal brand advocates. 

Glossier has found success through their community Slack group, which initially started out with 100 of their most active customers. “Glossier Labs” has eventually grown into an 800-person community, where members test new products and provide brutally honest feedback. 

But the community does even more than that. It has turned into a close-knit community of members who rally together in support of each other. For example, when one member lost her childhood home in the L.A. fires, they helped her rebuild. This proves the strong connection that Glossier has managed to foster within their community.

Meanwhile, brands like CLEARSTEM Skincare host exclusive IRL events to engage their community members. For their Clearer in the Hamptons event, the brand invited 100 real users and influential creators from the city to be a part of a 3-day retreat. The event consisted of workout classes, brunch, facials, skin analyses, and meet-and-greets for a fun-filled weekend.

This helped the brand to build a highly engaged community while members created plenty of user-generated content sharing their experiences. 

Creator Advocacy: Leveraging Existing Fans with Reach

Creators with significant reach can definitely take your brand visibility to the next level – that’s a given. That’s why so many brands look to them for paid collaborations. Although this is an effective approach, it could take away a certain level of authenticity from the collab. This is especially true when you’re working with creators who are new to your brand or aren’t genuine fans.

Instead, working with creators who are already fans of your brand could take your advocacy efforts to the next level. This involves looking through your existing fanbase to see which individuals have significant reach. 

Since these creators already love your brand, a partnership with them comes across as more authentic and reliable. They’ve already promoted your brand even without being paid or asked to do so. This means even if you do engage them in a paid partnership, the collaboration will still feel genuine because their followers know that the influencer is an existing fan.

If you’re lucky, these creators may have already created content around your brand and products. That means you’ll have plenty of organic user-generated content to work with. You just need to get their permission to repost or repurpose it for your brand’s social media or marketing campaigns. 

You can go through your brand’s tagged posts to find this type of influencer UGC to reuse. This might involve a little digging if your brand gets a lot of tags from customers. You’ll need to scour through the posts to see which ones were created by influential users.

Alternatively, branded hashtags can also help you track organic influencer-generated content. This will also require lots of manual digging, as you’ll need to filter out the content created by users without reach. 

Pro Tip: Don’t dismiss UGC from everyday customers, either. If relevant, consider using them for a different type of campaign that focuses on nano-influencers. 

Building Impactful Loyalty Loops

Customers love it when you listen to them. Whether it’s a complaint or a suggestion, brands that take customer feedback seriously can foster loyalty. It shows them that you value their opinions and experiences, which makes them feel a stronger connection to your brand.

That’s why it’s important to build effective loyalty loops where customers can share their feedback with you. Consider sending emails seeking out feedback after a customer has interacted with your brand. For example, you could send a follow-up after a recent purchase or a customer support ticket. You could also send emails to customers who haven’t bought from you in a while to gauge their experiences and see if there’s a need to improve.

Beyond this, social media serves as a treasure trove for customer feedback. Tap into your comments and DMs to look for complaints or suggestions that customers are directly sharing with you. You can even go a step further and look at your brand mentions and forums to see if customers are sharing complaints and bad experiences indirectly.

Keep in mind that not all feedback is constructive or valuable. So it’s important to sift through the conversations to narrow down the ones that are genuine and helpful. 

Like Glossier, consider creating closed community groups where members can share feedback about new or upcoming products. This helps you take a more targeted approach to collecting feedback, so you can filter out the noise.

Make sure to be responsive across all these channels, so customers know you’re listening to them. Then find a way to incorporate their feedback into various aspects of your product development, operations, and service. Don’t forget to communicate the ways you’ve been implementing customer feedback through your marketing channels.  

Tips and Best Practices for Effective Brand Advocacy

Now that we’ve seen how some of the top brands foster brand advocacy, let’s take a look at some of the best practices and tips to help you do the same.

Create Exclusive Perks for Superfans

Your superfans are customers who are already huge fans of your brand. They’ve likely been buying from you regularly and even creating plenty of UGC about your products. Rewarding them with exclusive perks is an effective way to garner further loyalty. This strengthens the existing bond they have with your brand, making them want to keep advocating for you.

These perks could include first access to new products, free gifts with purchases, exclusive discounts, and more. Glow Recipe offers insider perks like member-only sales, access to exclusive products, and reward points to Club Glow members.

Avoid an Over-Reliance on Affiliate Codes

Affiliate codes may be great for driving sales, but an over-reliance on them could commodify your brand advocacy efforts. This means that many “advocates” may only be advocating for your brand in the hopes of making money. So their promotion efforts could come off as inauthentic and overly promotional.

Instead, lean into non-monetary compensation to reward true fans. This helps you attract advocates who are genuine about their love for your brand and products, ensuring more authentic promotions.

Turn Feedback into Content

With the right approach, customer feedback – whether positive or negative – can turn into high-quality content to engage your audience. Positive feedback is easy to share. Turn them into attractive graphics to share them on social media or email. You could even include them in your paid ads promoting specific products.

Make sure to get permission from customers prior to reusing their feedback.

Alternatively, negative feedback could also serve as valuable content to address your customers’ biggest concerns and pain points. Even if you don’t reuse the feedback verbatim, you can use it to identify what your audience needs.

Notice how the following ad addresses a common customer feedback: high cost. It creatively puts a positive spin on something negative, providing customers with a solution. When your customers know that you’re listening to them, they’re more likely to advocate for your brand.

Feature Real Testimonials Over Scripted Ones

In the same vein, real testimonials from your customers are a great way to show social proof while fostering loyalty. When you show proof that your actual customers are benefiting from your product or service, it helps build trust with your audience. Meanwhile, the customers who shared those testimonials will feel valued and acknowledged for contributing to your brand.

Avoid polishing testimonials too much (except for typos), as it could take away from the authenticity of the language. Plus, giving your customers the opportunity to share their experience in their own voice will make them feel appreciated, thus strengthening their affinity for your brand. 

Better yet, seeing these testimonials from other customers could even compel other customers to share their own experiences.

Frank Body regularly shares real photos and testimonials from their customers. This helps to show the effectiveness of their products while making customers feel valued for their contribution.

Use Influencer Platforms to Identify Influential Superfans

While partnering with influencers who are already fans of your brand can be highly beneficial for brand advocacy, the process of finding them can be time-consuming. Make the most of influencer platforms like Influencity to identify your most influential customers who have an actual audience overlap.

There are two ways to go about this. The first option is to use the regular influencer search function and look for your brand under the “brand affinity” tab. This tab shows you the top brands that the influencer interacts with the most.

Another option is to use the brand monitoring feature. This lets you search for conversations that mention your brand and identify the authors behind them. So you can easily see the most influential users who mentioned your brand in a positive light.

Involve Creators in Your Content and Product Development

With their expertise and industry knowledge, creators can become major contributors to your content and product development process. Have them test your products and provide feedback so you can make improvements. Or get them to share their ideas on what products to create, how to create content, and more.

This will help you develop products that address the needs and pain points of audiences in your industry. It will also help you create content that resonates.

Moreover, involving creators in the “creation” process will make them feel like a part of your brand. And when they feel like a part of your brand, they’re more likely to advocate for you and maintain long-term loyalty.

Take Your Brand Advocacy to the Next Level

Effective brand advocacy doesn’t always have to involve influencers or affiliate codes. With the right approach, even regular users could be strong advocates for your brand and help you attract new customers. Make the most of the tips and brand examples I shared above to get started.