A successful brand advocacy strategy can create powerful Word-of-Mouth (WOM) marketing to elevate awareness and consideration. It can enhance your brand’s social proof through high-quality ratings & reviews. And it can inspire authentic user-generated content (UGC) to build trust across advertising and social campaigns.
But how do you define and measure “success” in largely organic, multi-objective, multi-channel, qualitative campaigns?
This is a critical question for marketers who navigate by metrics, measuring their progress, mapping KPIs against campaign goals, and course-correcting as required. How do you prove ROI if you don’t have the right metrics?
As a platform that powers hundreds of brands to activate millions of consumers in brand advocacy, we know how to calculate the value and impact of programs. We’ll cover how you can measure brand advocacy below. But first, let’s talk about some of the other reasons it’s important.
Why is it Important to Measure Brand Advocacy?
Beyond enabling you to prove the ROI of your efforts, measuring brand advocacy empowers you to know what kind of brand advocate generates the most conversions and sales. When you understand this, you can double down on what’s working best for your brand. The same goes for figuring out which channels are most effective, and what type of user-generated content most resonates with friends and followers.
These insights allow you to fuel your future brand advocacy campaigns and find success.
What Metrics are Important to Track?
There is no one-size-fits-all measurement for Brand Advocacy because there are multiple ways that your consumers will be having a positive impact on your brand.
So we’ve come up with six crucial metrics that track the WOM, social proof, and influence of your advocates.
Quantity of posts and channels
One of the primary goals for brand advocacy campaigns is the creation of UGC—user-generated content.
It’s quite simple: More UGC means more chances of increasing your overall reach. This means that it’s important to track how many new pieces of UGC are created by your brand advocacy efforts.
Tracking where advocates are posting and the types of posts is important as well. This data can fuel future marketing strategies and help you understand which platforms work best.
Consumer-generated impressions
In addition to measuring the creation of content, you need to measure how many people it is reaching. Your consumer-generated impressions measure how many people see your advocates’ content. Each person that consumes some of the UGC created by your advocates is a potential new consumer, and may even become a raving brand advocate.
Friend and follower engagement
Beyond impressions, you’ll want to measure how your audience engages with this content. By engagement, we mean likes, shares, clicks, and comments.
Engagement levels can help you determine the quality of the content. If one piece of UGC is being shared on a viral level, you might have stumbled across a recipe for success for future content.
Ratings and reviews
Effective brand advocacy campaigns can be used to drive more authentic review generation, such as with sampling campaigns. Measuring the creation of authentic reviews is important since they have such a substantial impact on purchase decision-making and consumer acquisition.
Share of voice
Share of voice involves social listening and can help you track your brand advocacy when compared to your competitors. Some community platforms track this using a third party. For example, the Vesta Community Platform tracks share of voice using Salesforce Social Studio.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net promoter score is a measurement of both customer loyalty and satisfaction. It’s a score that measures how likely your customers are to recommend your product or service to their friends, family, and peers. The higher your score, the more likely you are to have raving advocates spreading the word about your brand.
NPS is one of the most widely known and accepted metrics for measuring overall brand advocacy.
If you want to raise your NPS, an online brand community is one of the best ways to do it. It’s a place to cultivate consumers to become advocates and boost your score. On average, our clients see a 48% lift in Net Promoter Score within the first 100 days of launching their new community.
Speaking of community…
How an Online Brand Community can Help Measure Brand Advocacy
We previously shared why an online brand community is one of the best tools for managing brand advocacy marketing efforts. So it should be no surprise that it is also one of the best ways to measure your campaigns as well, providing you with a single tool to accurately track brand advocacy, double down on what’s working, and eliminate what isn’t.
When choosing a community platform, you need to take ease of use into consideration. Vesta, for example, has a client success team ready to set you up for success—with brand advocacy campaigns and other acquisition and loyalty-building efforts as well.
Communities allow you to empower brand advocates to use brand-supplied social sharing tools. When you ask brand advocates to share on their own, you’re relying on every advocate to remember to actually report back. When advocates use tools powered by your brand community, you skip the guesswork and get a clearer picture of your sharing statistics. Vesta’s Single-Click Sharing™ tool is a great example of this—it allows advocates to post reviews and share to social channels without ever leaving the platform.
You’ll also be able to track a sizable portion of your user-generated content in one convenient location. UGC can be shared across a wide variety of channels, so the ability to monitor connected channels from your community increases overall efficiency.
Conversion tracking is made easier using your online brand community, as well. By arming your advocates with a specific link, you can enable tracking on that link and get an accurate representation of conversion metrics.
Lastly, your community can act as your own sourcing engine for shared content. For example, you can identify high-quality content and flag the creator of the content to focus on activating them again in the future.
Similarly, you can use your community to tag and organize content to repurpose in advertising or other brand content.
When figuring out how to measure brand advocacy, your online brand community is one of the most valuable resources at your disposal. Not only does it allow you to more accurately measure campaigns, but it also helps increase efficiency in the process.
Questions About How to Measure Brand Advocacy?
The TINT team is always here to answer your brand advocacy questions. Reach out to us—we’re happy to help.
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