Between rising ad costs and an increase in the number of ad blockers (roughly 25.8% of US internet users), marketers are under increasing pressure to get more clicks for their proverbial bucks. Times are changing, and what tactics and strategies that worked in 2010 aren’t guaranteed to work in 2022.
If you’re searching for opportunities to up-level your paid advertising efforts, start by taking a look at your other marketing initiatives. Whether your overarching marketing strategy includes an aggressive PR strategy, inbound marketing support, or (in the case of this blog post) an advocacy marketing campaign, there are a myriad of ways to leverage your advocacy marketing program to support your paid advertising efforts.
Key Aspects of An Advocacy Marketing Campaign
Quick plug, if your brand doesn’t have an advocacy marketing campaign, you’re missing out. Sure, we’re admittedly biased, but an advocacy marketing campaign can be a powerful addition to your marketing efforts. With advocacy marketing, your biggest fans become your strongest allies. They join your program. You share your branded content. They, in turn, can opt to share that content with their personal social media feeds where its seen by their friends and family.
The content-sharing aspect of an advocacy marketing campaign may be it’s most powerful feature. But in no way is it the only trick this pony knows. When leveraged in the right way, your advocacy marketing campaign can support all of your various marketing initiatives. This includes your paid advertising campaign. Here’s how.
5 Ways Advocacy Marketing can Improve Your Paid Advertising Efforts
Editor’s note: We’ve updated this list with a few more ways that your advocacy marketing campaign can improve your paid marketing.
1) Go Deep on Data
Depending on your advocacy marketing program of choice, you should have access to a host of marketable data on your biggest brand fans. We’re talking demographics, psychographics, and everything in between.
Specifically, the SocialToaster platform can help you identify your advocates’:
- Gender
- Location
- Age
- Preferred Social Networks
- Preferred Content Subjects
- And a Host Other Deep Data Points
Once you’ve got your data in hand, you can then use it to help influence your paid advertising targeting.
Pro Tip: Want even more deep data insights? Use Facebook’s Audience Insight tool. With SocialToaster, you can easily create an export of your fan base’s key contact data points. Then upload that export into Facebook Audience tool to gain further insight into the likes and behavior of your advocates.
2) Fuel Your Custom Audiences
Speaking of exports, most paid advertising platforms allow you to determine custom paid target audiences. Which is perfect for brands that are searching for opportunities to increase their customer’s repeat purchase rate or lifetime value.
After all, for many brands, their advocates are either current or past customers. A custom target audience campaign can be just what it takes to push them towards another conversion.
3) Create Look-a-Like Audiences
In many ways, your advocates represent the creme-de-la-creme of your audiences. After all, they are the individuals who are choosing to actively promote and share your brand through their social media profile.
Look-a-like audiences are an opportunity to share your paid marketing messages with individuals that resemble (through demographic or behavior similarities) your top advocates. Load up your advocate export into the paid advertising platform of your choice (Google, Facebook, etc.) and let that platform match your message with a near-perfect match of your best customers.
4) Build Credibility and Trust With User-Generated Creative
You benefit from their credibility when you use advocates to promote your products or services. People are more likely to trust recommendations from people they know and respect, which makes your advocacy marketing program a prime source of promotional content.
To get started, work with your advocates to develop content around a specific topic:
- What do they like about your product or service?
- Why would they recommend your product or service to their friends?
- Are there any “use hacks” that they’ve discovered?
Once you have settled on the theme of your user-generated content, provide your advocates with guidance over what media would work best for your paid efforts:
- Still images
- Memes
- Long-form Video (YouTube)
- Short-form Video (Reels, TikTok)
Lastly, be sure to put mechanisms are in place to reward your advocates for participating in your UGC efforts. They’re doing you a favor after all.
5) Drive Repeat Sales By Enhancing Your Customer Loyalty Efforts
Customer loyalty is essential for driving revenue and increasing the lifetime value of your customers, and advocacy marketing can help you achieve it. When customers feel connected to your brand and believe in your mission, they’re more likely to stick with you even when there are other options available.
Our recommendation? Drive new customers into your CRM through your paid media efforts. Then after they’ve become a customer, remarket to them with messaging that pushes them into your advocacy marketing program.
Once they are a part of your advocacy marketing efforts, you’ll be able to continually reengage with them without having to spend your paid advertising dollars.
Take Your Paid Efforts Further
Feel like your paid media efforts are losing steam? Be sure you’re leveraging all of your marketing tools. Not only can an advocacy marketing program help you distribute your content and amplify your social media presence (more on that here), with the right strategy, you can also enhance your paid media efforts. By improving your targeting through more in-depth data, custom audiences, and look-a-like audiences, you have more of an opportunity to ensure your marketing messages resonate with your target audience.
Ready to take your paid marketing efforts to the next level? Give us a call at 855.62.TOAST, send us an email or request a free demo of the SocialToaster platform today.
