In the first three parts of our Brand Advocacy Essentials series, we explained the tremendous impact brand advocates have on generating sales and loyalty 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 brand 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

Creating an effective brand advocacy program takes time, planning, and the right resources. In the retail marketing world, the best resources are the people who become your brand advocates in the markets you’ve selected. Start by making a profile of what your ideal brand advocate looks like. You’ll want to nail down their soft and hard skills, such as charisma, salesmanship, emotional intelligence, and category knowledge. Once the ideal brand advocate profile is developed, then you can screen, assess and select your candidates.

Onboard & Train Your Team

Now that the markets and top talent have been selected for your brand, 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. They should love your brand, use it regularly, and be confident it’s the best solution for customers. On top of that, your advocates should have an authentic excitement about your product that gets passed on to the shopper. When advocates are effectively trained to deliver a unique, contagious experience, you’ll see new customers leave the store not only with your product in their hands, but also with greater enthusiasm to share their experience within their circle of influence.

Program Performance & Insights

It’s time to gauge the effectiveness your brand advocates are having on the campaign. Through a set of integrated reporting tools, we gain insight into what strategies are working and which ones need to be reconsidered. Understanding the data takes high-level insight and retail strategy to identify performance and success. This is where our experts come in – we know every aspect of the in-store experience and will calibrate your program based on what the data gives us, making improvements and increasing conversion at every turn.

The holiday shopping season is underway, and it’s time to start strategizing for Q1. Want to knock your brand advocacy program out of the part in the new year? Get in touch today to get the ball rolling on a successful 2019.