What Is Advocacy Marketing? Strategies and Examples

You’re scrolling through Instagram when you arrive across a post from an acquaintance who can’t stop raving about her recent favorite coat. Each period she wears it, she highlights another characteristic she loves: the classic style, the roomy pockets, and its ability to keep her warm without feeling bulky. Her thrill is contagious, and when you’re in the economy for outerwear, you decide to get the same one.

That’s advocacy marketing in action. With this way, brands inspire customers to recommend products or services on their behalf. While you can construct brand advocates by providing a phenomenal customer encounter and stellar products, there are also proactive ways to tap into the power of advocacy marketing.

What is advocacy marketing?

Advocacy marketing is a schedule to convert faithful customers into brand advocates who authentically promote your products through reviews, recommendations, and referrals. Advocacy marketing differs from influencer marketing partnerships or paid endorsements. It relies on organic, unpaid promotion from satisfied customers who distribute their experiences voluntarily or with minor incentives.

ordinary forms of advocacy marketing include:

• Customer reviews
• Unpaid social media mentions
• User-generated content
• Referrals through reward programs 
• Product achievement stories
• Product unboxing photos and videos
• throng forum discussions

Strategies for advocacy marketing

• make a customer referral program
• Craft post-purchase review request emails
• Design Instagram-worthy unboxing encounter
• inspire and amplify customer-created content
• Transform customer testimonials into marketing assets
• construct an engaged product throng

To construct a successful advocacy marketing campaign, select strategies that feel factual to your brand. Some businesses might focus on collecting and amplifying customer testimonials, while others construct thriving online or IRL communities. However, the most effective advocacy marketing schedule often combines multiple approaches to develop a packed-fledged program. Consider these strategies:

make a customer referral program

While word-of-mouth recommendations happen naturally, a structured referral program propels satisfied customers to distribute your brand with friends and household. The most effective referral programs propose compelling incentives for both parties—perhaps store financing for the referrer and a welcome discount for the recent customer, creating a triumph-triumph scenario encouraging participation.

Make your referral procedure straightforward: It should receive a few clicks and integrate naturally into your post-purchase trip. Track those who consistently refer recent customers and demonstrate brand loyalty, and consider developing deeper partnerships with these organic advocates.

Craft post-purchase review request emails

Potential customers scrutinize reviews to comprehend a product before making a purchase selection. They desire to recognize if a sweater shrinks after washing, if those sneakers are factual to size, or whether that vitamin C serum effectively fades dim spots. Post-purchase emails are an chance to gather meaningful reviews you can use to attract recent shoppers.

Send your request post-delivery, giving the customer enough period with the product. propose obvious guidelines for helpful reviews, and consider adding prompts about specific features to generate more detailed responses.

The post-purchase review email from Matteo’s Coffee Syrups has a warm, branded design and obvious call to action. By displaying person review buttons for each purchased product, it guides customers to leave specific feedback for every item.

Design Instagram-worthy unboxing experiences

With the rise of social media, everyday customers have become content creators—sharing snippets of their lives online. As a outcome, package unboxing has evolved from a private instant to a shared encounter across platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Creating a memorable unboxing instant encourages spontaneous sharing that turns buyers into customer advocates.

Consider incorporating custom tissue document in signature colors, branded stickers, appealing packaging inserts, and personalized thank you notes to make every package photo-worthy.

Luxury chocolatier Compartés shows what attention to specific looks like, with packaging so striking it earned a spot in the Smithsonian Design Museum. Rather than following traditional chocolate packaging norms, founder Jonathan Grahm reimagined each bar as a piece of fashion-inspired art, while maintaining the handcrafted standard. This has led to unboxing videos and taste tests across social media channels, like this:

inspire and amplify customer-created content

User-generated content influences purchase decisions by showing products in real-globe contexts, rather than staged on a pristine studio background. Unlike paid influencer posts, the content from real customers display people’s genuine experiences with your products.

Consider multiple channels for assembly customer content:

• Highlight customer stories on your blog.
• make dedicated spaces for product tutorials.
• inspire review photos on your website.
• Launch social media hashtag campaigns.

By featuring customer-generated content across your marketing channels—from email newsletters to product pages to social feeds—you make customersfeel valued, and your brand gains authentic social proof.

Fluff, an Australian beauty brand known for its refillable makeup products and quarterly drops, focuses its marketing schedule on authentic customer content rather than paid influencer posts. Through its editorial platform Fluff Issues, customers distribute unfiltered stories about beauty and identity.

“Our [posts] are all about people’s concerns or feelings toward the beauty industry or about themselves and their identity,” says founder Erika Geraerts on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We hardly edit these pieces; they’re just posted there for people to view.”

Transform customer testimonials into marketing assets

Your marketing throng needs fresh content for weekly newsletters, landing pages, and social media campaigns. Often, your customers’ words resonate more powerfully than polished marketing copy.

Transform customer testimonials into compelling graphics and weave them into product descriptions or email sequences to construct depend at key selection points. Select testimonials that address ordinary concerns, highlight distinctive product benefits, and demonstrate customer satisfaction.

You can view this form of advocacy marketing at play in a Glossier post about its You Doux eau de parfum. The candid customer review about how the fragrance “smells like my ex” is a relatable piece of user-generated content turned into a selling point. The post caption, “Reclaiming excellent smells from our exes, one bottle of Doux at a period,” shows how real customer stories can make for memorable marketing.

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construct an engaged product throng

Vibrant customer communities on platforms like Reddit, Discord, and Facebook groups make spaces where curious prospects can gather and discover from existing customers. This way is particularly effective for brands offering high-ticket items or products with learning curves. Potential buyers can observe real discussions about product use and results before buying.

When building a throng, focus on facilitating genuine conversations rather than promoting products. Your role is to back troubleshooting, respond questions, and inspire member-to-member interactions that construct long-term engagement.

Keychron, a keyboard manufacturer, has an energetic Discord throng in the computer peripherals space. Its 32,000-member throng is a technical back hub. It also serves as a passionate space where users distribute custom builds, mechanical switch preferences, and keycap modifications—creating a vibrant ecosystem around its products.