Stimulating Virality and Customer Advocacy

Once you identified the influencers and their followers, the next question is how you tap into the power of influence. In other words, how do you turn the influencers into your advocates?

In one word: carefully.

After cutting our teeth in over a hundred projects with large consumer organizations, we have developed best practices that are backed by our Influence Success Metrics and will help you avoid the pitfalls and maximize results in your customer acquisition, cross-sell, and churn prevention efforts.

Here are some of the things we have learned:

  • Influence must be genuine: influencers get their powers from their followers. Followers rely on the influencers for guidance, but they only do so as long as it serves them right. An influencer will cease to be one if followers suspect they are being manipulated.
  • Influencers are knowledge junkies: knowledge is a source of influence, and the opinion leaders are typically your most knowledgeable customers. Feeding their hunger for knowledge is a good way to turn the influencers into longtime advocates.
  • Influencers are tough customers: Influencers are also the most demanding customers. They have vested interest in your product or service, and expect you to show that you care just as much about them.
  • You can’t buy love: Trying to motivate influencers by using monetary incentives is usually going to backfire. The word of mouth spread by the influencers will most likely be related to the incentive and not to your product or service.
  • Be careful what you wish for: Influence is viral. Once unleashed, it cannot be controlled. If you don’t have a good product or offer, don’t promote it to the influencers, or the negative word of mouth will spread like fire.

How to Get Started

Based on our best practices and Influence Success Metrics, we can help you design campaigns, customer experiences, and long-term customer relationship strategies that target both influencers and their followers in a manner that maximizes positive viral impact and bottom line results. Contact us to learn more.