We’re thrilled to introduce Wearisma’s Brand Advocacy Index™ (BAI™), a proprietary metric that measures the strength of your brand’s community of advocates. In this post, we explore the importance of nurturing relationships with brand advocates, highlight successful strategies, and discuss how tiered gifting can elevate your brand’s advocacy efforts.
Published On: March 29, 2021
We’re excited to announce the launch of Wearisma’s Brand Advocacy Index™ (BAI™), our proprietary metric which measures the intensity of your brand’s community of advocates. In our last blog, we outlined the importance of brand advocacy programs and in our webinar, we revealed how a high BAI™ score is crucial to your brand’s survival. Below, we’ll reveal how best to nurture your relationship with your advocates, which brands have seen success with these methods and how tiered gifting can strengthen your advocate community.
Not only does research show that effective loyalty programs can generate as much as 20% of a company’s profits, but it also indicates that 84% of consumers are willing to stick with a brand that offers a loyalty program. The more consumers stick with your brand, the higher your BAI™ score. Our research and insights team revealed that brands with a high BAI™ score produce above-average Engagement Rates (ER), suggesting that the more powerful your community of advocates, the more successful your content. Relationships with brand advocates are typically nurtured through loyalty programs to reward advocates for authentically promoting your brand and prevent them from turning to competitors.
Nurturing a relationship with your brand advocates will also encourage a rise in user-generated content (UGC) which is 20% more effective at influencing purchase decisions and 35% more memorable than other types of media. Additionally, Wearisma’s insights revealed that, on average, organic UGC generates 20x the Media Value compared to that of paid content.
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Gifting is one of the best ways to nurture a relationship with your advocates. Wearisma’s insights revealed that the ER for #gifted jumped from 2.4% in January 2020 to 3.8% in February 2021. These figures suggest that audiences are becoming increasingly interested in content that shows brands rewarding advocates for their loyalty. Several brands have seen great success with large scale gifting campaigns, such as:
The fitness clothing brand ramped up its gifting in 2020 to great results. Wearisma’s insights reveal that in 2020, #gifted content featuring Fabletics generated an impressive ER of 5%, which is 5 times the average ER for fashion content. Simultaneously, Fabletics saw a 35% increase in BAI™ score year-on-year suggesting that rewarding their loyal advocates contributed to the success of the community’s content.
Using Wearisma’s advanced search feature, our research and insights team identified Nespresso as achieving successful results from gifting. In 2020, #gifted content featuring the Nestlé coffee brand generated a whopping 15% Engagement Rate, 3 times the ER for content featuring coffee.
Tiered gifting involves giving larger rewards for brand advocates whose content performs the best for your brand. Operating your gifting activities according to a tiered system will ensure that you get the most out of your best advocates and that you are maintaining the strongest connections with your top performers.
The amount of tiers you have in your gifting system is completely up to you but each gift in your tier should align with the products you are currently promoting. For example, a tier-one gift may be a discount code, a tier-two gift could be sample products while a tier-three gift may include a full-size product. Once you have discovered your advocates they should all typically start on tier-one.
After rewarding advocates you must keep a close eye on how they are performing. Besides rewarding your advocates for being loyal to your brand, tiered gifting activities should trigger the psychological principle of reciprocity, i.e. you gift your advocates and they reciprocate the gesture by creating organic content promoting your brand. However, the degree of reciprocity will be higher for some advocates than others which is why the next step is crucial.
Wearisma’s Monitoring and Reporting tools will allow you to easily see:
After reviewing your report you should be able to easily identify who is performing the best for your brand according to your KPIs. Once you’ve identified these top-performing advocates move them up a tier. For the advocates who have performed below or at average continue to reward them at tier-one as maintaining loyalty with your advocate community will always be important.
Repeating steps 2-4 will ensure that you cultivate a strong community of brand advocates. Using intelligent campaign tools will support you through each step with ease.
Contact a member of our Sales team today to find out more about our solutions.
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