Customer advocacy software, sometimes referred to as Advocacy Marketing or Referral Marketing software, is used by companies to enable their customers to promote their message, content, or products through word-of-mouth. These tools are used to help companies’ marketing, sales, and success teams to gather referrals and testimonials that can be used with prospects. Customer advocates are eager to share anecdotal evidence about their experiences using products and services, and customer advocacy software programs help to facilitate that sharing process. Additionally, the software can be used to motivate companies to be engaged in testing products, providing feedback, and sharing news.
Products in this category are used by businesses in a wide-range of industries. The software can be used to help acquire new customers, develop brand identity, and engage loyal users. These goals are accomplished in a few ways. Some brand advocacy software programs use tracking codes to create customer referral programs which can be monitored from a dashboard. Others feature platforms that simplify the process for users to share a company’s content and marketing narratives, in some cases rewarding them for every share.
Brand advocacy software tends to be focused on either customer advocacy or employee advocacy, although there are a number of products that provide platforms for engaging both employees and customers.
To qualify for inclusion in the Customer Advocacy category, a product must:
- Provide features to create and manage referral programs in order to find and attract the best advocates for each brand
- Deliver engagement and communication tools to establish an ongoing personalized dialogue with advocates
- Have the ability to help marketers share information, content, and documents with advocates, which may be different at each stage of the engagement
- Monitor interactions with advocates and their activities to understand how they can help marketers and what they need to become better at it
