How to Turn Loyal Customers Into Advocates in SaaS

While “you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar” might be an old and well-worn phrase, it’s also true today of the SaaS industry. After all, attracting, catching, and keeping new customers has always been the name of the game-step in brand advocacy.

Brand advocates in SaaS offer so much more than fandom — they are your secret and often most helpful marketing team. By spreading brand awareness, they influence their network to become customers too.

Let’s explore how you can harness their admiration to scale your SaaS for success!

What Does Brand Advocacy Mean? 🧐

Brand advocates are like cheerleaders for your brand. They are the customers who love what you offer and are willing to sing your praises to anyone who will listen.

How do they do this? They talk. Whether it be through word of mouth or social media, advocates in SaaS are like walking megaphones for your business’s message.

Brand advocacy programs drive lead generation and conversions, leading to the ultimate SaaS goal — sales. And the best part? The broadcasting is free. You get all the benefits of traditional marketing and customer acquisition strategies with zero cost.

11 Steps for Converting Customers to Advocates 📈

So how do you go about collecting brand advocates for your SaaS? Who are they? Where are they? Why would they want the job? To help answer these questions, we’ve compiled a list of eleven key steps to finding and attracting advocates in SaaS.

1. Find Your Advocates

The first step to finding advocates for your SaaS is to seek them out from the audience pools already accessible to you.

Start by understanding your target market, as that’s where your advocates will primarily come from. This gives you a better shot at creating messaging that will engage and resonate with them.

You can use data from market and sales research to segment your audience. After you’ve segmented your audience and found your target customers, it’s time to dig a little deeper.

Here are some tips for sifting through your target customers to find your dream advocates in SaaS:
• Zoom in on customers who have mentioned your brand in their social media content. Follow the conversations generated surrounding this content.
• Look for customers who have tagged your brand in their photos.
• Sift through your product reviews. Pick customers who have gone out of their way to share positive feedback or give high ratings.
• Analyze your sales reports, pinpointing your most active customers.
• Look into whether you have employees who would fit the profile of an advocate.
• Employee advocates are a bonus as they already know your brand and its conduct rules.

2. Provide a Quality Product

When searching for SaaS advocates, the next step is to make sure you have a product worth advocating for. You need a quality product that communicates value to your customers. Why else would they want to endorse it to their loved ones?

→ How?
You need to keep a finger on the pulse of what’s considered quality. Try creating a quality measuring system (QMS). A QMS allows you to drill quality in all levels of product development. You should also conduct beta-testing, market evaluations, and regular product checks.

→ Why?
Focusing on quality gives you a chance to preview what your product will be like in the real world. You’ll fix errors, add better features and improve the functionality of your product before it launches. This will make sure it meets your customer’s needs and solves their pain points.

→ Where?
It’s imperative to embed quality into every level of your business, not just product development. For example, centering quality in market research helps to finetune product distribution. From sales and marketing to customer service — quality should be the buzzword for your whole organization.

3. Use an Omnichannel Approach

One of the best ways to gain advocates in SaaS is to take an omnichannel approach to the shopping experience. Following this approach, retailers integrate multiple retail channels from websites and stores to mobile apps and catalogs.

This approach ensures the shopping experience remains consumer-focused as the channels can communicate. You’ll be able to learn about and retarget consumers, automate your business processes and manage customer data.

4. Streamline Your Customer Service

The key to brand advocacy is all about customer service. There’s far more to like about a brand than its products alone. A huge part of customers’ opinion rests in their experience of dealing with your brand as a whole. This includes your staff.

Poor customer service is guaranteed to put customers off wanting to become advocates in SaaS. Why would someone advocate for a brand that annoys or dismisses them? Instead, they want to feel heard and appreciated.

Improving customer service and having your staff go above and beyond to help customers will inspire trust and a sense of loyalty for your brand. Happy customers who feel respected and supported are more likely to shout about your services to others.

5. Offer Appealing Loyalty Programs

Most people love nothing more than a pat on the back when they’ve done well. After all, recognition and affirmation feel good. This brings us to step five of our brand advocacy breakdown, and that’s loyalty programs.

Loyalty programs offer your customers extra incentives to keep them coming back to your brand. The more customers interact with you, the stronger the tie between them, and your brand becomes. Eventually, they are bound so closely that they’ll jump at the opportunity to advocate for you.

Launching an appealing loyalty program can get tricky. You want as many customers as possible to join in. Try using these tips to craft a loyalty program that works for you -
• Make sure your program is easy to use and understand.
• Incorporate social interactions like sharing, voting, or surveys.
• Making rewards too easy to get costs money, but making it too much effort puts customers off. You need to strike the right balance.
• Offer enticing rewards and discounts.

Explore the full list of action steps for converting customers into advocates in SaaS, so that you can build your brand awareness and drive sales, on PayPro Global’s blog.