How to Use Net Promoter Score
I recently received a review copy of a new book called Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force and literally tore through the book and dog-eared several pages.
If you’re in marketing or market research this is a must read! You can also see this terrific interview article written by Dana Stanley over at Research Access where he talks with Rob Fuggetta about what brand advocacy is and how companies can use it for their marketing.
Net Promoter Score is a central tool for brand advocacy or customer advocacy.
You might think that finding brand advocates would be nearly impossible — and you would be wrong. In fact when I read exactly how Zuberance does it and recommends it, I just about fell off my chair — NPS – Net Promoter Score. How obvious is THAT?
One of the criticisms of Net Promoter Scores is that the score just sits there — or companies get engaged around IMPROVING the score. But what about RECRUITING the promoters? I’ve not heard of too many people doing this — and this is exactly the strategy that Fuggetta is talking about.
Promoters = Advocates
It doesn’t get any more simple than that. Your business has promoters (a little or a lot) and these are people who are happy and enthusiastic about the products or services that you offer — and you may not be leveraging their enthusiasm and energy for your brand nearly as much as you should.
How to take advantage of Brand Advocates
- Find your advocates — that’s easy — run a customer survey and ask the ultimate NPS question “How likely are you to refer (our company) to a friend or family member?” Use a 1-10 scale and pick everyone who gave you a 9 or 10 rating.
- Profile your advocates — You might have already done this as part of your survey with the standard demographics, but you can also get creative and ask some profiling questions inside your NPS survey such as “which social networks do you participate in?” or “how many Facebook friends do you have?” I happened to be focusing on questions around connectedness because I want to focus on people who are well connected and will share their story about my brand, but you can choose something else.
- Now that you have a profile — you can go looking for advocates who fit the profile but aren’t customers yet.
- Give people the product or give them access or experience with your service. After all, it’s hard to advocate for something you haven’t experienced yet.
- Mobilize your advocates. This is where the rubber hits the road. I’d say that this is the most challenging component of any advocate strategy. The idea is to give your advocates a structure that makes it easy for them to share their wonderful enthusiasm for your brand. You want to create active social media spaces where advocates can “play” and it also helps to send them information and notices of what you have going on that they can participate in.
- Track your results. As in any program, you want to make sure you have clearly defined goals and measurement systems in place. You don’t have to go crazy with complexity. You might choose to track how many sign-ups you have for trials of your product or service for example. You can also track Google Analytics or any web sites or pages that you have created around the brand. Another option is to start conversations around a blog and track the number of comments.
Developing brand advocates is the next evolution of leveraging referrals for your brand.
