Customer Advocacy: How to Get People to Talk About Your Company

Are your customers advocates for your brand or business?

Want to improve customer satisfaction and advocacy?

To find out how to turn customers into advocates, I interview Joey Coleman.
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The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

Joey Coleman joins us today. He's a customer advocacy consultant and coach who has worked with Hyatt Hotels, NASA, and Zappos. Joey's also a frequent keynote speaker and leads workshops on the customer experience and the customer journey.

Joey explores what it takes to turn a customer into an advocate.

You'll discover the phases that lead to advocacy.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Customer Advocacy
Joey's Story

Joey has had an eclectic career. After college and law school, he did business consulting before working as a criminal defense attorney in the courtroom for many years. Then he taught executive education courses and ran a division of a promotional products company.

About 15 years ago, Joey started his own brand experience and design firm. This led him to speak on stages all over the world, talking about how to create remarkable experiences that take someone from being a one-time customer to a customer for life.

In each of his careers, Joey says, success hinged on two things. First, an understanding of human psychology (why people believe what they believe and why they do the things they do). And second, an ability to use that understanding to persuade people to take a certain course of action, whether it's a sales pitch, brochure, website, infographic, piece of evidence introduced in the courtroom, or a closing argument.

Looking back, his entire career has been all about the experience; meaning the experience someone is currently having and how to make it better.

While marketing firms build ad campaigns, branding agencies design logos, and graphic design firms execute the visuals, Joey looks at brand experience and how all of the different elements of a business work together. Experience is the through-line that connects everything.

Listen to the show to discover how the name of Joey's business, Design Symphony, represents brand experience.

Why Customer Advocacy Matters

Joey thinks customer advocacy is really the end goal for most organizations. It happens when you reach the point where your customers are such big believers in who you are and what you do that they become your external sales force. Customers drive new business and increase the amount of business they do with you because they've become such raving fans, they can't help themselves. They advocate zealously for you and your business.

Joey shares a brief overview of the history of business.

In the 1980s, he explains, a movement came out of Japan that became known as the Total Quality Management approach to business. It was all about reducing product defects to as close to zero as possible. Out of this came things like Six Sigma Black Belt, as well as a general belief that when you buy something, it's going to work.

The 1990s were all about Just-in-Time manufacturing. For example, companies like Dell shortened the supply chain through building things on demand. As a result, the computer giant could dramatically control inventory, while at the same time push prices lower. Companies started to succeed based on being the lowest-priced player in the game, while at this higher level of quality.

In the 2000s, it became all about the Internet era. Businesses built websites and could make everything available globally 24/7.

Then in the 2010s, everything that happened over the past three decades came together.