Creating customer loyalty is essential to building brand evangelists. Brand evangelists are champions for your cause, they’re socially connected, and influential in speaking for the virtues of your organization or product. I’ll add a few ideas from Kevin Gawthrope, a Social Media Marketing Director, who outlines a simple, yet effective way to build brand evangelists for your organization. His method is simple and can be implemented by anyone, from the largest companies, to the individual business owner.

Social media lets you reach, connect, and develop relationships with brand evangelists.

Brand evangelists are customers, so connecting with them is part of customer service. The key is to use social media to reach out, connect, and develop relationships with your pool of brand evangelists. Connecting with your users is an essencial part of customer experience.

 

It’s critical to quietly introduce your product/service into the Facebook/Twitter conversation. By using Facebook to manage the people you know (warm market) together with Twitter to manage the people you don’t.

-Kevin Gawthrope

How to build an army of brand evangelists:

• Make frequent contact with your potential brand evangelists.
• Share interesting content (get people to share what you have to say).
• Train people on what to say & how to say it.
• Give away secrets (and giving trial products & services helps).
• Build trust with brand evangelists & your influence will grow.
• Promote. Promote. Promote.
• Exclusive offers, promotions, events via social media (Facebook/Twitter).

The ultimate goal for your should be to build a community of active, digitally vocal users around your brand. Success in today’s digital marketplace requires search engine support and that’ll require fresh, unique, relevant content. It’ll require word-of-mouth excitement from users who back up the product, services, and online marketing material with real-world user experience. Together they build the solid customer converting process to help your brand achieve success.

Brand evangelists require a brand experience that matches the brand promise.

It’s not just a marketing ploy, or a customer service team mission. Creating brand evangelists has to be a total organization mission. From top management, to programmers, marketers, customer service teams, even your receptionist has to be on board. Every employee must know their role in the plan to create brand evangelists and how their decisions and actions help develop the brand experience.

It’s crucial that the brand promise and emphasis on developing brand evangelists be communicated often to employees. Each individual has to be committed to live out the brand promise in daily job actions. Decisions need to be focused on customer experience. Customer feedback has to be received and customers need to be notified, even if we decided as an organization to not use the specific feedback item. As brand passion takes hold in your organization, it’s especially important to make sure that you don’t have a lazy individual who messes it up. One bad attitude that turns into bad online reviews can undo your hard work.

Focus on building brand evangelists and your hard work in will pay off in success for your organization.