Customer advocacy has become a buzzword in the marketing world, but is actually just a new name for an old — but highly effective — way of attracting new customers.
In essence, customer advocacy marketing is the process of getting your genuinely happy customers to communicate their positive experience of your brand to potential customers. It’s word-of-mouth marketing, or referral marketing for the modern age, and is also sometimes simply referred to as customer marketing.
The difference with modern day customer advocacy marketing is that brands are more aware of the power of using loyal customers as brand advocates and for increasing brand awareness and validation. So, they nurture those customer advocate relationships specifically to use them in their marketing campaigns, typically by setting up a customer advocacy program.
Setting up an advocacy marketing program from scratch may seem complex at first glance, but, in fact, any brand offering a great product or service already has loyal customers they can use to share real customer success stories. All you need is a solid process to collect and then showcase those assets.
This is where Vocal Video comes in because it was especially designed to make it easy for your customers to remotely record and send you videos answering a set of questions that you ask them. We’ve made our video recording process so straightforward to use that you can ask for and receive videos repeatedly, asynchronously, and at scale. With our platform, you can use video to get customer feedback and testimonials whenever you need them.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use Vocal Video to harness the power of video as part of your overall customer advocacy marketing strategy to:
- Collect regular and constant video feedback from your customer advocates, increase customer engagement, and improve customer satisfaction.
- Share the video testimonials and case studies you have gathered through social media and other online channels with your potential customers.
Along the way, we’ll also explain how to use Vocal Video to edit and polish the testimonial videos and other user-generated content you collect from brand advocates into high-quality videos you can be proud to use in your customer-facing marketing program.
Ready to get started on using Vocal Video to collect customer feedback and share customer success stories? Kickstart your customer advocacy marketing process by signing up for a free Vocal Video account.
1. Use Vocal Video to Get Constant Feedback from Loyal Customers
The first step in using video in your customer advocacy marketing is to set up a process for your customers to give you constant feedback on your products and services.
By using video to do this — rather than just written feedback — the information you get is more genuine and raw and your customers are more likely to be more open and natural with the feedback they provide.
Plus, people are more engaged by video and tend to trust what they can see and hear to a higher degree.
You can select the customer advocates you want to request feedback from by setting up a brand loyalty program with incentives for providing feedback, or simply by requesting feedback on an ad hoc basis.
Whenever you make changes to your product, update it, make new acquisitions, or anything else, get them onboard and request feedback on their experience of these changes. It’s likely you’ll receive both positive and negative customer feedback at this stage and that honesty and openness should be encouraged because it will help you identify your greatest advocates when you need testimonials.
If you already have an established Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) program in place, you can use those surveys to identify the most likely advocates in your customer base.
For example, Promoters as defined by the NPS methodology, are the ones who give you a score of 9 or 10. These individuals make excellent candidates for follow up and additional customer advocacy efforts, like asking for a testimonial video via Vocal Video. In this way, Vocal Video can be an excellent complement to your existing NPS and CSAT efforts.
Once you start receiving regular feedback, you can also include your customers’ opinions in ongoing changes to your brand or with new products, for example. This further nurtures the relationship you have with your customer advocates because they can see that your brand values their opinion.
For tips on nurturing customer loyalty and attracting more brand advocates in today’s market, see our article on customer advocacy in a post-Covid world.
How to Collect Customer Feedback Using Vocal Video
At Vocal Video, we have specifically designed our video collection and recording process to make it easy for anyone — even with absolutely no video recording expertise — to record a feedback or testimonial video.
To start the process, you simply put together what we call a “video collector” in just a few steps:
- Name your video collector and add a welcome message or video to explain what you want and thank your brand advocates for giving feedback.
- Optional: Include an incentive for recording a customer feedback video. Vocal Video offers a free monthly prize drawing, but you can add your own choice of incentive.
- Write the questions you want feedback on. You can adapt them from the ones included in our customer feedback and testimonial templates.
- Add your logos, colors and branding to include in the finished video.
- Send your brand advocates a link to record the feedback video.
For detailed information on how to build a video collector in Vocal Video, see our five-minute video.
Once your customers receive the link, they just click on it to be taken to a Vocal Video landing page branded with your logo and brand colors where they read each question you set and answer it by recording a short video.
Customers record their feedback using their own device (an iPhone or other smartphone, a tablet, or computer) directly on the Vocal Video platform.
Once they’ve recorded their response, they can watch it back and re-record it, or move on to recording their response to the next question.
When they are done recording, they click submit and you get a notification that you’ve received a new video.
The video you receive arrives pre-edited to include the following features:
- Your brand colors and logo
- Text overlays
- Motion graphics and animations
- Computer-generated captions and a transcript
- Background music
These features make the feedback videos much easier to view because they come pre-organized with question-answer formatting.
However, this automatic video editing process really comes into its own when you share testimonial videos as part of your marketing campaigns (more on that below).
The process of collecting feedback videos is exactly the same as the one used for collecting the customer testimonial videos you will use in the next step of your customer advocacy marketing process.
The main differences are that the questions you ask will be more focused on the messaging you have in mind for your advocate marketing initiatives, and you may want to edit and polish your videos for greater impact on potential customers (more on that below).
2. Use Vocal Video to Share Your Brand Advocates’ Positive Experiences
After receiving feedback from your customers on a regular basis, it will become clear who your greatest brand advocates are. These are the people who you can ask to record customer testimonial videos for you.
To get them to do this, simply repeat the process of building a video collector as described above and adapt the questions to focus your customer advocate on providing a brand testimonial, rather than just feedback.
Click here to see our in-depth article for more information on how to come up with good testimonial video questions.
Create Polished Videos to Share on Your Marketing Channels
After you get your pre-edited video back from your customer advocate, you also have the option of using Vocal Video’s comprehensive set of in-platform editing tools to get it ready to share on your customer-facing channels.
Like the rest of the Vocal Video platform, our editing tools are designed to be used effortlessly, even if you have no previous experience. It is quick and easy to become adept at using them.
Click here to watch our 7-minute video for comprehensive instructions on using Vocal Video’s editing tools.
Here’s what you can do using our editing tools:
- Rearrange the order of the recorded responses.
- Trim responses to remove pauses or unrelated information.
- Add extra, or different, text overlays.
- Add interstitial slides with extra information.
- Alter colors and logos.
- Change background music and change its volume (use one of our free tracks or upload your own).
- Add external video, like screen recordings, animated logos, and other B-roll scenes.
- Create highlight reels using footage from different brand advocates’ responses.
For additional effects, you also have the option of uploading your testimonial video into a professional video editing software package.
Click here to watch our 7-minute video on how to use the Vocal Video editing tools.
Use Automatically-Generated Links for Social Sharing
The final step in any customer advocacy marketing strategy is sharing customer stories where potential customers can see them.
Vocal Video includes free hosting and embedding on all paid accounts to make it easy and affordable for you to share all your customer advocacy videos.
Our platform offers the following video embedding and sharing options:
- Responsive video embeds: Embed your customer advocacy videos directly on your website.
- Branded public video pages: You don’t need a separate video hosting service and your branded video page within the Vocal Video platform is completely ad-free.
- One-click sharing to major social media platforms: Vocal Videos can be shared in a single click to most of the major social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) and for others, you can download the video and upload it to the relevant platform.
Click here to see our article for more on sharing and embedding Vocal Videos.
Vocal Video: An Effortless Way to Collect and Record Video Feedback and Testimonials for Your Customer Advocacy Marketing Program
Vocal Video is a simple-to-use video app that you can use regularly to collect video feedback and testimonials from your brand advocates as part of your wider customer advocacy marketing program.
It provides you with all the tools you need to:
- Regularly collect and record customer feedback videos for internal use.
- Record and collect customer-facing brand advocate video testimonials.
- Edit video testimonials for greater impact and a more professional look.
- Host and share videos of positive customer experiences across the web.
Ready to get started on using Vocal Video to collect customer feedback and share customer success stories? Kickstart your customer advocacy marketing process by signing up for a free Vocal Video account.