BRAND ADVOCACY 6 AND AWARENESS User reviews can complement and enhance your existing advocacy program and boost brand awareness. While advocacy programs typically draw from your best customers, ratings and reviews expose you to a wider range of customers, all of whom have valuable stories to tell. “Advocacy and being willing to share a point of view in a public space are one and the same,” says Goldstein. “Customers are huge advocates for a brand if they achieve success using it.” To build your brand advocacy: • Look for positive reviewers who write especially detailed reviews or who focus on an aspect of your product that you want to highlight. Contact them with a personal thank-you to start building a relationship. • Reach out to negative reviews with a goal to turn them around. Negative reviewers who turn positive can be your most powerful brand advocates. In that instance, you can even ask them to update their negative review when the issue is resolved. Then, turn reviewers into brand advocates by asking them to join your advocacy program or a beta user group. • Use a third-party site to host and manage authenticated reviews. Buyers today conduct extensive research online before ever reaching out to salespeople, and only 34% are willing to consider vendor related content as trustworthy, according to Demand Gen Report’s 2017 Content Preferences Survey Report. A presence on a review site with robust content and superior SEO can surface your company to buyers in the research phase who might never hear of you otherwise, boosting your brand awareness. • Use reviews to gain market exposure for a new product or company. Gaining market presence quickly can be difficult, especially in a saturated market. Reviews offer a way to sidestep the traditional analyst ranking and establish your presence next to big competitors. When Looker partnered with a third-party review site to help drive new reviews and tell their story, the outreach resulted in more testimonials about the exceptional experience customers had with Looker’s B2B data platform. The verified user reviews on the third-party site also provided objective, head-to-head product differentiation and increased awareness of Looker’s offering in a competitive market. Professional Services Automation SaaS vendor Kimble leverages its high user satisfaction ratings on third- party review sites to gain visibility online. By using reviews to grow brand awareness, Kimble can devote fewer resources to online marketing and more to product development and customer success — yet, still compete successfully against companies with big marketing budgets. 8