B2B Branding Turns Customers Into Advocates

No. You need something more effective. You need … someone on the inside. A brand advocate to help you do the selling for you.

What’s a Brand Advocate?

More than a “qualified lead,” a brand advocate is your unabashed cheerleader. Someone who’s willing to fight to get your product or service used at their company. Someone who will speak up in meetings and say, “Hey, why aren’t we using this thing already?”

Skeptical? Don’t be. Brand advocates are out there. They’re proud to be out there. And you know ‘em when you see ‘em.

Take, for instance, our pals over at Tango, whose step-by-step interactive walkthroughs make product onboarding a lot easier. Their G2 profile boasts an overwhelming number of five-star reviews, dozens of which include the word “love.” As one review plainly puts it: “LOVE THIS TOOL.”

Another example: Hubspot, whose 2023 INBOUND conference had 11,000 attendees of self-described “HubFans.” It doesn’t take a long LinkedIn search to find posts proclaiming love for everything from Hubspot’s customer service to its ongoing sales support.

These examples might sound extreme, and sure, these are some selective cases. But consider examples in your own life. Surely you’ve enjoyed a product or service so much that you’ve tried to win someone over. And you’ve probably been on the receiving end of it, too.

Creating a Brand People Advocate For

So, how do you get fans screaming about your offering from the rooftops? The name “brand advocate” just about speaks for itself: It begins with brand.

This means taking your brand above and beyond product-level messaging. Your organization’s best sales leaders already know that when you sell, you don’t sell to an organization — you sell to people in that organization. And it’s the same principle in brand.

This means not only solving your audience’s immediate problem, but understanding their wants and needs on a deeper, more emotional level. And from that understanding, developing a consistent voice that communicates, verbally and visually, all the things that make you different and better than the rest.

Sound like a lot? It can be. But the good news is that you don’t have to have every nuance of your brand figured out from the get-go. The important thing, as our friends at Tango say in this episode of The Debrief, is that you invest in brand early.

Disclaimer: None of this matters if your product or service doesn’t deliver on what your brand promises. The very best brands harmonize with and elevate their organizations. But they can’t make something out of nothing.

Brand isn’t an excuse to oversell and underdeliver. It can’t fix a broken product or make a subpar service better. Ultimately, brand is your best opportunity to get people excited about the real things you have to offer.

The Power of Brand Advocacy

A successful brand creates moments of connection with its audience. It creates excitement. And that excitement can be contagious.

How a person feels about your brand can make all the difference between them choosing you or not. And it can be the deciding factor in whether they’re compelled to advocate about it to others — or not.

Done right and done well, a successful brand can create a domino effect among these brand advocates, who go on to recruit more brand advocates, and on and on. And in this way, your brand becomes a force multiplier.

Sure, building out a successful brand might be more complicated than brute forcing your sales, and the results might not be immediately apparent. But like any good investment, you’d better believe it’ll pay dividends in the long run.