3 ways customers advocate your hospitality brand
Summary
Brand advocacy is earned media: customers recommending you because they mean it. Here are the three most common forms, and how to encourage each one.
Reviews, word of mouth and dark social: the three ways customers advocate your brand, and how to earn more of each.
Repeat customers who recommend you without being asked are the cheapest marketing there is. That is brand advocacy: a form of earned media, meaning you do not pay for it, you earn it by being worth talking about.
Customers show it in three common ways.
1. Online reviews and testimonials
A customer who left a positive review is halfway to being an advocate: they have already said something good about you in public. Your job is to keep that going.
Respond to negative reviews, and respond to positive ones too. It shows you value your customers and want a relationship with them, not just a rating.
Tip: actively encourage repeat customers and the people engaging with your socials to leave a review, and make it easy for them.
2. Word of mouth
Word of mouth is organic, and that makes it more persuasive than anything you can buy as advertising. People trust other people.
A lot of it happens online now, as user-generated content: social posts, reels and videos of the night out. When a customer posts about you, comment and re-share it. That amplifies their message and tells them it was noticed.
3. Dark social
Dark social is the conversation that moves off public feeds and into private spaces: WhatsApp groups, DMs and messenger apps.
A customer sends photos of the night to a friend instead of posting them. Someone asks the family group for a restaurant recommendation. You cannot track it and it is hard to influence, because it happens in the dark.
The good news: you probably have more advocates in those channels than you think. You cannot buy your way in, but you can give people something worth sending to a friend, then make the next visit easy to book.
Advocacy starts with knowing who your best customers are. Your loyalty and spend data shows who keeps coming back and who brings friends with them. Book a demo and we will show you what your own data says.
See it running on your venues
One unified guest record across Wi-Fi, bookings, reviews and loyalty, and the marketing that acts on it.