From Taylor Swift's enthusiastically vocal Swifties to Fred again's loyal fans organising IRL parties around his latest album, the biggest superfans are keen to pick up a megaphone for their faves.

When fans and customers feel a connection with a brand, they're primed to become brand advocates. In all verticals - music, gaming, fashion or any industry segment - you can nurture a connection that makes passionate superfans want to take to their social channels and spread the word about their love of what you do.

This is crucial, because 83% of customers trust personal recommendations from people they know more than any marketing (according to Nielsen). Word of mouth is the primary driving force behind 20 to 50% of all purchasing decisions (according to McKinsey).

Money can't buy that kind of organic multi-channel promotion. Done right, you can develop a flywheel of community-driven growth - an authentic and cost-effective strategy for increasing visibility, trust, and even revenue.

So how do you turn casual followers into passionate brand advocates? Which brand advocacy strategies drive tangible marketing ROI from fan promotion? And how does Discord empower brands to drive this transformation?

Challenges brands face in creating brand advocates

While community-driven growth is an attractive prospect, many brands struggle to build effective brand advocacy strategies. Engaging your community is one thing, but converting fans into advocates who actively champion your brand requires deeper, more personal connections.

Here are a few common challenges:

• Lack of engagement tools: Without the right tools, it’s difficult to identify your most passionate community members.
• Unclear incentives: Offering incentives and rewards without understanding what your community truly values can lead to wasted effort and unimpressed fans.
• Inconsistent interaction: Sporadic communication can leave fans feeling ignored, dampening their enthusiasm for promoting your brand.

Fortunately there are solutions for these challenges. And brands that get it right can benefit from powerful, organic advocacy.

Strategies for developing brand advocates

To transform your superfans into brand advocates, you need to build a relationship that goes beyond simple interactions. Your community should be a place that people love to hang out, thanks to effective engagement strategies. The next step is to get people talking about it.

To nurture word-of-mouth marketing, employ these brand advocacy strategies:

1. Engage your top community members

The first thing you need to do is identify your most engaged members. The Levellr dashboard helps you seek out different types of fans, so you can reach the influencers who drive conversations with their peers, create user-generated content (UGC) and provide feedback to admins. Then, make them feel valued.

2. Provide incentives for advocacy

Rewarding your most engaged members for their advocacy is key. Offer incentives that matter to them, such as:

• Exclusive experiences like backstage passes or game betas.
• Recognition badges or roles in your community.
• Special shout-outs in your live streams or events.

Tapping into what drives their passion ensures you’re offering rewards that genuinely motivate them to cheer for the community and your brand.

3. Active listening and consistent interaction

Advocacy is built on trust, and trust grows through meaningful conversation between brand and fans. Brands need to actively listen to the community, respond to feedback and engage in two-way dialogue over time. Consistency and transparency helps build a sense of belonging and loyalty. Polls, live events, direct chats and forum channels keep your community engaged and foster deeper connections.

4. Personalisation and authenticity

A one-size-fits-all approach rarely works when recruiting brand advocates. Personalise your interactions, acknowledging members' unique contributions. Does a member use lots of channels or focus on specific subjects? Do they share their own content, or just chat? Do they join in with campaigns or prefer fan-driven discussion? When fans feel seen, their personal connection to your brand makes them more likely to promote it enthusiastically.

• Authenticity is key: Fans can tell when a brand is being disingenuous.
• Don't be afraid to formalise the process: You can educate influencers on the goals and messaging you need to encourage. Where fans are suspicious of being told what to do, simply steer them with a light nudge that incentivises desired actions, like sharing a specific link or posting at a set time to create a critical mass of posts when you need it.
• Make it shareable: Most importantly, give your fans a shareable, visual story that will actually provide value to the right audience - and convert to new members or increased sales.

How Levellr helps create brand advocates

When you work with Levellr, you're equipped you with a range of simple but powerful community tools for engagement. These features and dashboards are designed to help brands identify and engage your most passionate community members.

Key features include:

• Sentiment tracking: Feel the vibe of the community by monitoring overall sentiment across conversations. Seeing how members are feeling about the brand is just the start - you can also pinpoint the most engaged who could become an advocate.
• CGC hub: Easily gather community-generated content in one dashboard. See what's going down well with members and with one click reach out to creators to invite them to release their content on your channels, attracting new fans with authentic social proof.
• Community events: We can help your team organise and promote exclusive events tailored for your top members, driving both loyalty and advocacy.

Whatever your industry or vertical, Levellr's community management experts can guide your team in proven engagement strategies and retention techniques. Harnessing data analytics that go way beyond crude follower counts, Levellr ensures you have the insights and tools to convert your fans into superfans - and superfans into passionate advocates.

Example: Call of Duty’s UGC campaign

Take, for example, the success of Call of Duty's UGC campaigns. The team behind hit game Call of Duty invited fans to submit user-generated content, including in-game clips and artwork, which was later featured across their official channels. Giving fans a platform for public recognition and showcasing community creations was a simple but effective approach that not only increased engagement but also turned their community members into vocal brand advocates, amplifying the initial investment with a far-reaching ripple of promotion.

Harness the power of community-driven growth

Turning your engaged community members into brand advocates is a great way to build that all-important trust with fans and customers. When passionate fans shout your brand story from the rooftops, you unlock organic growth, conjure up authentic and low-cost promotion, and build long-lasting loyalty.

Here at Levellr, we help clients like Fall Out Boy and Starbucks understand and engage with their superfans and loyal customers. To see how it works, check out our YouTube playlist of handy video guides or read more about how a Discord community can help you smash your brand goals, in gaming or any vertical.

Contact Levellr today to learn how you can build a happy community of people who are excited to go out and shout about it.