Customer Advocacy
In one line
Customer advocacy turns satisfied customers into active brand advocates whose voice — through reviews, referrals and community — becomes a primary acquisition channel.
Going deeper
Customer advocacy goes one step beyond satisfied customers. Advocates don't just repurchase — they write reviews unprompted, refer peers and defend the brand inside communities. The work is intentionally cultivating that behaviour.
Common shapes are formal customer reference programs, power-user communities and dedicated advocacy hubs. The trick isn't paying advocates — it's recognising their expertise and influence. Genuine advocates respond to recognition far more than to incentives.
In B2B, advocacy is the single biggest source of decisive sales material. When a prospect has watched the demo and still can't commit, a 20-minute reference call with a peer at a similar company tends to close more deals than any new asset marketing can produce.
Related terms
Customer Success
Customer success is the discipline of proactively helping customers achieve their business goals with your product — increasingly treated as a core SaaS growth engine, not a support function.
MarketingUGC
User-generated content (UGC) is content created by customers themselves — reviews, photos, videos, social posts — and acts as both a credibility signal and a low-cost reach engine.
MarketingWord-of-Mouth Marketing
Word-of-mouth marketing engineers the conditions for customers to recommend the brand naturally — turning the most trusted channel of all, peer recommendation, into a marketing engine.
MarketingVoice of Customer
Voice of customer (VoC) is the systematic practice of gathering and analysing customer feedback — reviews, interviews, surveys, support tickets — and feeding it back into product and marketing decisions.
MarketingNPS
Net promoter score (NPS) asks users how likely they are to recommend the product on a 0–10 scale, then takes promoters minus detractors as a single loyalty number.