10 Best Brand Advocacy Software Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 16 tools reviewed.
There are so many different brand advocacy software solutions that making a shortlist of the best can be tricky. You want a tool to identify, engage, and mobilize your brand advocates, encouraging them to share positive experiences and recommendations about your company across their networks. I've got you covered! In this post, I share from my personal experience using many different brand advocacy platforms, and share my picks of the best brand advocacy software overall.
What Is Brand Advocacy Software
Brand advocacy software is a digital tool designed to identify and engage a company's most enthusiastic supporters, like satisfied customers, dedicated employees, and loyal partners. The purpose is to encourage and manage these advocates in promoting the brand, often through social media and other online platforms. Brand advocacy platforms help in organizing and tracking advocacy activities, such as content sharing, product reviews, and referrals.
Overviews Of The 12 Best Brand Advocacy Software
The following are my reviews of the best brand advocacy software available for your business. In each, I detail what makes them worth consideration, pricing, and more.
Birdeye offers competitive benchmarking capabilities that advocates marketing teams can use to get an overview of advocacy campaign performance.
Why I picked Birdeye: The platform provides insights into advocates and how their efforts compare to other advocates, helping them see where they stand in your campaigns. This feature from Birdeye encourages some healthy competition between your advocates, motivating them to shine and improve performance. Also, this allows you to identify top-performing advocates and reward them appropriately.
Birdeye Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include referral templates to help you save time and easily customize messaging and designs, increasing conversions and effectively reflecting your brand. Birdeye also offers referral rewards capabilities that help increase response rates and maximize referral conversion.
Integrations include over 3,000 native connections to simplify advocate programs, such as Acuity Scheduling, AgencyAnalytics, Constant Contact, Hubspot, Invoice2go, Power BI, QuickBooks Online, Salesforce, ShippingEasy, Zoho CRM, and other software options. You can also create custom integrations using Birdeye’s API or a paid Zapier account.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Simple to use
- Omnichannel capabilities
- Excellent customer service
Cons:
- Can be slow to load
- Reporting can be limited
Brand24 is a brand advocacy software that empowers companies to identify and engage with their most influential supporters, leveraging real-time monitoring of online mentions to amplify positive brand experiences. Brand24's sentiment analysis helps in pinpointing positive mentions, enabling companies to amplify these voices through social sharing and engagement strategies. By leveraging these authentic endorsements, businesses can enhance their brand's credibility, extend their reach, and build a stronger online presence.
Why I picked Brand24: Brand24 excels as a brand advocacy software by providing businesses with the tools to identify, monitor, and engage with brand advocates across various online platforms. By tracking mentions of the brand, products, or relevant keywords, companies can easily discover enthusiastic customers and influencers who are naturally promoting their offerings. This insight allows businesses to recognize and reward these advocates, fostering a sense of community and loyalty around their brand.
Brand24 Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include advanced sentiment analysis reporting, which is particularly useful for brand advocacy, as it sifts through online mentions to identify not only the most positive and enthusiastic comments but also nuanced sentiments that could represent opportunities for turning satisfied customers into active advocates. By understanding the sentiment behind mentions, businesses can tailor their engagement strategies to more effectively foster brand loyalty and encourage positive word-of-mouth.
Integrations include Slack and SEMrush.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Strong competitor analysis
- Affordable pricing makes for businesses of all sizes
- Real-time alerts let you respond to mentions quickly
Cons:
- Only supports a limited number of languages
- Could use more integrations
Sociabble is an employee advocacy tool that helps marketing departments integrate relevant external content with internal ambassadors and social selling campaigns.
Why I picked Sociabble: The platform excels in integrating internal and external advocacy efforts to create effective campaigns. Sociabble provides a platform where your employees can engage in advocacy programs while connecting with external brand advocates. This holistic approach helps your brand encourage advocacy from internal and external stakeholders, resulting in a comprehensive, unified advocacy strategy.
Sociabble Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include data security tools that meet GDPR compliance regulations, protecting corporate offices and remote workers. Sociabble will also provide a customer service management team to help you implement strategies when using the platform.
Integrations include the ability to create custom connections between Sociabble and your current systems using its API.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Responsive support team
- Good for engaging employees
- Easy to use and navigate
Cons:
- Limited keywords can be used for posts
- Content distribution isn’t always accurate
Haiilo helps marketing teams enhance employee advocacy by gamifying the experience to show employees how they perform compared to other team members.
Why I picked Haiilo: I decided to add Haiilo (formerly Smarp) because it uses a gamification system to help enhance your employee advocacy strategy. Haiilo transforms employee advocates into active, enthusiastic brand ambassadors by introducing functions such as challenges, leaderboards, and rewards. This will help foster healthy competition among your team and increase employee engagement through advocacy efforts.
Haiilo Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include employee surveys that help you understand what matters most to your employee advocates through intelligent insights and automated analytics. Haiilo also offers multichannel communication tools that foster a connected workforce between you and your employee advocates.
Integrations include connections with a small number of tools to extend Haiilo’s functionality, such as Drupal, Google Drive, Hubspot CRM, Microsoft Teams, OneLogin, Salesforce, Slack, Telekom MMS, Trello, WordPress, and other software options. You can also create custom integrations with the platform’s API when needed.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Allows brands to connect with every employee
- Easy to use
- Simple user experience
Cons:
- Not many native integrations
- Sending large files can be difficult
Sprout Social’s employee advocacy capabilities enable marketing teams to share content libraries so their employee brand advocates can quickly and easily post to their preferred social network.
Why I picked Sprout Social: I added Sprout Social to this list because the platform sets itself apart by offering an employee advocacy content library. Sprout Social provides a centralized repository of pre-approved content your employee brand advocates can share, allowing you to simplify content distribution and ensure consistent brand messaging. This can help you streamline content management and make it easier for your team members to become advocates.
Sprout Social Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include tools to help you draft and send message ideas so you can ensure advocates stay on-brand. Your employee advocates can also use Sprout Social to explore and follow relevant tops and suggest content.
Integrations include connections with tools and systems to help you and your team access all the content they need to promote your brand, such as Dropbox, Feedly, Google Analytics, Hubspot, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Shopify, Slack, Zendesk, and other software options. Sprout Social also allows you to create custom integrations using its API or a paid Zapier account.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Easy to publish content across multiple channels
- Helpful customer service team
- User-friendly interface
Cons:
- Limited automation capabilities
- Not suitable for small businesses
Ambassador helps marketing teams optimize to enhance brand awareness in real time to drive revenue.
Why I picked Ambassador: What makes Ambassador stand out from the other options throughout this article is its automated referral optimization tools. Ambassador uses machine learning and predictive analytics that recommend the best channels, times, and methods for your advocates to refer new customers. This empowers your team to eliminate all the guesswork from referral marketing, ensuring your advocates maximize their impact and increase successful referrals.
Ambassador Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include multi-language tools that remove regional complications and barriers to secure your business’s global presence. With Ambassador, you can also create branded customer portals that allow you to maintain complete control of your brand image and messaging.
Integrations include native connections with the tools you’re likely already using in your organizations, such as Campaign Monitor, Hubspot, Magento, Mailchimp, Recurly, Salesforce, Segment, SendGrid, Shopify, WooCommerce, and other software options.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Enables beneficial referral marketing campaigns
- Many customization options
- Excellent customer support
Cons:
- Sometimes, reporting is unclear
- Additional features have an extra fee
Yotpo offers user-generated content management and amplification tools to help brands showcase advocates’ photos and videos to enhance future shoppers’ experiences.
Why I picked Yotpo: The platform deserves a place in this article because it offers marketing teams a user-generated content amplification tool. With Yotpo, you can automatically identify and promote high-quality user-generated content from your advocates across multiple marketing channels. This will leverage authentic content created by advocates and customers alike, allowing you to take advantage of the trust and credibility of user-generated content.
Yotpo Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include tools to help you create and handle loyalty and referral rewards programs to engage with advocates and convince new ones to work with your brand. Yotpo also empowers your organization to use customers as advocates by leveraging authentic reviews and displaying them where they will have the most significant impact.
Integrations include connections with leading third-party applications to help your brand create engaging experiences, such as Builder.io, Drip, Gorgias, Justuno, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Ometria, Slack, Tray.io, Zendesk, and other software options. You can also create custom integrations when needed through Yotpo’s API.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Significant number of integrations
- Collects reviews using loyalty rewards
- Email templates enable consistent branding
Cons:
- Can be buggy
- Customer support needs work
Refersion helps organizations create advocate campaigns by enabling ambassadors to sign up as affiliates and track their links to see clicks and conversions in real-time.
Why I picked Refersion: What makes Refersion an excellent addition to this article is its ability to efficiently integrate affiliate marketing with brand advocacy. Refersion allows you to track and manage advocate and affiliate links in a centralized platform. It’s beneficial if you engage in advocacy and affiliate marketing, allowing you to create a cohesive approach to managing relationships and tracking performance.
Refersion Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include an all-in-one platform to help you support brand ambassadors, create campaigns, and manage an unlimited number of affiliates. Refersion can also help you ensure your affiliate payments are on time and accurate.
Integrations include native connections with tools such as AnyTrack, Attentive, Carthook, Klaviyo, Littledata, Magento, Mailchimp, Segment, Upfluence, Yotpo, and other software options. Refersion also provides an API you can use to create custom integrations, or you can use a paid Zapier account.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Simple user interface
- Requires no technical expertise
- Easy to set up
Cons:
- The affiliate marketplace is too small
- Customer support needs work
GaggleAMP helps users maintain compliance across social media channels, ensuring advocates stay on brand when sharing your business.
Why I picked GaggleAMP: I added GaggleAMP to this article because it specializes in brand advocacy compliance management and monitoring. The platform provides comprehensive tools to ensure your advocates’ social media content adheres to regulatory guidelines and your brand’s standards. This is especially crucial when operating within an industry that has strict compliance requirements, such as finance and healthcare.
GaggleAMP Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include AI-powered tools that help your advocates create social media posts, generate alternative messaging, and foster genuine engagement. GaggleAMP also helps you demonstrate ROI through real-time reporting and analytics capabilities.
Integrations include the ability to connect the platform to many third-party applications to improve workflows, such as Google Analytics, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Marketo, Microsoft Teams, Okta, OneLogin, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Salesforce, Slack, and other software options. If you need custom integrations between GaggleAMP and your current systems, you can use a paid Zapier account or the platform’s API.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Reporting offers valuable insights
- Prompts help advocates write content
- Excellent for greater reach
Cons:
- Challenges with the mobile app
- User interface is cluttered
Braze Advocacy helps enhance brand advocacy campaigns with its AI-powered content recommendations that will help your ambassadors create engaging experiences.
Why I picked Braze Advocacy: The platform offers artificial intelligence to recommend and share relevant content with your brand advocates. Braze Advocacy’s content recommendation engine analyzes your advocates’ behavior and preferences to generate and share personalized content that aligns with their audience. This feature ensures your advocates consistently share high-impact content, increasing your program’s effectiveness.
Braze Advocacy Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include data and analytics tools that enable you to take advantage of real-time data to enhance your brand advocacy campaigns. The platform also provides tools to help your advocates create customer-centric journeys.
Integrations include the ability to connect with over 140 business systems and tools to make the most out of your time, such as Actionable.me, Amplitude, Contentsquare, Heap, Looker, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Segment, Shopify, Twilio, Zendesk, and other software options. You can use the platforms or a paid Zapier account to create custom integrations.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Not suitable for small businesses
- Users can customize customer journeys
- Intuitive to use
- Allows engagement across multiple channels
Cons:
- Can be slow
10 Best Brand Advocacy Software Summary
| Tools | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| Birdeye | From $299/month | Website |
| Brand24 | From $79/month (annually) | Website |
| Sociabble | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Haiilo | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Sprout Social | From $249/month. | Website |
| Ambassador | From $250/month. | Website |
| Yotpo | From $9/month. | Website |
| Refersion | From $99/month (paid annually) | Website |
| GaggleAMP | From $458/month, billed annually. | Website |
| Braze Advocacy | Pricing upon request. | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Options
There are more brand advocacy platforms available, too many to give a detailed evaluation. However, I added the following list of other options that are worth your time and attention.
- PostBeyond
Best for content approval workflows
- Firstup
Best for mobile advocacy apps
- Influitive AdvocateHub
Best for real-time engagement scores
- Extole
Best for advocate-generated campaign ideas
- Reputology
Best for multi-location reputation management
- Amplifinity
Best for multi-tiered advocate referral programs
Selection Criteria For Brand Advocacy Software
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best brand advocacy software for this article:
Core Functionality
When searching for brand advocacy software, you’ll see a specific commonality between each option that makes them a brand advocacy tool. The following details the core functionality of brand advocacy platforms that act as a foundation for every solution in this article:
- Motivate advocates; brand advocacy software can help encourage employees, vendor suppliers, customers, and other partners to aggressively promote your brand.
- Focus on power advocates; brand advocacy tools can show special attention to top advocates and use their actions to motivate other promoters by sharing their strategies and organizing them into best practices guides.
Key Features
The brand advocacy solution you choose to implement will need to fit your business’s unique needs. To help you meet these needs, I looked for software that offers the following key features:
- Contact Information Management: Communication is essential in any outreach program, and your brand advocacy software can accurately collect and track your advocates’ contact information, allowing you to send immediate follow-up messages.
- Data Collection and Tracking: Brand advocacy software can store collected data in a centralized area or send it back to a CRM, allowing you to easily analyze it and identify what’s working in your campaigns or what needs improvement.
- Participation Incentive Management: You can use your brand advocacy tool to encourage new advocates to join your program using anything from special offers or unique gifts, such as swag or free merch.
- Advocacy Campaign Tracking: Using the best brand advocacy tools can help you get insights into performance, allowing you to optimize when necessary.
- ROI Tracking: Using this feature will help you determine your advocacy program’s effectiveness, helping you learn from ROI metrics and optimize for future campaigns to improve your advocates’ sales, number of brand mentions, or how many people see your organization.
Software Integrations
Brand advocacy software typically works best when connected with other types of platforms and systems to enhance productivity. I look for solutions that can integrate with customer relationship (CRM) systems, survey tools, project and task management platforms, email marketing applications, and financial tracking systems. Connecting these tools with your brand advocacy software facilitates efficient handling of your brand advocacy efforts, such as ambassador communications, event planning and management, fundraising activities, analytics and reporting, and more. Connecting these tools with your brand advocacy solution will enable access to resources in a centralized area while simplifying processes.
Rewards System
The rewards system within your brand advocacy software is a significant capability that you’ll need to consider. Many of your advocates aren’t joining your campaign out of the goodness of their hearts; they’ll typically be in it for your referral rewards. This means they’ll want their rewards to arrive on time, and allowing this process to be handled manually can cause some rewards to be missed. So, I look for brand advocacy software that automates reward systems that adapt on a case-by-case basis, sends without complications, and keeps your advocates happy and enthusiastic.
Engagement Tracking
Other than using typical communication channels, you need to be able to have direct conversations with brand advocates. Sending individual emails is nice personally, but it can waste your time when doing this at scale. I look for brand advocacy tools that enable you to send broadcasts to all advocates simultaneously, in segments, and individually when necessary.
Ease of Use for the Brand Advocated
When deciding what brand advocacy software to implement, choosing a solution that’s easy to use is essential. So, I looked for tools that offer a simple advocate onboarding process that sets expectations to help you maximize results. The platforms also need to allow users to easily track and record likes, views, posts, and more and present them in easily digestible formats. Efficiency when using your brand advocacy platform will allow you to develop new strategies quickly and empower you to see what’s working immediately.
People Also Ask
Brand advocacy software and the benefits it can provide your organization can be challenging to understand, and you might have some questions. To help, I added a section below to answer the most frequently asked questions other people have about brand advocacy software to help you see the value of adding these platforms to your current business tech stack.
How much does brand advocacy software cost?
The final cost you can expect to pay when using brand advocacy software will depend on multiple factors, like the size of your company and your specific requirements. Typically, monthly fees range between $9/month to $1,999/month. For organizations with significant numbers of advocates or sophisticated analytics needs, the cost can greatly increase. Some brand advocacy vendors can also offer additional services, like custom branding or data integration, for extra costs. To help you test out the software, some vendors offer a free trial, allowing you to see if it fits your needs before committing to a contract.
How do you track brand advocacy?
There are a few things to consider when measuring and tracking brand advocacy. One way to track brand advocacy is to look at how many referrals an advocate brings to your business. You can monitor this with promotion codes or referral questionnaires to help you identify where new customers are coming from. Another way to track your brand advocacy campaign is to look at customer loyalty. Loyal customers to your brand means they’re more likely to stick around, even when cheaper or simpler alternatives are available. Lastly, you can measure your social media engagement metrics to determine how well advocates are generating a buzz around your brand. You can do this by identifying whether your content is being shared more, measuring the number of comments or likes on posts or brand pages, and seeing what people are saying about your brand.
What are the benefits of brand advocacy software?
Brand advocacy software is a powerful tool that empowers businesses to harness the influence of others and turn them into vocal brand advocates. The following benefits emphasize how implementing brand advocacy software can turn satisfied customers, loyal employees, and other external stakeholders into influential promoters, enhancing trust, engagement, and brand loyalty.
- Amplified Word of Mouth: Brand advocacy software can increase word-of-mouth marketing, resulting in a 13% drive in customer sales, making it more influential than traditional advertising.
- Trustworthiness: Leveraging brand advocates can boost brand trust, with consumers trusting recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.
- User-Generated Content: Encourage brand advocates to create content, leading to higher engagement rates for user-generated content than brand-generated content.
- Cost-Efficient Marketing: Brand advocacy is cost-effective, with businesses experiencing a 650% return on investment for every dollar spent on influencer marketing.
- Referral Programs: Utilize brand advocates to drive referrals, with referred customers having a higher lifetime value.
- Community Building: Foster brand communities through advocacy, leading to higher customer retention rates.
- Feedback Loop: Engage brand advocates for feedback, with many customers being happy to provide feedback if asked.
- Social Proof: Brand advocacy software helps you showcase social proof, influencing many online shoppers.
- Customer Loyalty: Engaging advocates can increase loyalty, with many loyal customers advocating for brands they love.
- Data-Driven Decision Making: Use advocacy data to make informed marketing decisions, with more companies stating that data-driven marketing improves customer engagement.
Other Social Advocacy Software Reviews
There are many tools that can help you create and manage your brand advocacy campaigns. You can implement any of the following types of advocacy platforms if you’re looking for something more specific that meets your requirements.
- Affiliate Marketing Software
- Brand Management Software
- Marketing CRM Software
- Employee Advocacy Software
- Influencer Marketing Software
- Social Listening Tools
- Customer Advocacy Software
Conclusion
As you may already know, there are many aspects involved when operating a brand advocacy strategy, and advocacy software can help your business grow with audience segmentation, marketing automation, and real-time statistics. The process of finding the right brand advocacy platform can appear overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be—all you need to do is use this article to weigh the benefits of several options and identify one that fits your budget.
If you’re looking for more software suggestions to handle other functions within your marketing department, sign up for The CMO newsletter and start getting regular review lists and marketing advice sent to your inbox.