Share

Step 9: SHARE – Activating Your Advocates, Amplifying Your Growth

We have arrived at the summit of the Elevate Playbook – Step 9: SHARE, the capstone of the GROW level. Through the preceding eight steps, you have built a sophisticated system: you FOUND and HOOKED the right prospects, nurtured them with a valuable GIFT, IDENTIFIED them as leads, facilitated their purchase through optimised ENGAGE and SELL environments, converted them over time via NURTURE, potentially increased immediate value through UPSELL, and crucially, ensured their success and deepened the relationship through proactive EDUCATEion.

You now possess your most valuable asset: a base of satisfied, successful customers. The final strategic step is to systematically leverage their positive experience to fuel future growth. Ignoring this is leaving one of the most powerful, cost-effective, and credible marketing channels untapped.

The Objective of This Step: To systematically encourage and facilitate satisfied customers to share their positive experiences through reviews, testimonials, user-generated content (UGC), and referrals, thereby generating powerful social proof that boosts conversion rates across the entire framework and creates a virtuous cycle of growth.

The Immense Power of Authentic Advocacy

In an era of diminishing trust in traditional advertising, authentic peer recommendations and social proof are disproportionately influential:

• Builds Trust & Credibility (PL Booster): Prospects trust reviews and testimonials from real users far more than brand messaging. Positive SHARE assets significantly increase Perceived Likelihood for new leads considering your offer (SELL & NURTURE).
• Lowers Acquisition Costs: Referrals often bring in highly qualified leads at a fraction of the cost of paid advertising. Strong social proof can improve ad conversion rates, further reducing CAC.
• Provides Valuable Content: Testimonials and UGC can be repurposed into compelling marketing assets for your website, social media, ads, and emails.
• Creates a Flywheel Effect: Happy customers sharing their experiences attract new customers, who then become happy customers who share… creating a self-reinforcing growth loop that feeds back into the FIND/HOOK stages.
• Deepens Existing Relationships: Asking for feedback and celebrating customer success stories can further strengthen loyalty among those who share.

Systematising the Ask: Making Sharing Easy

Customers might be happy, but they rarely share proactively unless prompted and guided. An effective SHARE strategy involves making the process easy and timely:

1. Timing is Key: Ask for reviews or testimonials when customer satisfaction and enthusiasm are likely highest:
   • Shortly after a successful onboarding milestone (tracked via EDUCATE engagement).
   • After they’ve clearly experienced the core benefit or ‘Dream Outcome’.
   • Following a positive customer support interaction.
   • A specific period after product delivery (allowing time for use).
2. Make the Ask Direct & Simple: Don’t beat around the bush. Clearly ask for a review, testimonial, or referral. Provide direct links to the platform(s) where you want the review left (e.g., your product page, Google My Business, Trustpilot, relevant industry review sites).
3. Reduce Friction: Keep the request process simple. Use rating scales (stars), provide prompts for written reviews (“What problem did this solve for you?”, “What was the best feature?”), or make referral sharing a one-click process.
4. Automate Where Possible: Use email automation (triggered by purchase date, delivery date, or positive CSAT score from EDUCATE) to send review requests at the optimal time.
5. Offer Incentives (Strategically & Ethically): Consider small incentives for leaving a review (e.g., discount on next purchase, entry into a draw) but never incentivise positive-only reviews, as this is unethical and violates trust (and platform policies). Incentivise the act of sharing, not the sentiment. Referral programmes often involve rewards for both the referrer and the new customer.

Key SHARE Activities

• Review & Testimonial Generation: Systematically requesting reviews on relevant platforms and collecting longer-form testimonials (written or video) for marketing use.
• User-Generated Content (UGC) Campaigns: Encouraging customers to share photos or videos of themselves using your product on social media (often tied to contests or specific hashtags).
• Referral Programmes: Implementing a system (using dedicated software or simple tracking links) that rewards existing customers for bringing in new ones.
• Social Proof Amplification: Actively using collected reviews, testimonials, and UGC in your marketing materials (website, ads, emails, social posts).

Integrating SHARE Back into the Framework: Closing the Loop

Step 9: SHARE is not an isolated final step; it’s the crucial link that turns the linear framework into a cyclical growth engine:

• Fuels FOUNDATION: Analysing review content provides incredibly rich insights into Customer Pains, Goals, language, and objections, continuously refining your Avatar profile.
• Powers HOOK & SELL: Testimonials and high ratings become powerful social proof elements used directly in HOOK messages (ads/content) and prominently on SELL pages to boost PL and conversion rates.
• Enhances NURTURE: Sharing success stories and case studies (derived from testimonials) within nurture sequences builds credibility and desire.

Effectively implementing SHARE ensures your marketing efforts become increasingly powerful over time as genuine customer advocacy builds momentum.

Your Army of Advocates

Step 9: SHARE completes the Elevate Framework by activating your most potent marketing force – your happy customers. By systematically requesting feedback, making it easy for customers to share their positive experiences, and strategically amplifying that social proof, you build immense trust, reduce acquisition costs, and create a sustainable, self-reinforcing cycle of growth.

You have now journeyed through all nine steps of the Elevate Framework, from laying the FOUNDATION to strategically ATTRACTing leads, effectively CONVERTing them, and implementing systems to GROW their value and activate them as advocates through SHARE. You possess the full blueprint for a modern Ecom growth engine.

The final part of this book focuses on bringing all these pieces together, optimising the integrated system, exploring advanced techniques, and solidifying your path towards becoming a true leader. Let’s move on to Part 5: System Integration & Optimisation.