Brand Evangelist : Why Your Small Business Needs One

A Brand Evangelist is someone within your company who becomes “the face” of the organization. He or she has high visibility in your industry and is widely recognized as not only an authority but also a friendly and approachable person and potential customers can recognize that.

The Benefits of a Brand Evangelist

Having a Brand Evangelist elevates the credibility of your company by having someone established as a leading authority, it increases the emotional affinity and likeability of your company through personality and benefits your bottom line because people want to work with people they like.  Even if they won’t be working directly with your Brand Evangelist, customers feel like they are making a safe bet with you because you have him/her on your team.

It’s best to not have to “designate” someone as a Brand Evangelist. It is a key terminology that every one should understand. The best evangelists are natural; they are the ones who take it upon themselves to evangelize for your business because they feel so passionately about the mission of your company and this creates word of mouth marketing and positive experience.

Many times a founder, CEO or CMO very naturally rise to this position. This shouldn’t be surprising since the executive team of your business should have the knowledge to be considered an industry authority, the leadership qualities that help grow communities and the insight to provide new ways of looking at things.

How to Become a Brand Evangelist

There are some common traits of really great, popular Brand Evangelists like Rand FIshkin for SEOmoz, Neil Patel for Kissmetrics or Robert Scoble for Rackspace.

Brand Evangelists tend to:

• Blog often, both for their own blog, their company’s blog but also guest blogs
• Stay active on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook
• Speak at industry related conferences
• Host webinars on important industry topics
• Create videos – both personal and professional that are shared online

Being a Brand Evangelist doesn’t have to be a designated role. As mentioned before, many times the CEO or CMO becomes the evangelist. The important thing here to remember is that no matter who is the evangelist they will be required to put in long hours.

The “job duties” in the list above are often performed as a labor of love outside of the person’s official duties.  For example, Rand Fishkin the CEO of SEOmoz works all day and well into the night but he still finds time to blog, be active on Twitter and create videos. And all of this, while being personal, is still tied back to his business.

For example his Twitter background includes contact information for his company as well as the company mascot, Roger.

Rand’s twitter stream helps him establish himself as an authority figure in the SEO community and he lends that credibility back to his company by tying the two together.

Roger the SEOmoz mascot also makes an appearance on Rand’s personal blog showing you how companies are effectively using mascots in branding. While posts on Rand’s blog aren’t always directly about his company, most are indirectly related because they focus on running a marketing-technology company.

Rand’s blog mostly serves as a place where he can build up his personal brand as a leading young entrepreneur and CEO. And at the same time he can also evangelize for his company about their TAGFEE mission, the goals they are achieving, the customer successes they are seeing and the cool technology they are creating.

Additionally, Rand adds likability to his brand by showcasing his own personality and evangelism marketing in videos on the SEOmoz website like video about content marketing. Again this type of content has two benefits: first it establishes Rand as an authority in the SEO community and second it establishes his company as one that can be trusted because it is run by authority figures like Rand that takes customer experience.

All of this leads to increased sales for Rand’s company because people want to do business with him.  They believe in his domain expertise, brand evangelism, and trust that he hires people just as talented as him to build the community around the brand.

Is there someone in your organization today who would make a good Brand Evangelist? Could it be you?