How to Turn Customers Into Advocates for Your Brand

0:10John Jantsch:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ductate Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Zac Froud. He is the founder of Advocacy, a company that helps brands turn passive audiences into real relationships. He spent nearly 20 years running marketing and audience growth at Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Disney, and Coinbase. And Billboard named him a global power player in 2025. So Zach, welcome to the show. Hey, John. Thanks for having me. You bet. So that must have been a little bit Warner, Universal, Disney, and then to Coinbase. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I've been in and around kind of music, marketing and media for the best part of 20 years and really liked the idea of applying the skill set to different industries, different verticals, came back to music more recently, but really like honing the skills and honing the kind of the learnings that I had across all of those industries to have kind of a diversified, career you know and it's it's always something like as i mentor kind of other people that i say yeah it's a great thing to you know it's a great thing to do and i would recommend you know i'd recommend that to anyone that you know go and try a different few different industries and see where you fit and where you don't fit so you put out a guide recently and i picked up on the sub subtitle more than anything else broadcasting is dead it's a pretty strong claim from somebody You spent a lot of years in essentially broadcast companies.

1:48John Jantsch:What has you making that bold claim? Yeah. Broadcast marketing for me is old school, right? It's kind of the now and it's the past. And when I kind of reference broadcast, I don't mean in the traditional sense of broadcast kind of media or TV, like linear TV. I'm referencing that in the way that right now, marketing is very one dimensional and one way, right? With your customer, with your consumer or your audience. So the idea is that, you know, we kind of solved reach with social media, but we haven't solved relationships. And the idea that actually now technology is unlocked the ability to have relationships at scale that aren't broadcast, right?

2:35It's not traditional email or social media or running ads. The premise here is that, you know, actually you can have individual relationships at scale and connection. And that is a different reflex to traditional marketing, which is broadcasting, shouting at people, right? And hoping that they're going to lean in and react and, you know, be customers. There is an alternative route now, and that's something we're exploring at Advocacy.

3:01John Jantsch:So you mentioned personal relationships at scale. And I know one of the things you talk about is the difference between a container and a community. I think a lot of people, when you say personal relationships at scale, I think a lot of people kind of default to community or a Slack channel, you know, Circle, you know, all the various tools that are out there. Tell me if that's what you're talking about or if you think that there's a different job to be done. Yeah, you got it. Look, the theses here is that the platform is the container, the community is what happens between people. And actually, what you find when you talk about community building, which is a really important part of the marketing ecosystem now, most of the top frontier labs, big tech companies, you'll notice that people are moving back to IRL and building community and hiring for events as well in the spirit of, we've gone down the algorithm and the digital AI route really heavily.

4:10So actually the antithesis to that is how do you bring people together and how do you create more human experiences? And the container really is that a lot of the platforms and the Martech side of things right now is they are great containers to house people. They're not so great at building the relationships within those environments. No one has really focused or brought up the idea of the relationship layer, the idea that actually by understanding individuals contextually at scale, you can surface better content, you can surface better ideas, you can surface people to the right people. And that's what this is about.

4:58I always say that the holy grail here for marketing and the outcome of marketing is to create more advocates, to create more advocacy in your business. And there's a couple of really important reasons why that becomes important. Advocates do a couple of things. Firstly, they buy from you. They're the ones that are going to buy from you first. They're the ones that are going to lean into your solution and they're going to care about what you do. When I put my marketing hat on when I've worked in big tech, they're also the ones that build with you. They're also the ones that give you the most feedback on your product.

5:38They're the ones that lean in the most and say, right, hey, we want this feature, we want this solution. So they will be the ones that are the most active in building your solution or building your product or you'll go to market with you. And then the third most important one is they advocate for you. Ultimately, they will bring others in. And when you look at marketing and cash and all of the measures of success that we've had from a legacy perspective, impressions and reach and those types of metrics are vanity versus an advocate who is going to market for you on your behalf, which is why we're seeing now, obviously, the growth of influencer marketing or creator marketing is because we are artificially creating advocates around the business.

6:27And those advocates will bring others in. They will create cultural capital around the brand and cultural movements. And it's a way for us to tap into cultural movements as a brand as well. But what I'm really fascinated with is, well, if that's the most valuable customer you have, and that's the person that's going to buy, build, and bring others in and market for you. How do we create more of those? That's become the real question for me. How do you create more advocates in your business? Because the more people that love what you do, the more powerful your brand is going to be. And we've seen it play out with Nike, with Patagonia, with all of these big brands.

7:06Actually, what they have is fantastic advocacy programs.

7:11John Jantsch:So I don't think there's anybody, even the smallest of businesses that would argue with that premise at all. However, you know, how does a small midsize business that's not Nike, not Patagonia, look at that when they're a lot of times juggling a lot of, you know, founders juggling, maybe they don't have big teams. you know how do they start and get that community because a lot of community building just takes work that doesn't necessarily turn into a dollars right away like i said i don't think anybody'd argue with the premise but how do they practically go about it in a way that that kind of balances everything else they're trying to do yes a good question i mean look like advocacy seems to be what happens when belonging becomes behavior.

7:57Yeah. Right. So like traditional loyalty marketing has been like, I keep buying something. Advocacy is saying, well, I bought something. I bought someone with me. I didn't just buy something. I bought someone with me. So, you know, when you look at the traditional marketing funnel, it ends at acquisition or purchase, right? Advocacy starts there. And when I'm working or speaking with like startups or smaller brands or smaller organizations, hopefully they've created a product that has some love, right? It has a niche. It has a small audience of people that really need that solution. It solves their problem.

8:36I mean, it's really interesting, right? For that niche. So then it's about saying, well, how are you cultivating that niche? How are you bringing them in and how are you turning them into an advocate? And it's similar to a loyalty program, right? It's a similar thing. You're putting your arms around them as a business and saying, okay, you're our most important people and we want to create more of you and we want to celebrate you and we want to reward you, right? For being part of the journey and part of our brand. And then it's about understanding them, right? So then it's like, you know, it's strategic, right?

9:05It's behavior, it's psychology, it's understanding, okay, well, how do you measure this, right? Between two axes, right? On one hand, you've got people that really love what you do and you deem them as super fans or in music, that's what we call the more advocates, right? If you're working in a brand. And then you've got people that have just maybe just heard of your product or your solution. And then you say, right, okay, well, there's a spectrum here that there's a journey that our customers need to go on, not dissimilar to the funnel, but I'd argue it is very different actually, because what you're trying to do then is graduate people.

9:42And what I've been fascinated with over the last four years, working in the music industry as well and working with large fan bases is, how do you approach advocacy at scale? And how do you approach taxonomy, building taxonomy of your customers from advocate right the way down to people that have just heard of your solution? And how do you graduate them? What are the things that you can do, firstly, by identifying where they sit in that journey with your brand or that relationship with your brand, I like to say, and then how do you graduate people through that i say you know conversation or marketing you know flow and i'd argue and this comes back to the original point around broadcast right i'd argue it's difficult to graduate humans people customers right through a journey with you as a brand if you're just talking at them okay so this is where in the last kind of year really 12 to 18 months conversational marketing becomes really interesting.

10:43And the idea that you can have conversation and relationships at scale with people becomes really interesting. You can understand contextually who someone is and where they sit in your flow, in your funnel. And then you can identify the things, the levers that are going to graduate them to become closer to advocate, people that love what you do, buy, build with you, et cetera.

11:05John Jantsch:So you actually break that down into layers. I mean, are there actual kind of moments of truth, like the first 12 hours, you know, somebody buys something, you know, the, you know, the next area that you get them into a community, how you continue to educate. I mean, are there like milestones that roughly fit most businesses? Yeah, I would say every business is different and every customer is different. And that's really important. And so this is where if you have a CRM and you're doing mass marketing to ads or email marketing, it's really hard to understand your customers, your audience. It's really hard to understand touch points with your brand or with what you're selling.

11:51So, you know, there is different, you know, kind of signals or different data points that you would layer into each part of your customer journey, right? Your customer taxonomy. That might be purchase intent. That might be, you know, looking at click-through rates and engagement on what you're doing. That might be customer acquisition costs. that might be looking at kind of more, what is the longer term play or the LTV,

12:19John Jantsch:long-term value that you're deeming from this funnel with these individuals. So absolutely, every business is different and falls and has different ways of building that taxonomy and absolutely should be customized. But what you often see after doing it various times within different businesses, the graduation moments, the human psychology and behavior around turning people into customers and turning people into people that love what you do is actually quite standardized. And there is actually quite a lot of literature and research around how you do that. And it's interesting, because when you go down the hole in this, what you see is governments do it very well in their policies and in their campaigns that they run.

13:05So, you know, the trans-theoretical model of behavioral change, like that type of work actually is really fundamental to marketing, right? And how we're bringing customers on board and graduating those customers. So there is actually, you know, a lot of, like I said, literature about that and how it works. And then it's about tactics, right? It's about, well, that's great, right? The research is great. And the, you know, all of that deep work is fantastic, but I'm a marketer and I have loads of different things to do. you like, how do I bring this to life? What does that look like in my technology stack?

13:37What does that look like in my comms plan? Like, how do I action that day to day? That's a completely different thing. And that's ever evolving as well.

13:44John Jantsch:I came across five layers that you talked about, and one of them stood out to me. And personally, I just want to know more about what you mean by this, that consent is the richest data moment a business gets, you know, rather than just being a compliance box. Can you unpack that a little? Yeah. Look, the moment that somebody opts in and says, hey, I'm interested. I'm willing to hand over my data or my keys or my information. That is the moment when the relationship starts, right? And it shouldn't end there, right? It shouldn't just be a ledger. and you know what you find and what you see is with traditional crm for example like it's a static ledger right it's like a it's consent but it's like it's not evolving right it's actually what it is their name their job title and hopefully they fill out a form right that tells you a little bit more about them but most people don't want to fill out forms right so the idea is you know that consent should be weaponized because it's important right it's showing intent and showing interest.

14:53And then how do you build on that relationship? That's the starting point, right? That's not place that person into a list and email them four times a week. That's okay. They've shown interest here. What's that next stage in the journey of building an active relationship and a connection with that individual to, again, bring them into the funnel and bring them into, you know, turning that person into an advocate ultimately.

15:17John Jantsch:Over the last few years, community platforms have really popped up. The idea that gives a place for people to gather, talk about a brand, maybe it's an influencer or a thought leader or something that creates it. We've all seen launches of those that were spectacular that then went nowhere. How do people get that idea of building a community, an online community, say on one of those platforms? I guess there's two parts to this question. How do they get it wrong? And then I'd love to hear you've probably seen some that really exploded and people were very engaged. So how do, you know, how do they get it?

15:55John Jantsch:Right. Yeah. So when like now, like, you know, we're really deep in community right now, we're working with lots of large communities, small communities, you know, dinner clubs, round club, you know, you name it right from large to small. What's really interesting is there's some like, there's some real common mistakes, common learnings, right. That you start to see. one of them is like a bit disruptive actually it's like sometimes the ultimate success of your community is helping someone no longer need your community right and that that becomes like quite a jerking thing to say right to a community manager but it's like don't just measure how long somebody stays in the room right whether that's a chat room or a physical room start measuring what happens because they entered it, right?

16:49Because they were there, right? Start measuring the outcome of that. So the other thing that you start to see is lots of communities treat it like, you know, I think this is going back. We've had a legacy of lots of platforms that have gained our time, right? Algorithmic platforms, social media, et cetera. And interestingly, when we think about community, lots of people think of it in the same way. It's like very one way, like I said, like kind of broadcast, it can be very, you know, time sucking at people and almost hacky, like, like marketing became a little bit hacky. And so did community building.

17:22Look, placing a thousand people in a WhatsApp group isn't a community. It's a WhatsApp group with probably 5 % of your users actually engaging and everyone else being like, I'm not sure what to say actually. I feel a bit awkward, you know, you don't, you know, just going back to the human behavior point, you don't go into an event and all stand in a circle of a thousand people and shouting each other and whoever shouts the loud, you know, so like there's some real misconceptions around community tech and the idea that, you know, a couple of things, right? The container, like, like we said, like a WhatsApp group is a community.

17:54It's not right. We need to be more dynamic in the way that we think about community. You know, when you enter a room and, you know, it's an event of a couple hundred people, like I said, you kind of find a couple of people that you want to talk to, and then you might form a little group of conversation. You know, that's a much more dynamic human experience of how community exists in the real world. Advocacy, we're building the virtual or the technology layer for that, right? Of that exact thing. Community rooms are dynamic, right? They're based on the intent, the challenges, the context of the individuals.

18:30And we say like, hey, John, you should enter this conversation with these four other people because they all have similar challenges to you. And by the way, they're in the same town as you. You guys should go for a coffee. That's much more pointed, a way of building a community around very pointed conversations. By the way, when those conversations finish, because they just do, that's the nature of having conversations and especially pointed ones around challenges or objectives or intent, spin that group down and place those people into another one. Put them into something else that they would get a lot of value from.

19:06The other thing that we've seen in communities, which is interesting, is everyone's trying to create another container, right? Another application layer. And I've built many apps. And, you know, as an entrepreneur and kind of residents within these large organizations, it's really hard to build an app in 2026. And anyone that is, I kind of say, well, what's the existing infrastructure or what's the habitual user behavior, right, of what you're trying to build? And when you look at community, you've got to say that, firstly, to try and onboard people to a new app is really challenging, right? Because it's not somewhere and people don't want another app on that back, really.

19:47Secondly, it's like, well, once you have the app and you have your community there, it's really hard to get people to retain people, right? To actually keep people there or have people come back. Because habitually, they're really used to, in the US, they're very used to using SMS, iMessage or WhatsApp. In Asia, they're really used to using Lime or Kit. Around the world, there's maybe Telegram and Signal. These are the places that, as humans, we are very used to communicating with each other and being part of groups and communities and family groups and business groups, et cetera. Our argument has always been create as little friction as possible, meet your audience where they already exist, and build on top of these platforms.

20:33to make them far more connected.

20:35John Jantsch:Yeah, I think that's really why so many people have groups on Facebook, because even if they hate Facebook, they're like, everybody's there, it's not another login. So I guess we'll do it. Well, Zach, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place you'd invite people to connect with you and learn more about advocacy? Yeah, we're advocacy.ai. That's A-D-V-C-Y.ai. And you can reach me on there. It's zacadvocacy.ai. And yeah, reach out and we can have a chat. Awesome. Again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

21:14Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.