Brands who educate their most powerful advocates see double the conversion rate to purchases and reviews.

Would you like the people most likely to recommend your products to be purchasing more often and writing more digital reviews? Offer them compelling, detailed education about your brand and products.

On ExpertVoice, brands that require their experts to complete education before they can purchase, enjoy 2x the conversion rate to purchase and review than brands that offer shopping alone.

In e-commerce, where product description pages are endlessly optimized to remove even the smallest hurdle to order, it sounds counterintuitive — even counterproductive — to gate your shopping experience and require your audience to spend 5-15 minutes learning about your brand first.

But the ExpertVoice audience is unique. They are credentialed industry insiders, retail sales associates and avid product collectors who have been vetted for access and are eager to learn. They want to be better at their jobs, and they want to help people around them discover products they love. 

“I was taking [an Altra] lesson, and a few hours later at Fleet Feet (where I work), someone asked me about Altra shoes, and I was able to go in depth about the design and zero drop. It was super cool to know so much about a brand and help customers,” said Brayden McLaughlin, in a 2021 ExpertVoice member survey.

How to design a complete advocacy marketing program.

The ExpertVoice Advocacy Platform gives brands the flexibility to design advocacy programs that meet their needs. They can gather their most influential advocates, strengthen their knowledge and passion with exclusive education and product access, and then collect and share these advocates’ product recommendations and content across e-commerce and social media channels. We can help brands do this at scale, for audiences of all sizes.

Most brands start with product seeding. By offering insider pricing — typically 40% to 60% off retail prices — they can get more of their products into their advocates’ hands more quickly. Many brands on ExpertVoice also offer education, which can be optional or required in order to unlock access to insider pricing. Educating your advocates pays off: Retail sales associates who’ve completed one lesson on ExpertVoice sell 69% more than their peers, according to a two-year study completed by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Experts who completed 6 or more lessons sold 123% more.

Shopping with exclusive access to the industry’s best prices is, clearly, a huge incentive for our member experts to come to ExpertVoice and engage with our partner brands. Yet, in survey after survey, experts are just as likely to tell us that they come to ExpertVoice to learn as to say they come here to shop. They value both.

Engage your most powerful advocates with education, often.

Experts are looking for rich, immersive, detailed education about the brands and products they rely on for their jobs and in pursuit of their passions, whether that’s whitewater kayak guiding or promoting wellness with natural nutrition supplements.

In a 2021 ExpertVoice survey, our experts said they would like to spend, on average, 12 minutes learning about a brand and 59% would like to see new lessons from brands at least once per month. Another 25% said they would like to see new content once every 3 months. 

Engagement with learning content on ExpertVoice also shows experts’ enthusiasm. Among brands that released new learning content in 2021, those brands that published a new campaign at least twice saw a 6.8% increase in the conversion rate for experts who started and completed education and a 6.2% increase in order conversion from brands that only published once.

Experts want more content, more often. They want to be on the leading edge of understanding and recommending your brand’s newest products. This presents a huge opportunity to equip your most influential advocates with the critical details that result in helpful recommendations to your consumers. You can give your experts the knowledge they need to explain why your brand is better than the competition and how to select the product best suited for a variety of consumer use cases. 

How to leverage ExpertVoice.

Feeding experts’ unending hunger for knowledge might seem daunting, but ExpertVoice is here to help. Not only can brands create and publish lessons to their selected audiences with the Advocacy Platform, they also can collect valuable insights from their experts. They can publish surveys, gather expert-generated images and videos for sharing on social media and collect high-quality product reviews that can be displayed on their e-commerce channels.  

The first step to helping your experts recommend your brand more often and more knowledgeably is education. Brands can publish simple, templated lessons and videos on their own on ExpertVoice or they can take advantage of our in-house creative agency, ExpertVoice Studios, which has an expanded toolset for designing full-screen, responsive, interactive lessons customized for each brand. (Some brands do both.)

Studios has created 20,000 digital lessons for more than 1,000 different product manufacturers. Our team includes instructional designers, copywriters, interactive designers, editors, videographers, motion graphics artists and project managers.

Based on your brand’s goals, we can design an educational program tailored to your expert audience. Your experts are looking for insider details they can’t find anywhere else. They value learning from their peers — other knowledgeable users of your product line — and from the people who work for your brand. We can take them behind the scenes with an exclusive interview with your product designer in text or in a custom video produced by our award-winning team. We’ll gather and feature authentic, trusted product recommendations from your expert audience. 

The variety of our content formats — including both immersive custom lessons and rapidly deployed templated lessons and video lessons — allows us to help you publish engaging, just-in-time content to your experts throughout the year, ensuring more of your advocates have your latest product in hand and the knowledge to recommend it. 

Your most powerful advocates are ready and willing to learn from you. What will you share with