Customer advocacy is the practice of nurturing relationships with your happiest, most loyal customers with the goal of turning them into brand advocates.

This matters because consumers trust word-of-mouth over a brand’s own marketing. In fact, 34% of consumers say “a focus on self-promotion” is a major turn-off in how they perceive brands on social, according to Hootsuite’s Social Media Trends 2025 report.

By turning more consumers into advocates, you can boost brand awareness, customer satisfaction, and brand sentiment. It’s worth noting the difference between customer advocacy and brand advocacy: Customer advocacy is what your brand does to champion customer needs, while brand advocacy is what happens when those customers promote you to others.

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Customer advocacy matters in 2026 because acquiring a new customer costs far more than keeping an existing one, and loyal advocates do some of that acquisition work for free. When a happy customer recommends you, they carry more credibility than any ad you could run.

That credibility is the whole point. People trust peer recommendations over branded messaging, so advocates shorten the path from awareness to purchase. They also tend to spend more, build stronger brand loyalty, and forgive the occasional misstep.

For CMOs and VPs of Marketing, that adds up to a measurable impact on brand sentiment and revenue. Advocacy isn’t a soft metric. 91 billion market ) is how you find it.

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