I will begin this blog, by giving you a perfect example of Advocate Marketing. I am sure every one of you has heard of the brand ‘Apple‘. Apple has its customers all around the globe. Whenever there is a new launch of any product you can see the long queues of people outside the Apple stores. To the customers of Apple, the price and product don’t really matter. You will always see them defending and boasting about the brand.
Thus, this is the power of advocates aka loyal customers. Advocates are the customers that initiate a little to a brand/business more than any other. The advocates of Apple defend its brand and also sometimes overlook the dissatisfaction.
This was pretty much about advocates and how they work for a brand and gives out best to the business. Let us now begin with the insights of advocate marketing. Further in this blog, we will learn how it works and how to recognize the advocates for your business.
Advocate Marketing is considered as one of the best ways to make your customers talk about your brand. But not all the hundreds and thousands of your customers can be the advocates. Out of the hundreds of 10 customers can be said to be true advocates for your business.
Advocate marketing can be best explained if we know how word of mouth marketing works. As we all know word of mouth means when your customers spread the good word about your business to their friends. Similarly, in advocate marketing, you ask your advocates to talk about your brand and promote amongst the people.
Ask your advocates to write online reviews about your products because 92% of the people rely on online reviews before buying any product.
There are a lot of ways by which you can ask your advocates to engage in your campaigns. We will learn about all further in this blog.
Here are ten specific ways you can recognize and promote your brand advocates in return for their efforts:
The great thing about advocate marketing is that it’s not just a one-channel initiative.
Depending on how open or large you want your own program to be, you may use some or all of the following onboarding tactics:
The email will be one of your most important channels to on-board advocates. You should test a variety of email templates. Some basic ideas to include:
Employees from sales and customer support can help enlist advocates in the program in a one-to-one manner. Marketing should provide these “recruiters” with information on target advocates, key campaigns and tools, such as call scripts and email templates.
You can incorporate the advocate marketing program into your content calendar. Blog posts, webinars and videos that feature advocates and the success of your program are all good tools for promoting it.
Regardless of the type of content you publish, make sure that there is a strong call to action about participating in the program and that the content links to a landing page where people can sign up as advocates.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all-powerful recruiting tools, particularly for companies that already engage customers, partners and influencers on social media. Use these channels to promote the overall program, specific campaigns and advocates who are active participants. Many social media applications are the ones who get to the advocate’s list.
Especially for technical audiences, some of your strongest advocates may be already interacting with product management and engineering teams through user surveys and product beta programs. Get these teams to ask which customers are the most active ‘hand-raisers’ for trying new product features, or who are actively involved in product user groups (either by hosting or speaking).
Annual user conferences or customer-oriented conferences are a great place to launch your advocate program. Not only do they literally give you a stage from which you can deliver an impassioned call for participation, but physical events typically carry with them a level of excitement that you can tap into to boost membership.
Not to mention, events offer opportunities for dozens of types of advocacy that you can put into action – from spontaneous meet-ups and gatherings to the active promotion of keynotes and track sessions from impassioned customers.
The advocate marketing program should be embedded in your overall customer experience. For example, when on boarding a new customer, make the advocate marketing program part of the welcome email. You can also promote the program via customer channels, such as the support portal or online customer community.
As the program grows, capture early feedback and success. You can record video testimonials about the program and recognize your advocates by promoting early adopters. You should also champion early successes internally to motivate your colleagues to talk to their customers and prospects about the program.
If you find enough fans out there in the marketplace, you can create an advocate marketing program. That advocate marketing program can help you increase your brand recognition, increase your demand, and create a sales pipeline for your team.
The first thing you’re going to need, of course, is active advocates. So where are you going to find customer advocates? There are three streams of advocates that can fuel your program and create a flood of advocacy for your company.
The first is your most obvious stream of advocates – the self-identified brand advocates in the marketplace today.
You know who these advocates are. They talk to analysts on your behalf, do media interviews, speak at events and let you do case studies about them.
They’re passionate about your vision and they’re happy to be part of this program. They’re going to be the critical core of your advocate marketing program, but they’re not enough. You need to add additional advocates to that program to make it work.
You can find advocates by walking the hallways of your organization because customers interact with your business in a variety of ways. To find those advocates, you must start by talking with others in your company.
Think about it: product management teams run beta programs and do user surveys. They’re a great source for finding advocates that could join your program.
Salespeople always have references in their back pocket that they rely on as part of the sales process. They can identify advocates who can join the program as well.
Finally, don’t forget your customer success team. They’re the front lines in interacting with your customers and they can always identify customers that they’re coaching, educating or providing tech support to who come away enthusiastic and might become candidates for your advocate marketing program.
Lastly, you need to build a pipeline of advocacy. It’s not enough to just identify a core group and run the program – you always want to be onboarding new advocates. How do you do that?
Some innovative companies are even experimenting with onboarding customers through their advocate marketing software to start advocacy behaviour from day one!
When you combine these three streams, these sources of advocacy, you’ll find that in no time you’ve got a flood of goodwill that’s helping to support your marketing programs.
If you find enough fans and evangelists out there in the marketplace, you can create an advocate marketing program. That advocate marketing program can help you increase your brand recognition, turbocharger demand, and create a pipeline for your sales team.
The first thing you’re going to need, of course, is active advocates. So where are you going to find customer advocates? There are three streams of advocates that can fuel your program and create a flood of advocacy for your company.
There are a huge number of advocates available, you can run various advocate marketing campaigns. There are dozens of campaigns that advocates can support, but it’s important to keep in mind that all campaigns are not the same and created for all. Some may be better suited for newly on-boarded advocates while others are best for experienced advocates.
Some common examples to keep your new advocates engaged are:
Regardless of the types of advocate campaigns you choose to run, there are a handful of best practices you should follow to ensure the success of a campaign.
You should always specify two types of objectives:
The following are the practices that one marketer should keep in mind before launching their advocacy campaigns to keep their customers engaged throughout.
Successful advocacy campaigns send targeted tasks to specific advocate that are designed just for them.
For example, you might create an industry-focused white paper and ask for advocates to submit two or three paragraphs. The promotion for these asks should be sent only to advocates from that industry.
There are three foundational elements that must be included in each campaign that will define the experience the advocates will have as they complete the various word of mouth campaigns:
Many marketers make the mistake of assuming that advocates will simply want to participate in campaigns. They don’t spend much time creating compelling campaigns that drive high conversion rates.
Asks should be presented like any marketing offer with good copy and a heavy emphasis on a compelling reason “why” the advocate should participate.
While you are building your advocate program to increase the effectiveness of your marketing and sales conversions, not every campaign should represent as a task to customers. Mix high-value campaigns with purely informational or even entertaining variations. These can be surveys, contests, puzzles or maybe trivia. Alert your advocates about campaigns.
How you alert your advocates about specific campaigns is dependent on their level of value or difficulty:
Advocates should receive consistent updates about new campaigns as they are launched, such as a weekly program digest or newsletter that summarizes this activity via email. The campaigns included in this type of alert should be quick and easy enough to bring your advocates back into the program, where they’ll see and hopefully participate in additional campaigns while they’re there.
Campaigns that are only relevant to a small group of advocates or which allow only a limited number of participants may warrant a real-time email alert, similar to the type of notifications you might receive from a social network.
Some campaigns are so urgent, specialized or challenging that they require some form of personal outreach, such as a personal email or phone call. High touch alerts ensure your advocates feel that you respect their time and also provide the opportunity to explain exactly what you’re looking for beyond a short campaign blurb.
Make sure you optimize your campaigns by analyzing a handful of metrics that tell you about their performance. For example, track the number of potential advocates for a task versus how many responded out of them.
You should also leverage feedback from advocates, especially in the initial phases of the program.
There are a lot of software providers out there in the market who help you to create advocacy programs. It takes a lot of effort and interactive ideas to engage customers via advocate marketing. Thus, asking an advocate marketing software provider to create an advocate marketing for your business is a better idea.
Also, it is not easy to identify true advocates of your business this is why you need advocate marketing software. Such software captures the customers and advocates who will be promoting your brand.
Read more on the Importance & Benefits of Advocate Marketing Software
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