Driving Advocates through Customer Experience

With an understanding of the ladder of customer loyalty, in this last section on digital revenue management, we would take a deeper look into who the advocates are and how loyal customers can be turned to brand advocates whose interactions can lead to new revenues through positive word-of-mouth and proactive reach-out to communities they are a part of. Customer advocacy here should not be confused with a similar coinage which involves the latest trend of marketers helping prospects become customers by guiding their buying process and advocating for their real benefit, hence, in the process, earning their trust. Rather, it refers to utilizing the power of customers, partners, employees, and key stakeholders to gather public support, endorse, or recommend a company, its products, and its services. According to TapInfluence (It is the name of a firm), which is a marketplace of social media influencers, advocate marketing differs from influencer marketing as marketing through influencers is more around partnering with individuals who have a significant influence and audience, while advocate marketing attempts to engage advocates to support sales and marketing objectives by sharing their positive experiences.

According to Influitive, which is one of the top B2B advocate marketing software firms, any company looking to improve its lead generation process to get newer customers would need to involve dedicated advocates of all types to improve conversions and earn higher revenue. In one of the whitepapers they explained that of all the leads sources, referral leads generally generate the highest conversions. Hence, on an average, leads generated by B2B advocates are 4 to 10 times more valuable than regular leads, resulting in shorter sales cycles, increased win rates, and larger order sizes. Apart from revenue, advocates can also support a firm’s intangible objectives including product design, market positioning, social media initiatives, content marketing, etc.

For any company to engage in successful advocate marketing, Influitive’s advocate marketing playbook details the following five key steps:

1. Developing a strategic plan
2. Identifying and onboarding advocates
3. Engaging advocates with campaigns
4. Recognizing and rewarding advocates
5. Analyzing and optimizing efforts

Let us closely understand all of the above five stages in more detail:

1. Developing a strategic plan: Development of an advocate marketing program involves deciding on the following key elements:
   • Program objectives: This refers to thinking about key marketing objectives based on a firm’s specific goals. Objectives could include increased revenue, customer engagement, brand recognition, etc. Typical end outputs could be references, case studies, testimonials, etc.
   • Developing personas: This involves defining the advocate persona to target.
   • Creating a process: This includes developing the process of running marketing campaigns.
   • Identifying people: This refers to the creation of program owners across the various divisions of the firm which would be responsible for engaging multiple stakeholders. A central marketing committee may also be set up to review the implementation of each of such campaigns.
2. Identifying and onboarding advocates: It is crucial to involve the right advocates as they would be the flag-bearers of the advocacy program and their efforts would count a lot in setting up the basic tone of how engaging the activities would be. To achieve this, we can use the following tactics:
   • Using personalized outreach to invite advocates
   • Developing a program to engage advocates
   • Presenting a clearly defined set of campaigns to them
   • Gathering early feedback to fine-tune engagement
   • Scaling the program to additional advocates and campaigns
3. Engaging advocates with campaigns: Once advocates have been identified and onboarded, it is important to assign the right kind of campaigns to specific advocates to make use of their expertise, experience, and interest for optimal success. Key steps for engaging advocates include:
   • Specifying high-level business and tactical objectives
   • Targeting tasks to specific target segments
   • Engaging with advocates for conversion
   • Using urgency as a tactic to complete conversions
   • Mixing high-value campaigns with the engaging ones to maintain advocate interest
4. Recognizing and rewarding advocates: It is important for companies to have specific rewards and recognition programs for advocates which are not only material based but also have strong intangible components attached. Four levels of rewards and recognition include:
   • Status—Programs should help increase status of advocates. Ideas include putting up advocate names on website, at customer events, mention in content, titles, etc.
   • Access—Special accesses like new feature or version preview, opportunity to buy early event tickets, reserved seating at conferences, etc., should be provided
   • Power—This denotes that advocates should have a say in building firm’s products, being a peer-mentor to new customers, crafting campaign messages for firm, organizing their events, etc.
   • Stuff—Tangible rewards like gift cards, merchandize, office supplies, discounts, and other giveaways of products which the company sells for a price should be shared.
5. Analyzing and optimizing efforts—It refers to quantifying advocate marketing programs through pre-defined metrics that measure their efforts towards attaining objectives like revenue generated, influence created, referrals, converted leads, average revenue per campaign, etc. There are three key types of marketing metrics which can be measured and reviewed:
   • Strategic metrics: It looks at business-oriented metrics related to lead generation (peer referred leads), revenue influence, renewals, and upsells.
   • Tactical metrics: It includes measurement of the end results generated, for example, references, case studies, reviews, testimonials, recommendations, social shares, etc.
   • Operational metrics: It studies the overall efficacy of the advocate marketing program which can be tracked as waterfall metrics, all related to each other across the campaign funnel stages. Metrics are tracked from the starting stage (total advocates signed up), to the middle stage (advocate conversion success rates), and then to the final stage (ongoing engagement rates).