Somewhere in the second half of 2013 advocacy marketing made waves as a rising trend. Many industry articles still available on the Web have caught the moment, researching on this particular marketing technique or trying to break down the patterns of its success.
Although it hasn’t outscored the other available marketing strategies, advocacy marketing has not disappointed either. In early 2015 an article that speaks of “the rise and rise” of advocacy marketing, while the fall of 2015 offers a luxurious display of articles on employee advocacy.
The 2013 advocacy marketing
The 2013 advocacy marketing was the shiny revamped marketing strategy to replace what used to be called loyalty marketing. Basically, the plan was to empower customers via various incentives and turn them into brand advocates that would in turn provide useful customer referrals to other potential clients. Loyalty marketing was the strategy that provided premiums, trade cards or stamps and, generally speaking, various consumer reward programs. The specific paradigm starts with the quality of the product or service offered, which triggers customer satisfaction and, when constant, generates customer loyalty – that can be channeled into brand-profitable actions.
Once analytics entered the entire paradigm, the numbers showed that advocacy marketing really was worth it. The differentiation between providers relied on peer opinions, professional communities and regional peers (in this order) – as a 2013 Gartner post revealed.
Moreover, the customer referrals lead to a higher retention rate, higher spending (brand advocates included), and gave birth to a special category of influencers. Although only used by 20% of the brands at the time, in 2015 the percent of brands most likely to work with influencers in promoting their content was an over-the-average 67, according to an Augure report featured by the Marketing Charts page.
Growing in parallel with social media (as a great marketing instrument), advocacy marketing gained momentum in brand marketing strategies. Attracted by the long-term sustainability and the organic rather than the artificial input, companies elaborated management plans for this tool. You can check here an illustrative Forbes article that encouraged brands and businesses in general to nourish advocacy marketing in order to gain long-term commitment.
Advocacy marketing mechanisms
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Finding advocates
This phase is both passive and active. Passively finding the right customers that are suitable for advocating your product, service or brand involves listening, while the active part translates into asking for feedback at the right moments (first contact with the customer or follow-up emails or forms).
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Engaging advocates
This phase regards locking onto the positive sentiments of your customers, in a shape that enriches and extends the successful interaction – communication channels efficiently serve at this point. Customers should be invited to engage in a dialogue where the marketers can find out useful information at the right moments.
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Repackaging the customer feedback
The satisfying experience shared by the customers should be processed in a marketable way, highlighting the important details and tuning the entire experience in view of content marketing. This partly changed once social media became such an important environment, since customers have adopted a more trendy style, and many of them manifest their feedback directly in content form. Nonetheless, the reactions coming back as analytics need processing before distribution (anonymous mass and aggregated group ratings, for example).
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Distributing advocacy
This output phase involves choosing the right channels and platforms, transferring advocacy content between them and integrating the material into the brand image.
For the companies offering marketing as a service, advocacy marketing is a subcategory of content marketing. These services can extend towards formalizing independent searches and mobilizing the advocates for the brand, but also in creating types or campaigns that focus on advocates motivation or customer empowerment in view of gaining new visible, positive opinions for the provided products or services.
Using advocacy marketing in B2B
A 2015 Forrester study reveals that advocate marketing might be critical for B2B success. Due to its particular traits, the B2B entrepreneurial relationships attribute great value to peer and business communities’ opinions. As we have previously showed in our article on business networking, long lasting professional relationships form inside business communities and important decisions may rely on referrals and recommendations when choosing between similar competitors.
Customer engagement in B2B results into a higher impact effect and associated expectancy. Customer goodwill is harnessed into real business value, and important benefits arise, as the Forrester report reveals after interviewing 26 advocate marketing software users and vendors.
Here are some of the advantages:
- Higher brand reach with less investment (word of mouth and social proof);
- Stronger connections and relationship, enriched with emotional investment;
- More engaged and satisfied employees, especially when involved in advocacy activities;
- An increase in revenue directly deriving from advocate participation.
Employee advocacy marketing
Come 2015, and we find out that an employee advocacy program turns employees into efficient brand advocates. It requires a slightly different approach than usual advocacy marketing – where off-premises customers and influencers represent the brand via independent activities.
Even though advocates are always stimulated with interaction, rewards, product/service quality or value and a certain guidance, when it comes to the company’s employees, the dynamics is distinct. One cannot present feature employees’ opinions as similar to customer feedback. However, the employees offer a brand image across social media channels, and if willing, they might disseminate engaging content.
This requires very fine tuning:
strategy, materialization, content choosing and all necessary elements should be wisely approached. Employees are not professional marketers, and social media is not inherently work-oriented. There are specialists that know how to introduce this concept to employees, as well as specialized employee advocacy platforms. Respecting the private life circumscription is also important – one cannot envisage imposing brand representation on employees’ private social media persona.
Engaging and educating employees in relation to the brand image would be the first step towards gaining new collaborators for your marketing team
Bear in mind that such a process takes commitment and honesty at every step; otherwise the message might go through distorted and return unwanted results. An employee that has agreed to enter such a program, educated and engaged in the marketing strategy will keep the genuine character of the messages – the one that appeals to customers. Overdoing it is not the key here, but most likely a risk.
Training employees helps in understanding that such activities can be done the right way,
proving thought leadership, pro-activity and creativity. Brand message doesn’t have to end up distorted or unpredictable, and the various social media occurrences shouldn’t scare the company marketers. If the entire move is well thought, the possible details taken into consideration and the employees offer a real cooperation, this can prove a winning move.
Advocacy marketing offers benefits that might even be higher once the advertising business readjusts to the Google algorithm changes and to the ad-blockers situation. Meaningful content coming from customers or employees is less likely to be ignored or blocked – and is social media compatible. A company might choose multiple advocacy strategies or stick to the classic formula. However the advantages are not to be overlooked, the more so as one may now benefit from the experience gained on this marketing branch and the accumulated evolution. From loyalty marketing to employee advocacy marketing, this marketing strategy has developed and adapted to the trends in order to offer valuable opportunities.
