Advocacy marketing strategy 2020: With the evolving trends of social media in the workplace, we must address advocacy marketing as a part of an organization’s social strategy. But first, let’s start by defining what is advocacy marketing. Advocacy marketing is a process that involves identifying customers and brand advocates who have strong network that includes your target audience. They tend to be influencers that can represent your brand effectively. Once identified, these advocates need to be equipped with right information to communicate with the audience. Individuals who are your natural brand advocates are also more likely to be loyal to your company.
Tips for a Successful Advocacy Marketing Strategy
Advocacy marketing strategies can be complex. Here are a few tips to help you get started. First and foremost, you’ll want to start with a pool of customers who will promote and profess the best about your company simply because they love your products and services. They’ll also want to share in some way, shape, or form how you helped them to achieve success in their lives, whether that’s increased efficiency in their work, time or money saved, or something else!
Second, an advocacy marketing strategy requires you to understand your company’s unique value proposition and communicate a story that your customer base strongly believes in and use it to expand your relationship with your customers. In turn allowing that relationship to spread and echo in their friends and family circles. These are essential prerequisites to market your product and your companies’ services making your customer and their requirements the priority.
Third, you’ll need a centralized platform where you can monitor all advocate activities, distribute information to your advocates, and ensure consistent brand messaging. Here’s how you can use MarketBeam as the hub for your advocacy marketing strategy:
Make it Easy for Advocates to Participate
Advocacy marketing program should be relatively easy for your advocates to participate in. You want to remove any unnecessary administrative burden, coordination, and inefficiencies so your advocates can focus on spreading the good news about your product or company.
Here’s how easy MarketBeam is to use from one of our customers who is an employee advocate at Kaminario:
Advocacy Marketing Strategy Content Ideas
Your advocacy marketing strategy must include simple ways for your advocates to share information with their network. This can include daily posts about your company and its development. It’s important to create buzz about your updates, especially your social posts, that encourage your customer to anticipate them via social channels.
A successful advocacy marketing strategy includes a range on content types:
– Articles
– Videos
– Images
– Podcasts
– Other curated content
Boston Interactive compiled a visual that shows the different types of content consumers seek depending on where they are in their purchase process. You can even tailor your advocacy marketing strategy further according to these recommendations.
Employees Are Your Advocates Too
Advocacy marketing strategy goes beyond just a customer who can advocate for you. This also includes your employees who can represent the brand. MarketingProfs identifies How to Launch Your First Employee Advocacy Program, and Why You Should
A common misconception is that you need a huge pool of advocates to make an impact. But, the truth is just by adding your employees as advocates, you can reach up to 900% more of your audience that you would otherwise miss. You can even create an advocacy marketing strategy in a small organization. Here’s how we recommend doing that: Employee Advocacy For Less Than 100 Employees
The way you treat your employees by providing educational opportunities to learn about your products and services offerings in depth goes a long way. Your employees will be the ones who invite customers to explore more and consider purchasing your product. Not only will employees contribute towards increased sales, they will also be able to share first-hand information about your business. Your employees can also talk to people they know about your product. It’s also equally important to listen to the feedback employees give to create better salesmanship and products overall.
We know that before someone buys a product, they check the online reviews or ask a friend for a referral. We outlined this in our blog post, Why Do We Trust Referrals?
Measure Your Advocacy Marketing Efforts
As with any marketing activity, measuring your advocacy marketing strategy is important too. We know how frustrating it can be when you’re driving your advocacy marketing strategy through social media, but you can’t see the cumulative efforts of all of your advocates who are working so hard for you!
With a platform like MarketBeam, you can see all of your advocates activities and efforts tracked across all social channels. We also provide a dashboard that captures analytics that are often difficult to capture, but are very helpful. You can learn the difference between the two types of analytics in our blog post: Social Media Metrics | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter & YouTube
