Customer Advocate Marketing: Keep Your Customers Happy and Vocal
By Barbara Pfeiffer, The Partner Marketing Group
What is customer advocate marketing and how is it different from a referral program? Search the term “customer advocate marketing” and you’ll find plenty of information (and tools) to engage your customers online. The focus tends to be around social media and what, in the past, we would have called brand advocates—those people who will proactively promote the value of a brand. In the B2B space, a more applicable definition is a marketing strategy that encourages your current customers to share their experience solving a challenge.
There’s some really good reasons to implement a customer advocacy program. According to a report from the American Marketing Association, peer-recommended leads are 2.5x more responsive than leads generated by any other marketing channel. Study after study show that customer evidence content – case studies, social posts and recommendations increase conversions.
Happy (and vocal) customers give you credibility and differentiate you from your competitors. They also help reduce risk for prospects by PROVING that your solution works. Nothing you can say about your company or your solution will be as strong as your customer’s success story.
Surprisingly enough, with all the evidence, most b2b marketers I speak with do not have a customer advocate marketing plan. We’ve seen some effort toward planning for customer referrals, but very little around bringing the customer voice into your marketing messages. Isn’t it time you added this extremely powerful strategy to your marketing? Need to know where to start? Download our latest eBook: Beyond the Referral: The Growing Role of Customer Advocates in Technology Marketing to see what it takes.
