Advocacy has been used as a means to influence decisions within political, economic, and social systems and institutions for hundreds of years. Impartiality and raw emotion are the ingredients that make an advocate’s lobbying and campaigning all the more valid. So it takes little imagination to understand why it’s the topic du jour among today’s B2B marketers in pursuit of customer centricity. But what form does advocacy take in a business context?
“Advocacy refers to any positive content from or interaction with happy customers,” explains Chris Adlard, senior manager, global client engagement at Misys. “Basically, any marketing a firm ordinarily does can often benefit from inclusion of customer examples and stories.”
Why bother?
Nobody on the inside of an organisation – whether they work in marketing or sales – can establish as much trust in a brand’s credentials as an enthusiastic and endorsing customer. Indeed, Forrester research suggests that 84% of B2B buyers consider word-of-mouth the primary influence on their purchasing decisions.
Although these stats are useful for demonstrating a point, it’s quite unsurprising: who wouldn’t be more inclined to watch a film recommended by a friend or family member rather than a billboard or tube ad? For businesses, a good referral is essentially the delivery of a qualified lead, one all the more inclined to convert.
As Daniel Bausor, managing director at Famous4 Customer Advocacy, puts it: “Nurturing advocates on and offline can drive awareness and lead generation. There’s still a huge chasm between marketing and sales and a lot of siloed activity still going on, but yet there’s a real opportunity to have far more customer-led marketing through advocacy.”
What encourages advocacy?
At the risk of sounding facile, the first step for a company to gather advocates is having its products and services in check – nobody will champion a brand with a poor offering. As Katryna Turner, marketing director and consultant for professional services firms, puts it: “The key to getting great advocacy is to deliver a great service; deliver on your promises and make every client feel like they have great value for money at every point – listen to what they are saying if there’s any feedback.”
Another common pitfall is to assume the job is done at the point of sale, and thus focusing a disproportionate amount of attention on the pre-purchase stage; a stage that’s dwarfed by the ongoing journey. Daniel explains: “A marketer’s efforts shouldn’t just involve the one-off transaction which finishes with the purchase. Pre-purchase reaches a dead-end at the point of sale; post-purchase is what those experiences look like.”
How to make a customer an advocate
The question then is how to develop strategies that will engage customers enough so they shape an opinion and sentiment about your brand. A natural starting point is to define objectives. Is the desired result to increased awareness? Build the brand? Close sales? Ask these questions to form a set of objectives that look familiar to any other activity: grow business by X% in X industry in X time.
Daniel explains how to use available data to make these objectives achievable: “Map the amount of customers that have bought from you compared with the amount of prospects in those sectors. Look at why the existing customers bought, how you faired against the competition, and then it’s really useful to look at lapsed customers or those who didn’t buy to understand their journey, and from that you get stage.”
Chris outlines a three-step, customer-led approach: “First make [the customer] successful, secondly, engage with them on a personal and emotional level, and then third, develop advocacy programmes that will help them build their careers. Reframe ‘advocacy’ to ‘telling the customer’s story’.”
Advocacy programmes can entail a number of relationship-strengthening activates. The trait all successful activities have in common is a stubborn focus on the success of the customer; especially career progression and profile raising. For example, media interviews and speaking engagements help build professional reputations and networks while encouraging the recipient to share their brand experiences.
Is it possible to measure advocacy?
While reverting back to the original objectives will shed some light on the success of the campaign, measuring customer advocacy is widely agreed to be a work in progress – though there are several steps a marketer can take. Perhaps the best results are found through customer reference programmes and sales productivity. Chris says: “The most promising approach is to measure the impact of customer advocacy similar to the way marketing ops measures demand generation campaigns.
“An often overlooked measure is that simply by getting customers into your advocacy programmes, their CLV (customer lifetime value) goes up – even before counting their impact on bringing in new or retaining other customers.”