Introduction
Customer advocacy has emerged as a powerful tool for driving growth and building trust. By transforming satisfied customers into proactive advocates, you can significantly amplify your brand's voice and enhance customer loyalty. Advocacy and referenceability often serve as engines for new client acquisition, customer-to-customer engagement, and increased market visibility. Our "Drive Advocacy Programs & Activities" stream focuses on leveraging advocates for various strategic engagements, from success stories and speaking opportunities to sales references and health scoring.
By effectively harnessing the enthusiasm of your advocates, you can create a robust network of brand champions who contribute to sustainable growth and credibility. This series of articles will guide you through comprehensive strategies for engaging and utilizing your advocates, setting the stage for deeper customer connections and business success.
Key steps to drive advocacy programs & activities
Step 1: Build advocacy through customer advisory boards and NPS promoters
Building advocacy starts with identifying and engaging your most loyal customers. Customer advisory boards and NPS promoters provide valuable insights and help foster strong relationships.
Key Activities:
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Identify strategic customers: Select a subset of similar customers who can provide valuable insights and feedback.
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Organize participatory workshops: Invite these customers to workshops designed to understand their needs and expectations better.
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Utilize feedback for product development: Use the insights gained to inform new release features and improvements.
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Convert NPS promoters into advocates: Close the feedback loop with promoters and offer advocacy opportunities such as case studies, white papers, and speaking engagements.
Step 2: Leverage advocates for business growth
Once you've built a foundation of advocates, leverage their enthusiasm to amplify your brand through success stories, reviews, and speaking engagements.
Key Activities:
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Identify and engage advocates: Deploy mechanisms to identify potential advocates, such as surveys and feedback forms. Initiate relationships and build rapport.
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Collect and publish success stories: Develop a streamlined process for capturing and categorizing success stories. Publish and share these stories widely.
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Encourage advocates to post reviews: Identify relevant review platforms and send personalized requests to advocates, encouraging them to share their positive experiences. Provide guidance and support to help them write impactful reviews.
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Notify advocates of speaking opportunities: Compile a list of relevant events and send personalized invitations to your advocates. Provide necessary resources and support for their success.
Step 3: Connect advocates for sales references and customer requests
Advocates can play a crucial role in driving sales and enhancing customer satisfaction by serving as references and sharing their positive experiences.
Key Activities:
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Identify and map advocates: Review existing processes and develop detailed profiles for each advocate. Align these profiles with specific sales needs and opportunities.
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Facilitate customer-to-customer reference requests: Implement a system for managing reference requests and automate assignments to appropriate advocates. Document interactions for future reference.
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Manage end-to-end reference activities: Simplify reference requests, track usage, and provide necessary support and resources to advocates.
Step 4: Incorporate advocacy into health scoring
To gain a comprehensive view of customer engagement, integrate advocacy activities into your health scoring system.
Key Activities:
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Define advocacy metrics: Identify key activities that reflect strong advocacy and set measurement criteria.
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Configure health scorecards: Customize scorecards to include advocacy metrics and assign appropriate weightage.
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Track and analyze advocacy impact: Regularly review health scores to monitor the impact of advocacy activities. Use insights to adjust strategies and improve customer success.
What’s next
By following this series, you'll gain a comprehensive understanding of how to build, leverage, and integrate advocacy into your customer success strategies. Each article builds on the previous one, creating a cohesive learning path that equips you with the tools and techniques needed to maximize the impact of your advocacy programs. Stay tuned as we dive deeper into each topic, providing actionable insights and practical guidance to harness the power of customer advocacy.
Further Reading and Inspiration