With an increase in the use of Internet and social networking websites globally, advocate marketing has become an essential marketing tool for companies everywhere. This is because customers are becoming connected and are able to share their views about a product or service with other customers or potential customers in a quicker and more effective way. Marketing has moved from being a product-centric approach to being a customer-centric approach.
Advocate marketing is an entirely customer focused marketing approach and is generally defined as the process of identifying a company’s most loyal and high potential customers, employees or partners and then motivating them to spread positive views about the company through word of mouth. If companies provide them with proper empowerment, these people can have a huge impact on the business of a company in all aspects including sales, product development, marketing and more.
Relationships between a company and a customer are very important in advocate marketing. Advocate marketing involves engagement with customers and users in order to build strong relationships with them so that companies can have a more effective sales process, more innovative and successful marketing strategies and an overall stronger brand presence. Advocate marketers place a lot of importance on personal feedback and customer advice and consider it to have a huge effect on the buying behavior of other customers as well.
The Essentials of Advocate Marketing
Linking Advocate Marketing with the Company’s Business Objectives: Advocate marketing can have a lot of effects on the business of a company therefore elements such as sales, product development, customer satisfaction, lead generation and marketing should be linked with the advocate marketing program.
Identifying your Advocates: This is a very important step in advocate marketing. It is essential for a company to segment their customers with the advocate activities that best suit their interests or characteristics. Along with that, other types of advocate should also be identified such as employees, partners, investors and influencers because they can improve the business of the company as well.
Designing an efficient Advocate Marketing Program: Advocate marketing involves thousands of customers; therefore a company should ensure that they have an efficient program that is able to handle such a large amount of activity effectively. There are programs available that are designed to cater to advocate marketing and should be used by such companies.
Conducting Innovative Advocate Marketing Campaigns: Having a unique marketing campaign is necessary as the tone, style and creativity of this campaign will have a huge effect on the results of the campaign.
Measuring your Advocate Marketing Campaign: Like any other marketing campaign, advocate marketing campaigns should also be measured through statistical or operational metrics and this data should be used to optimize the marketing campaign further.
