Advocacy Marketing Strategy 2019: Brand Advocacy, Employee Brand Advocacy

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 advocacy marketing. Advocacy marketing is a process that involves identifying customers and brand advocates who have a strong network that includes the target audience. They tend to be influencers who can represent a brand effectively. Once identified, these advocates need to be equipped with right information to communicate with the audience. Individuals who are natural brand advocates are also more likely to be loyal to a company.

Tips for a Successful Advocacy Marketing Strategy

Advocacy marketing strategies can be complex. Here are a few tips to help get started. First and foremost, start with a pool of customers who will promote and profess the best about the company simply because they love the products and services. They'll want to share in some way, shape, or form how the company or service 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 an understanding of the company's unique value proposition to communicate a story that the customer base strongly believes in and using it to expand the relationship with customers. In turn, it allows that relationship to spread and echo in their friends and family circles. These are essential prerequisites to market products and the company's services making the customer and their requirements the priority.

Third, a centralized platform will be needed where one can monitor all advocate activities, distribute information to advocates, and ensure consistent brand messaging. Here's how to use MarketBeam as the hub for the advocacy marketing strategy:



Make It Easy for Advocates to Participate

Advocacy marketing program should be relatively easy for advocates to participate in. Remove any unnecessary administrative burden, coordination, and inefficiencies so advocates can focus on spreading the good news about the 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

The advocacy marketing strategy must include simple ways for advocates to share information with their network. This can include daily posts about the company and its development. It's important to create buzz about updates—especially social posts—that encourage customers 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. The advocacy marketing strategy can even be tailored further according to these recommendations.

Employees Are Advocates, Too

Advocacy marketing strategy goes beyond just a customer who can advocate for the company. This also includes 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 a huge pool of advocates is needed to make an impact. But, the truth is just by adding employees as advocates, one can reach up to 900% more of their audience that would otherwise be missed. An advocacy marketing strategy can even be created for a small organization. Here's how we recommend doing that: Employee Advocacy for Less Than 100 Employees

The way employees are treated by providing educational opportunities to learn about products and services offered goes a long way. Employees will be the ones who invite customers to explore more and consider purchasing the product. Not only will employees contribute toward increased sales, they will also be able to share first-hand information about the business. Employees can also talk to people they know about the 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 Advocacy Marketing Efforts

As with any marketing activity, measuring the advocacy marketing strategy is important, too. We know how frustrating it can be when driving the advocacy marketing strategy through social media, but the cumulative efforts cannot be seen for all of the advocates who are working hard.

With a platform like MarketBeam, one can see all of the advocate's activities and efforts tracked across all social channels. We also provide a dashboard that captures analytics that are often difficult to capture but are helpful. Learn the difference between the two types of analytics in our blog post: 2019 Social Media Metrics | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter & YouTube



Erin Horiuchi is a marketing associate at MarketBeam, an AI-driven personalized enterprise social marketing platform that utilizes untapped executives' and employees' social networks to dramatically increase reach, elevate brand, and nurture leads beyond the usual corporate channels.

Erin has been a change agent and supporter of women's advancement. At her previous company, she co-led the formation of Women at Kabam, a global employee resource group and regularly organized networking and development opportunities. As a graduate student at Santa Clara University, she was co-president for the Women in Business, responsible for driving the organization's strategy, connecting with alumni, and providing development opportunities for students. She earned her MBA and BS in marketing from Santa Clara University, and currently sits on the University's MBA Alumni Advisory Board. Connect with Erin on LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected].

Opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily those of WITI.