Brand advocacy has yet to be a standard part of every brand’s ongoing marketing strategy. However, forward-thinking marketers who are energizing their most enthusiastic customers have come to realize just how powerful and influential this segment can be. Read what they have to say:
Box’s VP of Marketing discusses ongoing advocacy:
“In all my marketing experience, I’ve never really been able to create the ongoing program that consistently goes back and builds the Advocate Army, gives them lots of ways to recommend, and share stuff with all of their friends. One of the biggest things that gets me excited about this is to be able to make this a consistent rhythmic kind of action with these Advocates.” – Jen Grant, VP of Marketing, Box
AVG’s VP of Social Media on why advocacy is crucial:
“The decision-making of consumers and businesses is now being earned more through recommendations by Advocates. And so I think that that’s going to be a continuing trend and we’re going to see this shift from traditional marketing methods to more advocacy-driven methods through social referrals and recommendations.” – Jill Hunley, VP of Global Social Media and Online Engagement, AVG Technologies
Parallels’ VP of Marketing on the power of authentic advocacy:
“This is completely voluntary. We don’t pay Advocates and we don’t coach them. They’re also not edited. We are not filtering. This is a trust factor in going out to your customers and saying ‘could you talk and tell others about your experience with us?’…Over 4,000 Advocates shared offers and the in-bound click rate was very high. Our sales conversion rate in the second week of this program was 21%. Last week we hit 50% sales conversion. So, this is something that continues to fuel itself.” – Kim Johnston, VP of Marketing, Parallels
Collective Bias’ CMO on the value of a Brand Advocate relationship:
“Promoting our Brand Advocates requires a willingness to give back to them in response to all they do for us. This give-give cycle is the new marketing, so we need to allocate resources to building relationships with the people who believe in our brand and want to share it with their networks.” – Ted Rubin, CMO, Collective Bias
JetBlue’s Head of Corporate Communications on Brand Advocates’ insights:
“We started the company with the idea of really developing Brand Advocates. We built our brand on word of mouth, customers talking to customers. They give us a great actionable list of things that we can pass back in for the operations and really give the customers a brand and experience that they find rewarding as well as we do. One of the things that we did with the Spring Leadership conference, we pushed out a tweet to all of our customers, 1.6 million people. We said, “What would you say to JetBlue leadership in fewer than 140 characters?” The Twitter replies are all up on screen in front of every single officer and director of our company. Let us hear what you have to say.” – Morgan Johnston, Corporate Communication Manager, JetBlue
CDW’s Senior Social Media Manager on leveraging Advocate-generated content:
“Reviews are just the most tangible manifestation that this individual is an Advocate of our brand. And we had been asking this ultimate question in our loyalty studies for several years but we never did anything with it. The next phase is we’ve taken those reviews, and because I’ve realized it’s better copy than I can write, we are literally using those reviews in our catalogs, in our direct mail, on our website to help explain what CDW does.” – Lauren McCadney, Senior Manager, Social Media, CDW
Intuit’s former Senior Social Media Manager discusses the ease of getting Advocates to write reviews:
“We’ve identified that about 60 to 80 percent of our sales are really driven by word of mouth, and the issue we had was that there was a lot of negative word of mouth by some detractors that we didn’t feel really was accurate. We started emailing some customers that we knew were Brand Advocates because they were in the Inner Circle, or they had indicated that they might be an Advocate. And it was great, because we were able to quickly see that these folks were very willing to write reviews and be out there on social channels. In fact, 30 percent of our Advocates were willing to go out there and write about us, which was an amazing stat for us. We were blown away by that.” – Laura Messerschmitt, former Senior Marketing Manager Social Media, Intuit, current VP of Marketing, Outright
Ooma’s VP of Marketing on the benefits of Advocate marketing:
“We’ve identified over 20,000 Advocates to date, and that’s in a relatively short period of time. This is going to grow as our service grows. I can easily see hundreds of thousands of Advocates out there. And mobilizing all of those Advocates means that we have a network of millions of potential customers that we can tap into. Advocates are probably the most efficient type of marketing, most efficient way that we can spread the word about Ooma.” – Jim Gustke, VP of Marketing, Ooma
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