Episode 25: Launching a Customer Advocacy Program
Part 2
Welcome to the next episode of the CMA Soulmate Newsletter where 650 marketers get better at building Customer Marketing programs and strengthening relationships with their customers in less than 5 minutes.
Hope you enjoyed Part 1 of this series. We left off with making sure you benchmark current engagement with your inaugural members so you can have a mic drop moment at an all hands where you say your program has increased X by X!
At some point you will have a good amount of folks in your program BUT it may be too soon to report on any success metrics. When you are in that awkward phase, I like to educate the company on what these advocates are doing in your platform and how they differ from the rest of the customer base.
The above slide won’t make sense to you guys so let me break it down.
95% have a utilization rate compared to 68% of folks outside of your program. (They’re your advocates so thank god they are using the platform)
89% are utilizing an important new feature and thats 35% higher than the average.
83% are utilizing another team to help them execute business practices
Advocates are sending 53% more than other accounts
I also like to report on how sticky or integrated advocates are compared to the rest of the customer base. So like “Advocates have 3x more integrations then the average account”
Ok I’m jumping the gun a little bit…
Next comes the fun creative part of naming the program, designing your logo, and landing page.
Here are some common words Kiely Monteiro dropped in our CMA Slack Community. Come on in if you aren’t already!
Here are some examples of advocacy program landing pages from Mary Greens CMA Resource Hub! ← Also an amazing resource!
Okay let’s recap: You have been doing your internal roadshow to get everyone on board, you have been interviewing customers, getting creative with the name and landing page.
When you launch your landing page, you have to make sure the fields are built in SFDC. You will have a form that captures info on that webpage so make sure you point that info to live in custom fields.
At the very least create a checkbox on the contact that shows they are now an advocate
Equally as important, is to mark it on the account level so you can know the number of advocate accounts versus non advocates account and how many advocates you have at each account. Once you start digging into success data you will see trends like “Advocate Accounts that have 2 or more have a higher retention rate”. This is helpful when determining how to scale.
As a bonus, you could add Advocate Start Date in order to be able to celebrate anniversaries and trigger gifts :)
Okay once all that is set up you can think about launching. You might be thinking “Launch? What the hell will this program consist of?”
When thinking about what your program will be, consider the 7P’s when designing your program.
People: Who are you targeting
Purpose: Why are we gathering?
Place: Where are we gathering?
Participation: What will advocates do?
Policy: Advocacy Mission
Promotion: How will you invite members?
Performance: What will success look like?
This is how I landed on a slack community. At a very high level I remember thinking like this:
People: Busy Marketers
Purpose: Share best practices and inspire sending
Place: Events and Community
Participation: Share their successful campaigns
Policy: Create a trusted space to increase loyalty
Promotion: Email, In app, CSMs, other advocates
Performance: Increase send and spend in platform
How the hell could I do all that 👆 through email nurtures and a few events a year? I had to create a space for us BUT didn’t have the budget (still don’t) 🤣😳
Let’s talk about people for a minute. So for the first year I was SOOOO picky on who I let into my program. I wanted to build a strong foundation first, build trust, and have the conversations be really high level. Essentially I wanted to build content with these folks and have the newbies learn from these OGs.
In 2021 I opened the floodgates. I actually opened the flood gates a little too much and CSMs where throwing at risk customers into the advocacy community thinking it would save the account. (Look, I’m good but not that good) 🤣
Some eventually churned and it brought my retention rates way down. However, the metric that I had a lot of fun with was increasing spend in the platform for those “low sender” accounts. Turns out I didn’t mind that a several accounts weren’t doing so hot, it was my chance to turn them around and gather data on why they are not sending and pass that back to the Customer Success and Onboarding team. Win, win, win all round.
Launch
I like to launch at an event. I launched the SuperSenders at our first Customer Advisory Board. I actually teased “a special announcement w/ gift” in the invite. I like to think it creates intrigue and a higher attendance rate. Make sure you invite your inaugural members.
If you’re thinking it’s going to be some glamorous launch, adjust that. You are going to care waaaay more than anyone else because they don’t know what the fuck the program is. For some it might be their first advocacy program.
I spent money to have Pauly Shore do a video with me here. I swear I am the only one that think its hilarious and cool. Mostly because Gen Z’s think Pauly Shore id the Pauly D from Jersey shore. 🤣😫
Just launch it so you can start to measure, iterate, and expand :)
As far as participation goes, here are some the acts my advocates are participating in.
You will want to automate promotions from NPS and other triggers that make sense for you. Here is an episode I wrote on the 8 ways I find advocates.
Tracking advocacy acts
I think everyone wishes there was a way without any platforms like Influitive, Slapfive, Base. I’ve seen this be successful in CRMs but it’s still manual to log it.
Lets do a poll:
What I have done in the past was create a New Task in Open Activities (in the Sales view in SFDC).
Inside the New Task you will enter the date in which they completed the Advocacy Act, what they did and make the Subject standard:
[Advocacy Act] ← Now you can run reports off of that.
I haven’t done this in a while but I remember it working.
Okay well you should be good to go! At some point I will do an episode on advocacy communications, surveys, gifting programs, nurture streams, etc.
Don’t you worry, PLENTY of episodes coming. I’m not sure I could run out of things to talk about in this wonderful role.
Love your CMA Soulmate,
Leslie
More Digital resources
Catch up on previous newsletters here.
Follow me on Linkedin for edu-taining content on CMA tactics
Check out my video course Measuring the ROI of Customer Marketing & Advocacy if you want to display impressive CMA metrics. Enjoy your 20% off!