Grow Business Using Advocacy Marketing Program

A Weber Shandwick study estimated that 50% of US employees are active in sharing content on their employers. Today, social media opens up a new world of advocacy opportunities to tap and motivate important marketing assets – Employees, Customers and Partners.

As a modern marketer, the ultimate bottom-line is to harness the power of advocacy marketing to build an army of trusted brand advocates for boosting your social brand in real-time.

Whether they are on a quest for friends or fans,organizations of all sizes spend on social networking, from meager amounts to a small fortune. SOCXO team has enlisted the following

1. Establish clear objectives

Although a new concept in marketing, advocacy has been evolving as a key component of marketing strategy, and is gaining significant traction in today’s digital world. The first and foremost step is to establish clear objectives of the advocacy program in the context of budget, plan and team, to get real business outcomes.

2. Get advocates on-board and engage them

After finalizing your plan, the next step is to identify a sponsor preferably from human resources and marketing line of business, who would own and run the program effectively. The follow-up action is to get advocates on-board, and nurture and engage them to maximize online reputation.

3. Train a pool of advocates

Next, the sponsor team must guide and provide requisite information to advocates so that they get hands-on experience of the advocacy tool. In turn, the trained advocates can enable their peers to adopt advocacy.

4. Measure and analyze

Like any other program, the advocacy marketing program should be measured to link back to organization’s business objectives. The key metrics to be measured are: social shares, referral leads, engagement rate, clicks, upsells, conversions and many more. This data will enable the organization to continually visualize value, and improve the advocacy program to a greater extent.

5. Rewards and recognition

Getting your advocates to naturally adopt a tool is a key challenge in today’s digital world. Don’t assume that once you have built it, your advocates will easily embrace and adopt it. Energize, entertain and engage your workforce with gamified rewards and redemption points. The bottom-line is to incentivize your early adopters, who, in turn, will act as internal champions to encourage further adoption within the organization. Unleash the power of gamification to build an army of advocates for promoting your social brand in real-time.

The Bottom Line

It requires a fair amount of time and planning to make an advocacy marketing program a success within an organization. With the right team, tools and guidelines in place, advocacy marketing proves to be an effective and profitable strategy to tap and motivate your key marketing assets – Employees, Customers and Partners – who will enable a positive online word-of-mouth marketing.

An effective employee advocacy program requires proper planning and implementation to reap these key benefits. Talk to us at SOCXO and learn how you can achieve these benefits for your business.