Case Study: The Smart Marketer Behind Smart’s Amazing Advocate Marketing Program

By Jim Williams on February 26, 2013 / Case Study, Celebrate Advocacy, Our Advocates / 2 Comments

Two of my favorite experiences at Influitive came at the exactly the same time. First, I met a customer who not only knew more about our company’s mission than anyone I had met, but had been out evangelizing it for years. The second is hearing these beautiful words “The minute I saw your product, I knew right away it was what I needed.” Both experiences came at the hands of Deena Zenyk, Marketing Manager for Customer Advocacy Programs at SMART Technologies, a leading provider of collaboration solutions for schools and workplaces.

Deena has spent years pursuing her vision for getting committed Smart users to help make their peers more successful with Smart products. Long before we met her at last year’s Summit on Customer Engagement, Deena was spreading the advocate marketing gospel. This year she is returning to present about “Measuring–and Increasing–the Full Value of Customer Advocacy Programs.” (If you’re interested in attending at a reduced rate, please comment on this post and we can hook you up!)

Today I’m delighted to release this short customer success story on the results of Smart’s advocate marketing program. Next week, you can hear just how Deena accomplished these feats in her track session (hint: lots of passion & vision!), but here are just some of her accomplishments outlined in our success story:

Advocate Marketing Case Study: SMART experience with the AdvocateHub from Influitive

Deena boosted advocate engagement at Smart by 500% in the last year.
In the first 30 days, 349 advocates joined the program and participated in more than 40 ‘challenges’ during the launch.
Deena calculated a Return on Advocacy of $130,000 for each advocate – that is, they deliver that much value to the business in the form of marketing, development and content.
Most importantly, all functions at Smart have jumped into the program. There are internal competitions on who can create the ‘best’ challenges and systems to manage how and when advocates are notified of new activities. According to Deena, this groundswell of involvement has been crucial to the program’s success.

Any marketer woud be proud of results like these. But if you are the marketer that has carefully and painstakingly cultivated a new approach to marketing - sometimes all alone – it must be immensely gratifying. And so we off our heartfelt congratulations Deena and Smart on developing a truly inspiring advocate marketing program! We look forward to hearing more next week …