How are you managing your customer, employee, or partner advocacy programs? Today, most advocate marketers are organizing advocate activity through separate applications, and—our favourite—spreadsheets and emails. (If you’re still wondering what exactly advocate marketing is, read this primer first!) But there are two big problems with this approach: 1. You can only engage a handful … Continued

At the heart of every successful advocacy program is a single marketer—a forward-thinker, a trailblazer, an innovator—who recognized the power of advocate marketing and ran with it. It takes a special kind of marketing professional to plan, execute, and measure the success of an advocacy marketing program—especially since they also must continually demonstrate to their … Continued

You know those things you’re *supposed* to do that are good for you…like…flossing daily? Well, (gross) confession time: I rarely never used to floss. I thought it was a scheme dentists had with the flossing industry! For years, dentists told me that it would come back to haunt me—in the form of gum disease and/or … Continued

We’ve all been there. You walk into a marketing conference, full of excitement and hope. Oh the things you’ll learn! The free swag! The takeaways that‘ll dazzle your coworkers back at the office! But then as the day rolls on, you’re inundated by countless boring slideshows, sales pitches galore, and booth workers who are a … Continued

Think about the last time you had an unexpectedly positive experience with a company or product. (Maybe your barista threw in a free biscotti with your morning americano?) What did that experience make you want to do? You likely wanted to tell others about it, or (at the very least) send the company a congratulatory … Continued

Still relying on email campaigns to engage and communicate with your customers and prospects? These innovative B2B marketers are doing things differently. They aren’t wasting time crafting clever messaging or chasing the latest marketing fads. They’re driving retention and acquisition by harnessing the power of their customer advocates. By building engaging advocacy programs, these marketers … Continued

Here’s the major problem with today’s content marketing landscape: most of the time, people who write content are totally out of touch with the people who actually read the content. That is why Sujan Patel is a total breath of fresh air. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty and find clever ways to … Continued

In 2016, Cristina Melluzzi, Head of Customer Advocacy EMEAR at Cisco, was facing something lots of B2B companies can relate to: having an internal fire drill every time Cisco needed customers for references, speaking opportunities, analyst interviews, and case studies. Cisco had a traditional reference program with around 100 European customers that sales and marketing … Continued

This is the third post in a developer relations and advocacy series. In my previous posts, I touched on the concept of developer advocacy—AKA turning developers into brand advocates. In this post, I’ll cover how developer advocates are different from developer evangelists, and where growing a community of advocates (and shifting the mindset of your … Continued

This is the eighth post in a series about launching a customer advocacy program. The latest post in the series described how to determine which facet of your program to focus on: reach or relationship. Because advocacy managers are so focused on day-day activities, we are prone to tunnel-vision. Sure, we set aside time to … Continued