2022 was quite an exciting year for customer marketing and advocacy.
In January, LinkedIn dubbed “customer marketing manager” the third fastest-growing job title in the United States. Shortly after, Influitive’s State of Customer Marketing Report found that 93% of executives consider customer marketing very important or important to their company’s selling efforts.
Advocacy and customer marketing have taken another giant leap forward as strategic priorities companies want to invest in. This was clear amongst Influitive customers and their programs, where we saw double (and even triple) digit growth across recruitment, engagement, acts of advocacy, ROI, and community discussions this year.
Before we welcome the year ahead, let’s look back at what customer marketing and advocacy programs powered by Influitive accomplished in 2022.
Recruitment and Engagement
In 2022, our customers welcomed over 517,000 users to their programs, and more than 585,000 users have engaged with them. The number of engaged users has grown 124% year-over-year. It’s important to note that most Influitive customers operate invite-only and exclusive programs, so recruitment is typically strategic and less broad than public communities.
Collectively, they generated over $211 million in ROI via 6.6 million acts of advocacy. Customers have generated 31% more ROI and 45% more acts of advocacy compared to 2021.
Discussion and Community
Everyone was quite chatty this year! We saw nearly 25,000 discussion topics posted and more than 416,000 replies logged. Both saw double-digit growth, with topics posted up 27% and replies up 87% from last year.
Some of the top categories across all programs included:
- Welcome and introduction threads
- Campaign and contest announcements
- Mental health and wellness tips
- Product announcements and requests
- Ask me anything (AMA) sessions with subject matter experts
- Product tips and tricks
More than 440,000 users were engaged in discussions in 2022, which is 82% higher than 2021.
Challenges and Acts of Advocacy
When it comes to recognition, our customers’ users have earned more than 118 million points and redeemed over 75,000 rewards. To help make this happen, they completed over 5.9 million challenges, which is 36% more than in 2021.
Users completed over 260,000 social shares (generating over 885,000 clicks) and responded to more than 455,000 survey and feedback challenges. Around 2.3 million educational acts of advocacy were completed, which includes consuming educational content and completing educational certifications, and has grown 65% from last year.
Other notable acts of advocacy include making over 64,000 referrals, writing more than 20,000 reviews–on sites like G2 and TrustRadius–and acting as a reference nearly 3,000 times. Online reviews saw a surge in popularity, with 87% more submissions than in 2021. Together, Influitive customers generated $34 million in ROI via reviews, references, and referral campaigns.
These are just a few of the many use cases and programs Influitive supports. We asked a few of our customers about the programs and campaigns they were most proud of for 2022.
“We were launching a new product, and a product manager asked me to engage my hub to get more sign-ups for beta testers. I planned a webinar demo and made the call-to-action to sign up for beta testing,” said Robert Maddox, Customer Advocacy Coordinator at Delinea. “Typically, it would take the product team 30 days to get five signups, but with our program, we got 10 times as many sign-ups with only 3 hours of work!”
“2022 was the year of the review. We’ve delivered a huge uptick in the volume of reviews written by our members and look forward to continuing this momentum into 2023 and beyond,” added Wigley.
“I was proud to get our new program off the ground and be able to identify and award 10 outstanding members as MVPs,” said Kristen Blye, Director of Customer Marketing at Labster.
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We hope you enjoyed this year-end review of key customer insights and trends. We’ll be bringing these trends to you throughout the year to help benchmark your customer marketing and advocacy programs.
