During the holidays there are plenty of gifts to buy, parties to attend and trees to trim. So, how can you engage your advocates when they have visions of sugarplums – or spiced rum – dancing in their heads?
In November, we gave ourselves a challenge. We wanted to not only engage our VIP advocates during the holidays but also go deeper into each account.
We wanted to motivate more people from each VIP’s company to use AdvocateHub, so they would become familiar with the experience and recommend it to others. So, we came up with an advocate experience that marries Thanksgiving and Christmas. We called it (drumroll, please) Thankxmas!
During the month between the two holidays, we:
- Released a new challenge every day – similar to an Advent Calendar
- Established an incentive to drive advocates to participate
- Encouraged company competition and collective action
As an incentive, we offered five AdvocateHub Experiences (value over $2,500) to the company with the highest amount of points.
We hoped this prize would motivate advocates from the same company to work together to complete challenges. We also offered to donate $200 to a charity of our advocates’ choice if they collectively went over 6,000 points. This helped to motivate ALL our advocates to work together for the preferred charity.
What Type of Content Engages Advocates During the Holidays?
We kept our Thankxmas challenges fun to motivate advocates to take action. For example, we ran a testimonial challenge where we asked our VIP advocates what they would give up before they gave up their AdvocateHub.
We got some hilarious answers, including:
“I’d give up my sanity (and I nearly had to!) before I give up my AdvocateHub!” – Heidi Lorenzen, CMO at CloudWords
“I’d give up pie…it’d be tough but I’d do it before I give up my AdvocateHub!” – Spencer Czapiewski, Associate Marketing Manager at TalentWise
Encouraging Team Play Helped Us Engage Advocates, Get Referrals and Go Deeper Into Customer Accounts
Thankxmas got very competitive, as the teams pushed each other to complete challenges and earn more points. All of the top three teams had multiple members who were fighting hard for the top spot.
Thankxmas allowed us to engage our VIP advocates over the holidays. It resulted in:
- 47 companies – one third of our customers – participating
- 5 engaged individuals
- 971 completed challenges
A $200 donation was made to World Cancer Research Fund International, as our VIP advocates surpassed 6,000 points. We also achieved our goal of going deeper into each customer account. During Thankxmas, we received eight intra-company referrals. All of these referrals went on to become advocates.
You may think that your customers are too busy during the holidays and won’t have time to advocate for you. However, keeping your requests fun and festive can help you bring some holiday cheer to your advocate marketing results. If we didn’t run Thankxmas, we would have missed out on almost 1,000 touch points with our advocates.
Contact Influitive today to learn how to mobilize your advocates to supercharge your sales and marketing results.
