However, advocates impact much more than just pipeline.
There’s also the intangible impact an army of eager advocates can have on the initiatives you already pay for, including:
Feedback collection
Content creation
Boosting brand awareness
Beta testing
Running focus groups
Generating social media buzz
Ask yourself and your executives: what would it be worth to you if all of those things were easier, faster and a better experience for your customers than they are today?
How to calculate the ROI of advocate marketing
Learn how to measure and track the value of advocate marketing—and prove to your entire company that it’s worth the investment. This guide features insights from marketers at companies like BMC Software, Ceridian, Iron Mountain, ReadyTalk and more.
Advocates can make channels you already invest in for brand awareness and reputation-building much more effective and valuable.
Here are a few examples of the ways advocates help you develop relationships and extend your reach:
1. Advocate reviews can solidify your brand’s image
According to a Google study, 60 percent of B2B technology buyers consult product reviews from peers before making purchasing decisions. This means having genuine reviews on third-party websites like G2 Crowd, AppExchange and Spiceworks is vital to making the first cut during your prospect’s evaluation phase—which happens well before they reach out to anyone at your company.
Success Story:Code42 operates in the hyper-competitive backup software space. To stand out, Angela Higgins, Director of Customer Engagement, asked Code42’s advocates to share feedback by writing online reviews across third-party websites. Her efforts inspired the brand’s advocates to increase Code42’s number of reviews by 900% and make the brand the Backup Software market Leader on G2 Crowd.
2. Advocates make content creation easier, faster and better
3. Advocates boost social engagement and build better communities
It can be tough to evaluate the business value of social media and online communities. According to a Social Media Examiner report, B2C marketers (71%) were much more likely to develop a loyal fan base through social media than B2B marketers (62%). However, advocates can help boost engagement on these channels while removing some of the burden on community and social media managers.
Success Story: A few months after re-launching its Ambassador program in February 2014, the Hootsuite marketing team started using Influitive’s AdvocateHub to mobilize advocates at scale. By making it easier for Ambassadors to interact with each other, Hootsuite decreased its new customer drop-off rate and increased its “self-solve” rate from 30% to 65% in its support forum. Ambassadors also helped generate 81 million Hootsuite-related social impressions on Twitter.
4. Advocates improve the effectiveness of event investments
A Regalix study found that nearly half of marketers say that events make up 10 to 25% of their budget. However, the returns on event sponsorship are usually questionable; Kissmetrics found that 82% of marketers can’t quantify attendee interactions at their corporate events. Your advocates’ authentic passion will make pre-event promotion and attracting prospects to your booth easier and more worthwhile.
Success Story:Lauren Berry, Customer Marketing Associate at Okta, gave the brand’s advocates special treatment before, during and after its annual Oktane conference using its advocate marketing program, the Okta Ozone. As a result, Lauren built pre-event buzz by driving 1.1 million social impressions for #Oktane16, and sourced 38 advocates speakers. She also received tons of advocate quotes and stories to use in next year’s event promotions and upcoming demand gen campaigns. Learn more on page 7 of this eBook.
5. Advocates take you with them when they change companies
Advocacy isn’t just for your marketing and sales teams. It can have a much wider impact on initiatives through your whole company.
Here are some ways Influitive customers are harnessing advocate power throughout their company:
1. Developing better products by providing valuable feedback, insights, feature requests and eager beta testers to product teams.
“As a technology business, our clients always want to know what’s next for our software, so we developed a campaign to get our users voting for features and releases. The one with the most votes was pushed to the top of our roadmap and users got insider information on when they could expect it on the platform.”
2. Supporting client success teams by educating customers and identifying cross-sell, upsell and renewal opportunities.
“Across our business, the advocates that engage with us, or come back [to the program] frequently, are the ones that typically renew with us. They ask us specific questions (directly tied to retention or renewal) that I give back to our customer success and account management teams.”
3. Equipping executive teams with real-time customer feedback. (No more “going with your gut.”)
“My CMO will call me up and say, ‘Kim, I need to test the messaging on whatever solution we’re about to work on.’ Within a day, I can get him feedback from customers. When we first started, the business [and executives] used to ask us, ‘Why do we need an advocacy program?’ Now, they say, ‘OK, the advocate program is off the table. We have to have it.’”
2. Advocates make content creation easier, faster and better
It can be tough to evaluate the business value of social media and online communities. According to
When a happy customer changes companies, they often bring their love for your brand along with them. The value of second-order revenue from advocates buying you at their new company can be difficult to track, but, as 
“As a technology business, our clients always want to know what’s next for our software, so we developed a campaign to get our users voting for features and releases. The one with the most votes was pushed to the top of our roadmap and users got insider information on when they could expect it on the platform.”
“Across our business, the advocates that engage with us, or come back [to the program] frequently, are the ones that typically renew with us. They ask us specific questions (directly tied to retention or renewal) that I give back to our customer success and account management teams.”
“My CMO will call me up and say, ‘Kim, I need to test the messaging on whatever solution we’re about to work on.’ Within a day, I can get him feedback from customers. When we first started, the business [and executives] used to ask us, ‘Why do we need an advocacy program?’ Now, they say, ‘OK, the advocate program is off the table. We have to have it.’”