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What’s the ROI Of advOcate MaRketIng?

How to prove advocate marketing is

wortH tHe investment.

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Introduction: How can you show the ROI of advocate

marketing?

How will advocacy increase your revenue?

How can advocates save you money?

What are the intangible returns on advocate marketing?

What other parts of your business can benefit from

advocacy?

What should you do to gain buy-in for advocate

marketing?

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What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

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F ast-closing deals usually land in your sales

reps’ lap thanks to one powerful force: positive

word of mouth from advocates. A referral, genuine

customer review or relevant success story makes

all the difference when it comes to boosting brand

awareness and accelerating pipeline.

Unfortunately, many marketers don’t believe they

can engineer advocacy. Instead, they spend money

on less effective and more expensive tactics, like

event sponsorships, ads, or paid content distribution,

hoping to fill their funnel with as many leads as

possible—no matter how cold they are.

However, if you focus on creating a pool of vocal

brand advocates, you can actively drive word of

mouth and improve the results of your existing

programs. Advocates add an authenticity to your

marketing that clever copy and slick graphics just

can’t compete with.

The best way to engineer worth of mouth is to create

an advocate community where you can build 1:1

relationships with your advocates and recognize

them when they help out your brand. An advocacy

platform, like Influitive’s AdvocateHub (recently

ranked as the market Leader in G2 Crowd’s Spring

2016 Brand Advocacy Grid℠ Report), helps you do it

at scale.

I NTRODUCT ION :

How can you sHow tHe RoI of advocate maRketIng?

MarkET LEadEr IN G2 CrOwd’s sprING 2016 BraNd adVOCaCy GrId℠ rEpOrT

What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

4 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M

“Customers are often the solution to many departmental

business objectives. Engineering depends on customers for

new version user acceptance testing and product advisory

boards. Product management engages customers for visionary

executive councils. Human resources receives new employee

referrals. Support has lightened its load by having customers

support other customers.”

-Carlos Gonzalez , V ice Pr esident of customer success oPer ations at Ceridian

But first, you’ll need to show the value of advocate

marketing to get buy-in from your boss. Don’t worry!

It’s easier than you think.

You can tie advocacy directly to revenue through

referrals, references, influence from customer-generated

content, and cross-sell/upsell opportunities. There’s

also the intangible impact an army of eager advocates

can have on the initiatives you already pay for—such

as collecting feedback, creating content, running focus

groups, boosting brand awareness, social sharing and

more.

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?

In this short guide, you’ll learn how your advocate marketing strategy will pay for itself by:

• Increasing revenue and accelerating pipeline

• Decreasing costs thanks to advocate input

and feedback

• Boosting brand awareness and demand

• Increasing customer retention and

account growth

What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

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How wIll advocacy IncRease youR Revenue?

T he easiest way to show the ROI for your program is to measure how acts of advocacy directly affect new

business and pipeline. To demonstrate the link between advocate activity and revenue, you can track:

You can use and track these strategies through product integrations between Influitive’s advocacy platform and:

• Marketing automation tools such as Marketo, HubSpot and Eloqua

• CRM software like Salesforce

• Reference platforms like RO|Innovation

1. New business and pipeline from advocate referrals

success story: Michael Beahm, Senior Marketing Manager at Blackbaud,

started the Blackbaud Champions advocate community to create a

humanizing touch point between the brand and its customers. In return,

Blackbaud’s advocates helped Michael exceeded his annual referral goal

by helping him generate $530,000 in referral pipeline in 2015.

Learn more in this eBook.

2. Faster time to close with advocate references

success story: Kim Ellis, Director, Customer Connect at BMC Software,

launched an advocate marketing program to give BMC’s advocates a place

to learn about BMC products, submit feedback and enjoy exclusive perks.

Thanks to Kim’s hard work, advocates influenced $100 million in revenue for

the brand by acting as references.

Learn more about the program in this blog post.

3. Influenced opportunities with advocate-generated content

success story: Bo Bandy, Director of Marketing for ReadyTalk, empowered

her company’s advocates to create and promote content through the

ReadyTalk Summit Club advocate community. As a result, Bo’s marketing

team exceeded their content goals, resulting in 3 closed-won deals and an

extra $60,000 in sales pipeline.

Learn how in this case study.

What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

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1. saving money on third-party feedback collection

“One of our challenges is being able to qualify some of our gut feelings.

Invariably, we go to a third party. They’ll do some telephone-based

research—it might take them six weeks and cost $10,000. The truth

is they’re reaching out to customers you already know. We used

Influitive to remove that layer. To test new branding around customer

communications, we put a challenge up in the Influitive community.

Within 24 hours, we had 60 unique pieces of feedback which allowed us to

say, ‘Yeah, this direction is right.’”

-david Coates, senior m a r keting m a nager at iron Mountain

How can advocates save you money?

A sking for advocate feedback can help you

cut costs on already-funded initiatives, which

can then be re-allocated to pay for your advocate

community.

By continuously engaging your advocates and

asking for their input, you can:

• Eliminate investments in third-party research for

product or branding feedback

• Reduce support costs

• Save on headcount-related costs

• Scale back product testing and quality

assurance spend

• Save your team time and effort tracking down

customers for fire drill requests

Here are a few ways Influitive customers generate cost savings through their advocate communities:

What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

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3. Making advocacy scalable and faster for your whole team

“AdvocateHub helps us to communicate with over 1,500 advocates at one

time…We are able to get feedback from our advocates on future products,

marketing materials and strategies. It saves me tons of time! It replaces

and scales back the manual task of individually emailing advocates when

we need something. It wouldn’t be possible to run a global program like

ours without AdvocateHub.”

-JessiCa MitChell, m a r keting m a nager at sMart teChnoloGies

2. reducing the burden on Cs, support and marketing resources

“We believe that the Teacher Learning Network saves Edmodo at least

$500,000 yearly. Our 1,000 ambassadors [are] covering most of our

support wall, [so] we haven’t had to hire as many support agents. They’re

essentially our social media leg of marketing; they host our meetups and

help our event manager so she hasn’t had to hire an event coordinator. The

certified trainers have hosted over 240 trainings in the last three months.

They have impacted around 3,500 training participants who had probably

never heard of us before, and now they’re spending an hour with a teacher

who’s actually used the platform.”

-Kev yn Klein, dir ector of customer success & a dVocacy at edModo

What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

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wHat aRe tHe IntangIble RetuRns on advocate maRketIng?

A dvocates can make channels you already invest in for brand awareness and reputation-building much

more effective and valuable.

Here are a few examples:

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.

Learn how they did it in this blog.

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.

What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

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Learn more in this case study.

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.

Learn more in this case study.

2. advocates make content creation easier, faster and better

It’s estimated that B2B firms with 250+ employees allocate roughly $558,400 worth of internal marketing

headcount on content development annually. If they outsource to agencies or freelancers, they’re

investing an additional average of $202,800 annually. Advocates can quickly help you create better,

more authentic content faster—and for far less.

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: Chris Peltz, Customer Success Operations Manager at HP

Software, used the ITSM Insiders advocate community to challenge their

customers and partners to provide their best tips for IT service management.

ITSM Insiders happily responded by writing world-class advice that HP

Software easily compiled into a full-lengtheBook.

What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

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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.

success story: Bo Bandy has created a special group in her advocate

community for passionate advocates who are no longer ReadyTalk

customers, either because they moved to a new company or their business

was acquired. Maintaining these advocate relationships has been valuable

for influencing future deals. “Sometimes, a prospect will ask to speak to

somebody who’s no longer a customer. From that standpoint, it’s nice to tap

into this group,” says Bo.

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.

5. advocates take you with them when they change companies

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 Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr—the largest community of SaaS

founders and entrepreneurs—says: “They’re more profitable (no additional marketing or customer

acquisition costs).”

What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

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wHat otHeR paRts of youR busIness can benefIt fRom advocacy?

A dvocates marketing doesn’t just impact sales and marketing departments. Advocate communities

also help:

“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.”

-Jillian zaCChia, content gen er ation sPeci a list at aCquisio

1. develop better products by providing valuable feedback, insights, feature requests

and eager beta testers to product teams

What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

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“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. ’”

-KiM ellis, dir ector , customer con n ect at BMC software

3. Equip executive teams with real-time customer feedback.

(No more “going with your gut.”)

“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. ”

-Kevin lau, sr . m a r keting m a nager , customer r etention & a dVocacy at netBase

2. support client success teams by educating customers and identifying cross-sell,

upsell and renewal opportunities.

What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?

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wHat sHould you do to gaIn buy-In foR advocate maRketIng? New business and pipeline from

advocate referrals

Closed-won deals sped up or influenced by advocate references

Advocate-generated content that influences opportunities

Cross-sell and upsell opportunities

Support

QA/product testing

Feedback/research

Online reviews

Advocate-generated content

Social media/forum mentions

Community engagement and growth

Improve effectiveness of events

Second order revenue from long-term advocates

Improved product development and adoption

Time savings communicating with advocates

advocate Marketing rOI Checklist

revenue additional Benefits

Cost savings

Aside from forwarding a copy of this eBook on to

others at your company, here are a few articles to

help you get internal buy-in:

1. Learn how to introduce the idea of advocate

marketing at your company.

2. Share this resource with other departments:

“4 ways advocate marketing helps your entire

company—not just marketing”

3. Use this step-by-step guide to get your

colleagues excited about the idea of an

advocate community.

transform customer love into sales pipeline and revenue growth

Now that you can demonstrate the value of advocate marketing, you’re ready to learn about the best platform for engaging your advocates.

Contact Influitive now to see

how AdvocateHub can help your

company achieve its biggest goals.