Advocacy influencing action
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1. Advocates have passion and authenticity that leads to high consumer trust, even without a large audience. Influencers have large audiences but lower trust, so their reach does not automatically translate to action. 2. To find advocates, companies should use social listening to understand customers' journeys, identify where customers discuss the company, and listen to understand customer needs and experiences. 3. Companies can then influence action by surfacing advocates through employee recommendations and customer testimonials as a form of social proof at different stages of the customer journey.
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Advocacy influencing action
- 1. Advocacy influencing action WHERE INFLUENCERS FAIL.
- 2. Influencers Influencers have audiences but their reach doesn’t automatically come with action 18% consumer trust* Advocates Advocates have passion - not necessarily audience. However it’s real, authentic & most importantly trustworthy 92% consumer trust** Vs *Forrester Research ** Neilson Influence means {The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour of someone or something, or the effect itself} an influencer here today in the context of social media means someone with a big social media following. What influencer doesn’t mean is that it gets you influence.
- 4. Sign- up/Purchas e Aware Consideratio n Use Advocate 1. Define your social listening around the customer How do you use the customer journey? Define the keywords by the stages in the customer journey to better understand what customers say or maybe more importantly read about you at each stage. A much higher % of people read rather than participate in social media discussions.
- 5. Sign- up/Purchas e Use Advocate Advocates directly influence the acquisition of new customers Aware Consideratio n Sign- up/Purchas e Use Advocate Advocacy influencing action The other thing you will possibly notice during your social listening exercise is how much your advocates or detractors are already influencing perception of your business and influencing actions - consideration to use or buy your product or service. This is particularly true if search is a major mechanism of acquiring sales & users.
- 6. 2. Find destinations where your customers are already talking Sign- up/Purchas e Aware Consideratio n Use Advocate
- 7. 3. Listen to what they talk about Listening to what they talk about is of course the final and critical stage of social listening. At each of the stages based on the keywords you listened for - your customers will be telling you something really insightful. In our case what we found was; 1.That there are a lot of people asking for advice and suggestions on all sorts of topics related to starting a business. That people are focused on starting their business and not on our products 2.That there are lots of people giving out that advice both in our favour as well as not. 3.That there is a huge amount of misinformation out there that is detracting from our customer experience 4.That there are some poor experiences that are stopping people from advocating for us
- 8. 1. Understand your customer's journey and use it to define your social listening (keyword list) 2. Identify where customers are already talking about you i.e. FB, Instagram, forums, review and comparison sites etc. 3. Understand what they are saying, what they are reading and what they care about
- 9. Putting it into action
- 10. Sign- up/Purchas e Use AdvocateAware Consideratio n Sign- up/Purchas e Use Advocate Search Reviews, testimonials, comparisons & ratings Influencers, media, thought leadership, blogs, search Advocacy influencing action
- 11. Social Proof – Asch Experiment
- 12. Social Proof People are generally more likely to do what everyone else is doing - trying to fit in and belong is hard-wired into our brains and our biology. It’s a shortcut to decision making. Also known as Herd Mentality. When was the last time you tried something new when you didn’t look for recommendations? 81 percent of consumers use the internet to research purchases before making them* *GE Capital research 2013
- 13. Social Proof
- 14. People are most likely to act on information that is communicated by an expert - people follow credible, knowledgeable experts. Voice of Authority
- 15. 1. Use social listening to understand customer advocate opportunities 2. Consider your internal stakeholders and employees as advocate opportunities for having a Voice of Authority 3. Surface advocates by building Social Proof into the customer journey
- 16. “WORD-OF-MOUTH marketing isn’t about giving customers talking points, as if they were brand spokespeople. It’s about delivering an exceptional customer experience that makes customers want to recommend you.” - Deborah Eastman
Editor's Notes
- INTRODUCTION Hi everyone I hope you had a nice lunch and aren’t too sleepy! I’m Carolynn, I look after social media and content for PayPal in APAC. Social media is a relatively new function, and we’ve been exploring what it means for our business. We’ve been doing a lot of testing & learning and I’m really excited to talk about some of the work that’s going on because I think it’s relevant for a lot of businesses. Not the companies with massive brand kudos usually with massive brand marketing budgets too Not the companies who have built social into their DNA, the millenial start-ups, the Ubers and Air BNBs etc. Cos let’s face it PayPal is a grandpa in the digital world And there is the rest of us We’re working to get there, we’re trying to understand what value social brings to our businesses, and what we can do for our companies. QUESTION Hands up if you have been frustrated that your social media activities are considered peripheral or that people keep asking you how to measure the value of what you do, whats the ROI!!! I know i have. One thing of high value it does help us to do is identify and potentially allow us to activate advocates – with very tangible impact to the business Why is advocacy valuable? Simple. It drives ACTION
- DEFINITION I want to talk about advocates but before we do i want to clear up the definition. I often notice the term advocate getting used interchangeably with influencer. Between us, the word “influencer” can be a bit confusing. Influence means {The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour of someone or something, or the effect itself} an influencer here today in the context of social media means someone with a big social media following. What influencer doesn’t mean is that it gets you influence. Influence is only influence if it mobilises people, influences them to do something, take action. So an advocate can influence people and the business can influence people but social media influencers should be thought of in our context as being less influen Influencers have a very specific objective - to grow their audience. If you’re also looking for the same audience and you can really tightly align you campaign with the influencers objective to grow their following then it can be part of a great program to drive action because they’re highly motivated because it also helps them. There are some businesses who have successfully used influencers as advocates. But for most of us influencers will result in a lot of views and possibly not much more. ADVOCATES Advocates have passion - not necessarily followers. However it’s real, authentic & most importantly trustworthy. They may not have followers but they do have audiences which I will talk about. And Advocates garner a lot more trust because of they're authenticity. Advocacy brings trust, trust brings sales/sign ups/bookings & brand love. We’ll talk more about how to get that later.
- DEFINITION First let s talk about who are advocates? Advocates are our customers, who because of their experiences want to speak on behalf of the brand. This is amazing this is already happening without us even having to do anything. Of course it can be much much better but what a way to start right? You don’t have to create them, you don’t have to pay them, they already exist. You just have to find them! FOCUS ON MERCHANT Most of you would have heard that we’re going to IPO later this year. Our new CEO has re-organised our business to focus on our two most important customer segments Consumers & Merchants. Today I’m going to talk to you about some of the thinking that’s going on around merchant advocates but this approach could equally apply to our consumers. And in fact we’ve started this process as well.
- Using the customer journey to identify influencer & advocate opportunities So, how did we find them??? Actually we went a roundabout way because we didn’t know we were looking for advocates. We started a process a year ago working with two very good agencies, Vertic & Pebble road because we wanted to acquire new merchant customers and wanted to understand them and the decisions they made along the way so we could do that much better than we were. It didn’t start out specifically as a advocacy program but that’s where it has ended up. SOCIAL LISTENING What ended up happening was that we did our social listening around the customer journey. This brought us to the point of advocacy because we realised that so much of the advocate content would end up being what new merchants would see in their early journey. Because they are customers the best way though to get some insight on your advocates out of social listening by looking at their customer journey. This is a much simplified version but we mapped out the major steps a merchant takes in his or her journey to discover PayPal and sign up. There are many illustrations of the customer journey but typically it might look something like this. They become aware of us, they consider us and our competitors, they buy, book or sign up for something and then experience our product. After they’ve gone through this process, if it was an amazing experience, an amazing product then they’re advocating for you. What you can do with this customer journey is to define the keywords by the stages in the customer journey to better understand what customers say or importantly read about you at each stage. OUR EXPERIENCE We had a huge epiphany during the listening process, one of many - what we found was that maybe common sense but we found that the journey didn’t start with us. It started with them talking and thinking about their business and what they needed to do about their business and only a small percentage of discussions were about payments processing. This was a huge shift in the way we tried to influence merchants so far by talking about ourselves.
- Advocacy influencing action - the short & long term value of building advocacy The other thing you will possibly notice during your social listening exercise is how much your advocates or detractors are already influencing perception of your business and influencing actions - consideration to use or buy your product or service. This is particularly true if search is a major mechanism of acquiring sales & users or you have a technical product. This is because social content is up-ranked by google so things like reviews, forum posts, etc are really impacting your search rankings and because with technical products people are often looking for advice and suggestions. Understanding how customer advocates impact your business will help you to use your social media tools to find opportunities and impact change. i.e. Host reviews or pull in #tweets at point of sale, thought leadership to increase. And don’t forget if you’re not doing it someone else is. Either they are talking to your customers about your product or your competitor is influencing action for their product. Directing the conversation. So the next time someone asks you what value social media has for your business you can say it impacts every decision point a customer has with your company.
- This could be anywhere. Instagram, Twitter, Forums, Blogs, Facebook, Linkedin, Quora - Maybe you’re lucky and you have a support forum or customer service data you can add to this to make it really insightful. Influencers usually live up at the top of the customer journey because they’re focused on building reach and Advocates as existing customers live at the end of the process after they’ve experienced your product or service. We want to find where they’re talking because this will help you build a channel strategy. Which channels should we be using and where can we integrate owned and earned. HAT WE FOUND We not only found where our influencers are talking but which channels they go to to look for advice and suggestions
- Listening to what they talk about is of course the final and critical stage of social listening. At each of the stages based on the keywords you listened for - your customers will be telling you something really insightful. In our case what we found was; that there are a lot of people looking for advice and suggestions on all sorts of topics related to starting a business. That people are focused on starting a business and not on payment solutions That there are lots of people giving out that advice both in our favour as well as not. Also that there is a huge amount of misinformation out there that is detracting from our customer experience and stopping people from advocating for us due to a poorer experience.
- So to recap there are three critical steps to social listening for advocates
- How to use all the information you now have. So we’ve gone through a number of iterations big and small that we’re now putting into action looking holistically at the customer experience but I want to touch on a few ideas that are not too hard for most of us to implement on their own and let’s face it to get ahead we can’t always wait until we can implement the perfect customer ecosystem or often it’s not our area if you’re business is like ours and is sometimes not a cross-functional team we can work with. So how do we use advocates to help us. Once you know what they say and when they say it you will already have insights you can work with.
- So there are a number of simple things you can do to surface advocacy content at the top of the customer journey or funnel. Why do these work? I want to talk about 2 major principles we’re looking at at PayPal in our advocacy & influencer work. They’re psychology terms often used for persuasive design or user experience design.
- Asche experiment is old. It was done in the 1950’s. He ran a number of experiments to understand conformity. You might have also heard it called Herd mentality. One of his tests he showed a number of test subjects different length lines and asked them to idenify the ones that matched. What he did though was that in reality only one was the test subject. I want to show this quick cute clip with
- People are more likely to do what everyone else is doing - needing to fit in and belong is hard wired into our brains and our biology. It’s a shortcut to decision making. When was the last time you looked for a restaurant? Did you ask your work friends for a recommendation? People are XX more likely to try something if recommended by someone they trust. We’re starting with 1. reducing negative social content at the top of the funnel. Warning: a bad experience is equally likely to be shared as a good one.
- You see these used every day. We’re working on building and directing advocacy at the top of the funnel with our social presence for small merchants on linkedin and on the website. How could you be surfacing your existing customer advocacy? Reviews, social integration on your website i.e. twitter feeds, ratings, testimonials
- MILGRAM’s experiment Users are most likely to act on information that is communicated by an expert - people will follow credible, knowledgeable experts. It’s a great way to leverage senior stakeholders expertise and vision for the business But other employees can become functional advocates for the business. The hotels concierge talking about tips for travelling in the city, the personal banker who talks about the investment market, etc. In this context I would consider stakeholders and employees as a type of influencer not an advocate. {The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour of someone or something, or the effect itself} An influencer since we’re building their audience for them - Not a social media influencer, well not yet. Coming back to the customer journey and social listening we have A lot of businesses may have spokespeople but here we have specifically targeted small merchants and work with our internal stakeholders to be advocates for the business merchants
- Just a final message that advocacy is authentic - that means you CAN’T fake it. They’re not social influencers, they’re your customers and you need to create experiences and products they love to make them want to recommend you. There are opportunities for all businesses to build on the power of advocacy to drive action.