Meet Your New Marketing Department: Your Customers
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•205 views
This document discusses how companies can use customer advocates to market their products. It argues that advocates are the new marketing department as they can drive value across a business through social proof from reviews, referrals, and case studies. This increases trust and sales conversion while also helping retain customers. The document outlines different factors that motivate advocates, including feeling part of an exclusive tribe, having a meaningful impact, and gaining social capital. It provides examples of how game mechanics and rewards can fuel advocacy and shares results from A/B testing that engaged advocates drove higher conversion rates. The key recommendation is for companies to make advocates their messengers by empowering and incentivizing them.
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Meet Your New Marketing Department: Your Customers
Similar to Meet Your New Marketing Department: Your Customers (20)
More from Crowdsourcing Week
More from Crowdsourcing Week (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Meet Your New Marketing Department: Your Customers
- 1. @INFLUITIVE@INFLUITIVE Meet your new marketing department: your customers Mark Organ, Founder & CEO, Influitive @markorgan
- 2. @INFLUITIVE2
- 3. @INFLUITIVE3 It’s not all good in Marketerville
- 5. @INFLUITIVE5
- 6. @INFLUITIVE6
- 7. @INFLUITIVE@INFLUITIVE7 Advocates can drive value across your business Increase Trust with Social Proof Improved Sales Conversion • Reputation • Reviews • Social Amplification • User Generated Content • References • Referrals • Proof Points • Case Studies Retain Customers Reduce Churn • Product Survey / NPS • Community & Events • Voice of Customer VOC • Customer Advisory Boards
- 8. @INFLUITIVE8 Motivating Advocates MACRO Factors micro factors
- 9. @INFLUITIVE@INFLUITIVE9 Exclusive Tribe Advocate Motivation Model Meaningful Impact Social Capital
- 11. @INFLUITIVE11
- 12. @INFLUITIVE12
- 15. @INFLUITIVE15
- 16. @INFLUITIVE16
- 18. @INFLUITIVE18
- 19. @INFLUITIVE19 Game mechanics fuel advocacy
- 20. @INFLUITIVE A/B Testing with Advocates 20 2% 14%
- 21. @INFLUITIVE A/B Testing with Advocates 21
- 23. @INFLUITIVE Use Advocates to discover unleveraged channels “What or who is newly influential for you over the past 6 months?” 23
- 24. @INFLUITIVE 19 positive product reviews 24
- 25. @INFLUITIVE Devotion Hacking: Putting it all together Experimentation Iteration New Channels 25 Exclusive Tribe Advocate Motivation Model Meaningful Impact Social Capital
Editor's Notes
- Background
- We’re coming up with new ways to optimize our funnels and convert users and that’s cool… But it’s not all good for Marketers. In fact – we’re facing an exsitential threat. We’re being tuned out. Our fantastic copy and ingenious SEO is building an inherent dirstrust from our buyers. They don’t want to be tricked into reading your ad. They read too much content as it is, so your listicle with a regression tested headline that compels them to click....well.... It’s turning them off
- Another famous Canadian, Marshall McLuhan famously said that The medium is the message. He is often credited with uncovering the idea that ‘the how’, or the way in which you connect with your audiences, is often as, if not more important than the ‘what’ the message you intend to deliver. When McLuhan penned these words, he didn’t only mean to say that the channel that messages are delivered on supersede the message – but that there are unanticipated benefits (enhancements) as well as consequences (reverses) when using new channels for distributing content. Today – the consequences of our actions is that the marketer has lost the trust of the buyer. Now there is a new vessel for social proof
- The Advocate In a world where social proof and authenticity are paramount – advocacy and understanding how to earn and develop loyalty is a strategic imperative. At Influitive, we've studied and tested the path to devotion and believe the path to get there is by going strategic and tactical. But first – what do we mean when we say advocate? So what do we mean by advocacy. Do we just mean our customers? Now, there is a distinction. Customer: One who observes and uses but may contributee very little. They aren’t the most engaged and they have very little to say. Online connections—Facebook fans, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, a Like, +1, or any connections on social networks—matter only in a customer’s potential to interact with each other and your brand. Just because someone ‘follows’ your brand, just because they are technically there, doesn’t mean they’ll ever take any meaningful action. What makes someone an advocate? What takes someone from customer to SuperFan? Advocate is the term for your most influential, prolific, and knowledgeable customers. The ones who love your business and will rave about it, refer you, answer questions, take calls and jump at the chance to help you achieve goals as a business and community. It’s amazing the thing’s they will do Enhance marketing as evangelists and advocates, speaking on the company’s behalf. Contribute to development as a 24/7 focus group centered on ideation, co-creation, and constructive feedback. Lower support costs as product experts answering questions and deflecting calls. Help you scale. Ten superfans can help you manage ten thousand fans.
- These are all non-financial investments – which is exactly how we describe advocates. When we say ‘Devotion Hacking’ we mean how do you deliver a process, through experimentation, testing and iteration – that deeply encourages the non-financial activities that advocates can take on your behalf. Reviews, Testimonials, References, Content, Test subjects…. The list goes on, and as marketers and growth hackers I don’t need to express how important that is.
- What we have found is that building those relationships at scale is actually a science. There are all sorts of things that we can do to engage our customers and build those relationships through things like trust and social proof, and leveraging that relationship in the sales process, as well as in the customer retention department. And some of the metrics that customers are looking to drive in their business, they want more referrals and more leads and increased conversion rates, reduced churn, higher NPS score. And all of these things come from deepening those relationships with customers. But often times when customers think about advocacy, they don’t necessarily zero in on this idea of the relationship being really important. These are all the various value added acts of advocacy that customers want but the magnitude of those asks can escalate as advocates engage. For example. a customer might be happy to tweet about you early in their relationship but as we deepen our relationship they may do more. It’s important to see advocacy as an ongoing behavior and not a point in time ask. - They nurture great relationships and evolve their customers into active advocates who deliver results. They're doing so to unlock value at every stage of the customer experience with tangible, measurable results. You can start right now by tapping into the latent advocacy potential of your existing customers. Think of all the ways advocates can contribute. Now you’re probably doing many of these things today – but for 99% of the companies we engage with, they’re being done in a haphazard, ad hoc manner. For example: - Advocates can refer business to you – and those leads convert at 5X the rate of all other leads - They can endorse your products in media and analyst briefings, review your products, say great things on reference calls. - They can help you educate the market by sourcing and promoting authentic content (like case studies and success stories) They will engage with your business in a way you haven’t seen before – in communities, at events, in surveys, on customer advisory boards. They can do all of these things and more – if you offer them the right experience. And our customers are the ones who are putting this into practice with their Inflictive powered programs. social proof- ⬆ Consumption & sharing ⬆ Owned media ⬆ Traffic & conversion Sales conversion- ⬇ Customer acquisition costs ⬆ Win rates ⬆ Sales velocity Reduce Churn- ⬇ Churn ⬆ CLV ⬆ NPS/ CSAT ⬆ Up/XSell
- Developing Advocacy and Devotion come from pairing a micro strategy with macro activities The same way that understanding our planet comes from looking deep under the microscope, but also deep into the cosmos - Truly understanding advocacy comes from both a micro and macro approach. That’s right – you have to think big and small to build the case for advocacy
- Developing Advocacy and Devotion come from pairing a micro strategy with macro activities The same way that understanding our planet comes from looking deep under the microscope, but also deep into the cosmos - Truly understanding advocacy comes from both a micro and macro approach. That’s right – you have to think big and small to build the case for advocacy
- Belonging….It’s the reason people paint themselves at sporting events, .
- Or carve logos into their hair
- Or Tattoo their Arm. You ever seen someone with a Suzuki MotorCycle Tatoo? No, because it’s just a form of transportation. Whereas Harley Davidson has created a movement of messengers
- Super fans want to know that their loyalty has consequential implications. They want to know that they matter and see the results of their actions. They really want to move the needle. They want to feel that their contributions are are making an impact that they can measure. And it’s contagious, like a positive feedback loop. Once they see they can move the needle, the want to do more. It’s like a drug.
- They like social capital. When people become rock stars inside a community it feels great. But what really powers super advocate activity is when the experience benefits them outside of the community. If it improves in their careers, their lives in general. When you have these three things are cooking together – belonging, meaningful contributions and social capital – truly awesome things can happen.
- Tesla is a great example of a company that is putting all the pieces of the advocacy framework to work. They understand the concept of exclusivity with the creations of clubs and tight knit communities. They help show the impact their advocates make in the number of gas guzzlers they help take off the road. Offline Tesla partners with financial institutions who invite their preferred customers to exclusive Tesla weekends. In California, they have Tesla Car Clubs and Tesla Road Rallies. And the conversion rate is amazing. They convert at 70%. Typical car sales convert at 12% -- and that’s after a customer has taken it out for a spin.
- Tesla goes even further. It builds its advocate program right into its cars. You turn the key, and an app launches on the dashboard that accesses your address book and encourages you to refer someone. If your referral takes the plunge, they get a $1000 discount and so do you. If you get ten people to buy, you get the right to purchase a special model car that no one else has. Now that’s an exclusive club. It’s also a great little bit of social capital.
- White Hat growth hacking – it’s about testing, experimenting and iterating within your existing customer or user base to find exponential growth engines. So while points, badges and levels are great to get one-off activity, your advocate pool is a great group with which to use as a testing ground. We’re constantly running tests and experiments to see what our customers will respond to and what makes them tick
- At a micro level Game mechanics are an amazing way to build the early building blocks of devotion. It shouldn’t feel like work for your customers and advocates to get to know you better and make an impact. It should feel natural, fun and engaging. When your bank or telecom provider sends you a form to fill out, are you thinking about the ways they may have solved a pain for you in the last year? No..you’re thinking,” this is a form, is this mandatory, if not…Delete..” The same goes for your product, the way you take an advocate through an experience is as important as the ask itself.
- That’s why when we help customers build the community that will spark their movement of advocates, it feels like something recognizable. Challenges feel like Pinterest or other consumer based hub applications. The community feels and sounds like Quora or a familiar discussion follow. Points and badges feel like their favourite challenge based game. See how the way the experience is crafted helps fuel advocacy – not just the ask itself?
- One of our micro experiments was assigning customer advocate images to our social shares and ads. By putting real faces and voices in our ads, our click-through-rates doubled and we generated 66 sales-ready leads in 3 months. While the results are amazing, the stat that we are most proud of is the conversion rate. Typically, leads from our paid advertising effort convert into sales qualified opportunities (SQO) at a rate of approximately 2%. With this campaign, it grew to a whopping 14%! So far, these campaigns have created $153,000 in pipeline, with Twitter being the most successful distribution channel.
- The beautiful thing about engaging an advocate community – is once you stumble on a great hack, the time and effort you have put into deepening your advocate relationships creates a ready stream of advocates who are willing to jump in and get involved. So once we recognized the change in SQO conversion rate – we’ve started adopting this practice across the board. Our advocates are now featured in just about every major marketing initiative we adopt – from our blogs, to ads to our investor materials.
- Black Hat Growth Hacking is about finding and leveraging underserved groups of users. It’s about going beyond the know user-base and finding creative ways to extend reach and conduct experiments
- A great example is Dell Kace, Not the group you’d think of when talking about growth hacking. But a few years ago they conducted a really interesting experiment by asking their advocates about the most influential places on the internet. They didn’t say Facebook or Twitter or Foursquare(RIP), they said Reddit. It took DK by surprise so they started with some experimentation within Reddit and sub-reddit groups. MARK I NEED YOU TO FILL IN THE CONTEXT HERE AS WE DIDN”T FINISH THE STORY
- This saves time, effort and creates optimal results. It even helps create a deeper pool of advocates with which to test and iterate. Consider the case of Ready talk Taking the time to build a pool of happy customer advocates can save you a lot of time in the long run. Consider the days (or weeks) you spend chasing customers for case studies, references, testimonials, or PR requests. First, you have to bug your sales or account reps for customers with an industry-specific story. Once you’ve found a customer who’s willing to talk, you exchange multiple emails to set up an interview—only to find out their story isn’t the right fit and go back to square one. Does this painful (and inefficient) process sound familiar? An advocate marketing platform can automate this process by sending out an ask (or “challenge”) to all the customers within your community. Your advocates can then volunteer to participate. In a matter of 24 to 48 hours, you could have five or six responses from advocates your team never even thought about approaching—allowing you to quickly select the best story. Bo Bandy, at privately funded SME ReadyTalk had a hard time standing out from large competitors like Citrix and Cisco in the web conferencing market. To drive lead generation and social proof for their product, they launched an advocate community called the ReadyTalk Summit Club. Through this program, ReadyTalk gave their happiest customers fun, educational and engaging challenges. Advocates were also asked for favors like acting as a reference or volunteering to be in a case study, receiving points as a reward after completion. This time investment in customer advocacy paid off in the first four months. They recruited 470 advocates who submitted 190 referrals—33% of which closed within the first 60 days. In 2015, the program generated 760 net new leads, which resulted in three closed-won deals and an extra $60,000 in pipeline. “
- In a world of abundance – Trust and Attention are scarce resources. As marketers – the best thing we can do to earn these two items back is to change the messenger. Find the right ones for your brand, and make them your messengers