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🤔Quick thought: Customer Marketing & Advocacy vs. Customer Advocacy Marketing
Why do we refer to this function as customer marketing and advocacy? …When,if we’re doing it right, we as customer marketers should be putting our customers first and advocating on behalf of them (our advocates) to build trust and cultivate customers’ participation in acts of advocacy that can be leveraged by marketing? When we say customer marketing & advocacy it feels like we’re putting our company’s priorities first and advocacy is an afterthought (aka the customer is an afterthought 😬, yikes).  Customers in your advocacy program want to network with each other. They know that it helps their personal brand, accelerates their role success, and helps lead to future career opportunities when they can meaningfully expand their professional network. That’s why it’s of value to your customers if your organization can help make it easy for them to find each other to make those connections. Here’s a simple, and easy-lift, way to do it. Use your customer community, advocacy platform, or even a private LinkedIn group you’ve set up just for customers…just some place online where your customers regularly gather. Create a peer-to-peer networking post. In the post, ask customers who are interested in, and open to, networking to share their title, industry, company name, and LinkedIn profile URL in a comment. Then ensure the post instructs commenters to review the comments for people they would like to reach out to via LinkedIn to connect with, and/or set up an intro chat. Those looking to network can use control F (find function) to search the comments for titles or other keywords as identifiers of peers with whom they would want to connect. You can even go as far as providing a sentence or two script for those reaching out to their peers on LinkedIn to initiate a networking conversation, like: We are both part of the XYZ company customer program and I found your LinkedIn profile from the networking post. I just wanted to reach out to connect and have an intro chat. Depending on the platform you may be using to gather and communicate with your customer advocacy program members, there are varying degrees of sophistication you can get into with peer-to-peer connections and even more direct recommendations and matching. At this level you can gain the ability to track that these connections are happening, which can help prove another great benefit of your advocacy program to the org — peer-to-peer references, peer-to-peer mentor/mentee relationships, and often cross-seek and up-sells come from such peer-to-peer connections. Oh by the way, it’s also great for executive customers. How you ask? Create a private, exclusive group online just for your customers who are executives (I recommend a private LinkedIn group for this one because most executives are on LinkedIn regularly). Offer a 1:1 personal introduction to the customer executives you want to invite to this LinkedIn group. Let me know know that by joining they will have access to other customer executives who join from your organization. It's an opportunity specifically designed for executives to find one another and network right on LinkedIn, where they are anyway. Then, the group can function like the peer-to-peer networking described earlier. The beauty of using a LinkedIn group is that if the executive has their LinkedIn notifications turned on they will be notified when there are posts to that group, which is the reminder to them to pop in and do some networking. Remember, customers who participate in your advocacy program may be brand/product ambassadors, but they likely are more driven to participate because they care about their own careers, and how your program might help them in their role to get promoted, or to find their next role. Lean into that motivation and provide value. Doing so will endear trust and respect and more advocacy.
Emily Amos, founder of Uplift Content, will be speaking at CustomerX Con in Boston in a little over a week, and while she's there she will be conducting a “woman-on-the-street”-style interview with attendees. Her goal is to ask one single question of as many customer marketers and customer advocates as she can, and then compile the responses into a helpful resource for the customer marketing community. Here's the question: How do you measure the performance of your customer stories? To kick off her effort prior to the conference, she tagged several CMA professionals on LinkedIn, myself included (I'm honored), to answer her question. As usual, while on LinkedIn trying to answer the question, I ran into the character limit because my response was too long. So in order to share my long answer without a character limit, I created this blog post... My answer to the question: This isn’t exactly an area that the role I’m in typically is responsible to measure, however, I do have some thoughts about it. Because a customer story will likely live on a web page you can measure the basic web page metrics — traffic, click-thrus, conversions. You can even break this down a bit further if you have/use different formats of the story, like video vs. written to identify which format converts best. As conversions happen (form fills, etc.), you can likely track the lead through the sales cycle to closed won/lost status, if it gets that far. Then you can look at how many deals included that asset as part of the journey. So what’s measured in the scenario above is really just a strong indication, based on online actions, whether or not the story was effective at converting those site visitors into the next stage of the sales process. Unfortunately, we know that site visitors don’t always follow the most easily measured path that we marketers would prefer they take. In reality, you will never know if someone read the story, didn’t fill out the form for a demo, then later chose to return to your website, then reached out to a buddy on LinkedIn using your product to get the name of their contact at your org. Then they got in touch with someone and a deal ensued from there toward a close/won status. You can perhaps gain some additional insights by enabling customer-facing teams to use the customer story in their outreach toward sales (net new, up-sell/cross-sell). Even KR them on the usage of the story asset to hold them accountable toward using it (hopefully you’ve connected with Sales prior to creating the asset to ensure it’s fulfilling needs they have in the sales process to begin with). Give each Sales person a unique tracking link that can be used in email signatures, in decks presented to prospects, in email outreach and follow ups to prospects, etc. Then you can see how often the asset is being used by Sales — one measure of whether or not the story is effective: does Sales even use it? Then you can compare how often the sales team is using/sharing the asset with the traffic to the story online and ultimately the conversion rate of the web page the story resides on, and how many closed/won deals included that asset as a touch point in the sales process. Emily is a good human who is amazing with customer stories, so if you find yourself in need of help to craft effective customers stories, click the button below and check out her website.
 I keep seeing posts and practices that suggest using AI as a starting point to create a first draft in record time. Then use your human intelligence to edit that draft to your needs. Perhaps it’s just me, but that process does not tend to save me time, or produce the kinds of results I’m after — quality and expedience. Here’s what I’m getting at: I think AI is a better editor than an initial drafting tool when it comes to writing. When I try to start writing with AI, I have to create a prompt to have AI produce a draft. Certainly, I can add reference sites or other inputs to help refine the prompt toward an output that is a potentially workable draft. That’s time spent crafting a prompt. Here’s what I don’t like about that: Even inputting tone of voice instructions into the prompt, the initial draft output doesn’t have my tone, or the brand’s tone; it still needs quite a bit of massaging. That’s time spent where I have to edit. Editing the draft AI has produced leaves me feeling like I’m trying to make something work from what’s been given me instead of starting with solid ideas that need editing to tighten it up and ensure it flows well to it’s point or call-to-action. AI as an editor, however, has been a much better experience for me. I’ll write my first draft or an outline of ideas then save myself time by having AI refine my writing to make it more concise or come up with paragraph transitions that I hadn’t thought of. Approaching it this way tends to allow your own tone of voice and writing style (which is an output of your thinking style and communication style of expressing those ideas) to come through while the AI tech shaves time off of the process of specific word choices and sentence structures. All in all, I think AI in writing is a time-saving editing tool vs. a creative starting point. |
Hey there. I'm Nick
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December 2024
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