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. Comments are closed.
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November 2024
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