[Webinar] Leveraging Customer Advocates

Editor's Notes

1. Amanda Grupp: Hello, I’m Amanda Grupp and today happens to be my one year anniversary as the customer advocacy manager at Kapost, which was a new position when I started. Our customer success and marketing teams came together to create it, which shows that customer advocacy is extremely cross functional. I have a background in anthropology—the study of human societies and culture—and marketing, creating customer communities, and customer support. This allows me to approach advocacy from several angles.
2. Founder of Eloqua
3. Happy customers create great content!
4. 1. Nobody believes what you say about your brand. They believe what other people say about you. Advocates can help increase brand sentiment and buyer trust by sharing their positive experiences on social networks, review websites, at in-person events, in case studies and so much more. 2. Sales cycles are getting longer and buying committees are getting larger. Surrounding buyers with advocate social proof throughout the entire buyer journey is the fastest way to make them trust your product. 3. Advocacy allows you to regularly engage, educate, and communicate with customers so they feel appreciated and heard. The results? Decreased churn, new account growth via cross-sell/upsells, and higher overall customer satisfaction—which usually means an increase in customer advocacy, as well. 4. CS teams can use an advocate marketing program to educate and motivate customers to become more successful (which will turn them into even stronger advocates). Posting product tips, case studies, and other helpful content can show advocates how to get the most value from your product, and speed up the onboarding process.
5. As a customer marketer, you have a very valuable asset to offer through case studies, webinars, and speaking events: publicity. This is valuable to the customer at two levels: the company level and the human level. We’ve found it particularly important for SMB customers, who are excited to build brand awareness and re-market the content as validation that they’re fast-growing and cutting-edge. Early in the process, ask the advocate about their goals for the project and do your best to make them shine. It’s our job to show how our product served as a means to that end. Many of your advocates will be proud of what they’ve achieved, and a great asset should be something they feel proud to share internally.
6. Amanda talked about why customer advocacy matters to the company and advocates, and I really want to dive into that and how it matters specifically to you as marketers. The function of marketers is to build brand awareness and demonstrate your company’s industry expertise to drive traffic, leads, and sales. Content is key to this, but that doesn’t mean you have to be alone in producing all the content for your brand. In a world inundated with advertisements, consumers don’t trust traditional marketing, they trust their peers—so let them tell the story for you. Partner with happy customers (aka your advocates) to create content. Highlight their successes as they share their positive experiences with your company and product. Customers can be your best listeners (upsell anyone?)—You already have their ear, and customers are one of your greatest content consumers. This leads to several opportunities. If you prescribe solutions for their needs, there is the possibility of upsells. Customers can be your company’s greatest influencers, and share your content like wildfire. And, they love learning about what other customers are doing, so advocacy content is one of the best ways to get their attention. This includes thought leadership from other customers (let them know they are in an elite rank), and practical how-tos of how others are using your product. BUT you need alignment with customer success and sales. This is something you’ll hear over and over, and I’m not sorry. To have a successful customer advocacy program, you need cross-team alignment.
7. Advocacy can live in many different parts of the organization. Though I’m on our content marketing team, I often joke that I could live on the customer success or sales teams with how much I interact with them…. And actually, I started on the customer success team, which allowed me to create relationships with our customer success managers and customers that have proved invaluable. That said, my position gains a lot from being on the marketing team, and here are some benefits: Ability to identify the correct persona for advocates—Marketers are great at identifying personas and your advocacy program will need to identify advocate personas to understand what drives different people, and how to serve them. Platforms to amplify the distribution of customer successes—With control of the company blog, website, podcast, videos, etc, the marketing team has a lot of unique ways to get the customer stories out into the world, and ensure they are engaging. That’s because... Marketers are talented storytellers who know how to take what may seem mundane and make it resonate with the right audience. Customer stories must be authentic, and compelling, so the audience identifies with the customers. Marketers make this happen. Speaking of the right audience, the marketing team has insight into what stories the sales team needs, so they can get the right customer stories to speak to prospects and be shared. If you’re shaking your head saying you don’t know what the sales team needs, check out our sales/marketing alignment benchmark. You’re missing out on creating great content—and having it be used. That said, there are a few drawbacks to advocacy living in marketing. With awareness and communication, they can be overcome. Marketing teams typically don’t interact with customers regularly. That can make connecting with customers, and hearing the real story more difficult. The cool thing is that once you start interacting with customers, not only do you hear even more stories and get better customer content and testimonials, you also get better all around content. The other day I read an article that said to “Write down any question you hear from customers more than twice. That’ll feed your content marketing.” More access to customers, allows you to give more guidance to customers, and prospects who benefit from your product. Which, speaking of people who use your product—you do have to listen to your customers and hear the story you’re telling them. If it doesn’t match what your company message is, keep asking questions to figure out the disreparency. People reading the content can tell if you’re telling the storyline, or if the customer is. If a company has case studies that all sound the same, it feels insincere and the consumer can pick up on that. Make sure you use the customer’s experience and capture their story. Hopefully you’ve educated them and they believe in your company and what you’re doing, so it gets your message across, authentically.
8. There are so many ways you can leverage advocates to benefit you—and them! Here are several ways Amanda shared.
9. Here are some of my favorite pieces of content that to create with customers, and how it’s done. Last year was our first year of customer awards, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t receive internal skepticism. In years past, we always did the Kapost 50 where we picked 50 companies with the best marketing campaigns of the year. It was great, but it didn’t share our message or our customers for us, it was actually really hard to say what it did for us. The customer awards, on the other hand, gave us a chance to highlight our customers. We gained several amazing customer stories, essentially mini-case studies. They gained bragging rights (trust us, it was competitive), and an award that resulted in promotions, recruiting opportunities, and acknowledgement of hard work, well done. The best part is that customers actually created the content for us, we asked for story submissions. We had a cross-functional judge panel and then helped polish some of the submissions—we’re always willing to put in the work, and it’s great when it’s a collaboration. Blog posts—are a lightweight way to have customers write their thought leadership in your industry (helping spread your message), a place to highlight their successes (which happen to be done with your product). You can have customers write the blog for you—get their name out there—or ghostwrite for them—or even interview the customer and write about them. Who doesn’t like a little flattery? Speaking of which, get your customers to talk about themselves, and you, with an influencer program and speaking engagements.
10. Again, advocacy continues throughout the lifecycle of a customers. Prospects look at advocacy content before purchasing a software—they might even speak with a customer of yours through formal or informal channels. Customers benefit from advocacy—both participating and learning about other customers. Here are some numbers you can measure. The ROI is a long term game, which is why you should start tracking now. Prospects Length of the sales cycle when advocate content is consumed or a reference is used—ideally Number of case studies and other advocacy content consumed Total deals closed from references—and the new revenue Customers Percentage of customers who are advocates Customer engagement with content Renewals and upsells of customers engaged with advocacy—advocacy influenced revenue
11. Quick plug for our advocacy program, if there are any customers wondering how to be involved, message me at amanda.grupp@kapost.com. We’d love to collaborate and share your successes and elevate your company and personal brand.
12. Questions: Can you share some examples of great pieces of customer advocacy? How can you pitch customer advocacy to your CMO? How should a team new to customer advocacy start building relationships with customers? What role does the customer success organization play? How do unhappy customers factor into advocacy? Do they? Amanda Grupp: Can you share some examples of great pieces of customer advocacy? I loved watching Kristin Fallon speak about GE and Cameron Caswell speak about Synopsys at SiriusDecisions. Their stories resonated with so many people who reached out to the presenters in person and LinkedIn. On our end, we had a lot more traffic at the booth. It’s truly a success when both parties win. And actually, Cameron is a great advocacy success story, since she saw a Kapost case study the year before at SiriusDecisions and knew she had to have the software—and present next year. Talk about ROI and an all around amazing customer. The other great thing about this is how diverse their stories are, which speaks to the authenticity of content. Also, we were able to do follow up webinars, which is great derivative content for us, without too much additional work on our customer’s behalf. Also, Marketo’s Fearless 50. How can you pitch customer advocacy to your CMO? You must be able to use numbers. While feel good examples are nice, make a case with the C-suite with numbers. Show the revenue increase in companies who have advocacy programs and come up with a plan to measure yours. Make sure the advocacy ties in with your marketing plan, and show the benefits. How should a team new to customer advocacy start building relationships with customers? Start building a relationship with your customer success team. The biggest challenge I’ve found, and heard from others, is customer success managers feeling (rightly) protective of their customers. Let them know your intentions and how you can help them—and the customer. Ensure that you’re not just doing an ask, and it is a give as well. I never talk to a customer without letting them know I am a resource and what I can do for them, regardless if they want to do a case study. What role does the customer success organization play? They are a connection both to the customer and customer stories. I sit in on our Customer Success meetings every week, so I know what the customer experience is, how I participate, and ensure I hear our customer success stories. They are really your partner in this, and sometimes advocacy even sits in Customer Success for this reason. How do unhappy customers factor into advocacy? Do they? Yes! Detractors can become some of your biggest advocates if you 1—know they are detractors, which is how a NPS score can help and 2—reach out and really listen to their concerns and respond.