Advocate Marketing: Strategies for Building Buzz, Leveraging Customer Satisfaction, and Creating Relationships

by Barbara Thomas

Overview

Today, engaging customer advocates is one of the most powerful marketing strategies available to you. Advocates provide third-party validation and positive relevance; build and protect brands, and create exceptionally effective content to influence buyer decisions. Sales teams enjoy the benefits of advocates, too, through case studies, referrals/introductions, and assistance in securing renewals.

Advocate Marketing: Strategies for Building Buzz, Leveraging Customer Satisfaction and Creating Relationships shows CMOs, business development leaders, and customer success professionals, and sales executives exactly how to leverage this powerful approach. Barbara Thomas helps you make the business case, outlines the strategic requirements, and presents powerful best practices and case studies. You'll learn from the experience of recognized leaders in advocacy marketing, from Intel and Citrix to Sirius Decisions, Influitive, Reputation Advocates, Boulder Logic, and RO/Innovations.

Most important, Thomas introduces a systematic, five-step strategy for leveraging this powerful opportunity. You'll discover how to:

• Build a complete strategic plan for advocate marketing
• Define best-practice program processes and policies
• Establish internal resources, team, organizations, and budgets
• Choose and integrate the right technology and tools
• Establish and apply the right KPI metrics and analytics

What others say about you carries far more weight than anything you can say about yourself. Advocate Marketing will help you transform that simple reality into a powerful competitive advantage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780134496054
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	03/09/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Barbara Thomas is president of Creative Tactics and is recognized for helping large and small organizations with high-impact, award-winning programs. Known as BT to her associates, she offers the benefit of more than 25 years of experience with corporate and governmental institutions to engage their customers and turn them into advocates. Clients appreciate her clear, direct communication and insight into their business. As a Certified Direct Marketing and Certified eMarketing professional, BT is the recent winner of the 2016 Killer Content award and has served on boards of national marketing organizations, speaks at marketing events, volunteers her time to mentoring, and provides pro bono marketing services to small independent business owners.

She and her husband live in North Potomac with their two dogs, one cat, and thousands of honeybees. BT is an award-winning beekeeper in the state of Maryland.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix
Preface xiv
Part I: Principles and Benefits of Advocate Marketing 1
Chapter 1: What Is Advocate Marketing? 3
Chapter 2: Why Is Advocate Marketing Important? 13
Chapter 3: The Net Advocate Score: Building on the Net Promoter Score 25
Part II: Case Studies and Best Practices: Words from the Experts 35
Chapter 4: Build an Advocate Recognition Engagement (ARE) Program 37
Chapter 5: The Power of One Advocate 53
Chapter 6: Breaking Past the “Press Release” Goal 61
Chapter 7: Overcoming Skepticism with Open Communications 71
Chapter 8: Innovative Marketing Strategy Propels Intel to Successful Global Product Launch 79
Chapter 9: Citrix Moves from Customer Content Factory Model to Content Showroom 91
Chapter 10: The Influential Power of Customer References 99
Chapter 11: Award Engagement Program Helps Win Two-Million-Dollar Contract 107
Chapter 12: Enthusiastic Advocates Help Businesses Drive Measurable Marketing and Revenue Performance 117
Chapter 13: The Paradox of “Do as I Say, Not as I Do” 127
Chapter 14: Survey Says: Engage Your Advocates as Partners at Every Opportunity 135
Chapter 15: Advocates Turning Rogue: The Importance of Reputation Management 143
Chapter 16: Best Practices for Creating a Project Management Plan for an Advocate Recognition Engagement (ARE) Program 155
Chapter 17: Best Practices in the B2B Customer Advocacy and Reference Industry 165
Chapter 18: Best Practices for Measurability 173
Chapter 19: Epilogue: What’s Next? Using What You Have Learned 193
Interviewees’ Contact Information 199
Index 201