'Advocacy Leak': is your company leaving opportunity on the table?

For thousands of years, humans doing business, dating back to the markets of ancient Rome & Egypt, recognized word-of-mouth marketing and advocacy as the most impactful marketing tactic to sell their products and keep customers coming back. It’s rooted in trust and connection, two powerful human psychological elements. Some would argue that’s somewhat changed now since we have technology and a much more complex society, but I’d say the opposite. Humans inherently like the simple and advocacy keeps purchasing simple and is happening everywhere whether your company knows about it or not.

Companies are getting leaner as we enter the summer months, figuring out how to cut unnecessary costs and be most effective with their budgets, while also **hopefully** doubling down on strategies that enhance customer loyalty, engagement, and retention & expansion. It would make sense to turn your eyes slightly away from acquisition and towards your most valuable asset, your customers.

Strange it is then that we’re seeing companies actually stall or shrink the investment they’re making in their customer marketing & advocacy programs. Perhaps some reverse logic in play.

Luckily, this isn’t the case for all leaders out there. Many of the same leaders who doubled down on their customers during the beginning phases of the pandemic and perhaps all the way back during the 2008 recession know the power of customer lifecycle marketing engagement & advocacy.

Let’s discuss a blind spot that can help you maximize your most effective marketing play (your customers) and squeeze all the juice from your install base to come out of this economic situation in a stronger position than before.

Advocacy Leak: The potential output of enthusiastic customers that businesses leave dormant.

Advocacy Leak is customer enthusiasm left dormant due to systematic failures in visibility, process, and activation. It is enthusiasm you did the work to earn, that your teams sunk time and effort into, but that doesn’t show up in any tangible form, beneficial to the business or customer (notice, I mentioned customer here as well, and will explain why).

This dormant enthusiasm is potential growth-influencing activities that haven’t been put into action.

This means lost opportunities to identify & activate potential advocates to support things like renewal discussions, upsell opportunities, customer reference calls, referrals, testimonials, and on (and on and on).

Leaks can spring up at any part of the customer lifecycle post-purchase journey and can compound on each other, derailing every customer-facing team’s efforts and leaving the customer inactive to participate.

Leaks will silently slow you down, especially when it comes to scaling customer engagement & advocacy. Coincidently, your customers lose out as well, given many of these opportunities help them with their own career advancement (through things like personal branding), financial gain (through rewards), and overall happiness (through recognition and giving back).

We may be focusing on company growth gains, but it’s critical to think about what the customer has to gain as well.

The silent unmeasured impact of Advocacy Leak

Advocacy is something that happens regardless of additional effort, outside of having an exceptional product. “By doing nothing with customer marketing, you’ll likely have 1 advocate out of every 100 customers” (heard first from my main man, Steve George ). However, out of those 100 customers, there are sure to be many more enthusiastic ones that would help market through or to and that’s where the real opportunity lies. One missed advocate may not make much of a difference but especially in an era of economic instability and upheaval, the financial consequences of compounded missed opportunities for customers to advocate can make a pretty massive (almost silent) impact.

Companies that don’t have a well-oiled advocacy program and customer marketing communication structure in place, risk enthusiastic customers not being involved in important revenue-influencing activities like upsells, renewal conversations, referrals, customer reference calls, reviews, testimonials, etc.

It’s hard to argue that the sheer amount, and not to mention the diversity, of customers involved in the above activities will organically lead to more revenue (new & existing). If you agree, time to get that customer marketing & advocacy program right, and put levers in place to measure it's impact and hit the gas.

In a downturn, those are opportunities to generate revenue and build brand trust that you can’t afford to miss.

Spotting & Fixing Advocacy Leak

Advocacy Leak is tough to track. If it were easy, someone would have patched up the problem by now.?

The leak can translate to internal time/money spent or revenue/branding influence on the customer side.

Let’s start with ‘the internal’: most customer marketing teams work with limited resources, so if they’re able to achieve 2x (or more) results by avoiding as many leaks as possible, this leads to more time for them to focus on strategic activities more tightly tied to executive priorities and higher revenue influence, while not needing to hire as many resources to achieve that output (important given the reduction or halting of employees). The team typically has an idea of their lack of coverage across the customer base with both automated & manual touchpoints, what percentage of that group is actually engaging, and the success they’re having in the form of ‘acts of advocacy’. Great place to start. There are typically a lot more holes than you think. Additionally, if you don't have a system in place to make the advocacy (references or customer content or participation) readily available and easy to use by the end-business users (i.e. sales or product) then we've spotted another potential advocacy leak, internally.

‘The external’: this is where things become tougher unless you have very vocal customers. In this case, we’d want to subjectively look at the below:

• Are we engaging customers at the right moments during the customer lifecycle stages (onboarding, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy)?
• Are we engaging customers where they are to give them the easiest way to optimize their preference to opt-in (i.e. community, email, academy, dedicated advocacy portal, etc.)?
• Are we recognizing & rewarding these customers in ways that align with what motivates them while providing flexibility for them to choose their own pay-out (B2C style)?

The key is running customer marketing as a holistic, collaborative, and coordinated effort. That means operationalizing the entire customer lifecycle, on a Customer Marketing & Advocacy Platform (*shameless sales plug* like Base - Customer Led Growth ) that ingests all relevant data in real-time and informs the most optimal communications to your customer base.

Such a platform gives everyone, from customer marketing through customer success, an accurate read of advocacy appetite and existing advocacy participation. It allows them to optimize areas to further engage the customer base on their way to the advocacy phase. And ultimately prove impact of all the above.

Patching the holes means treating customer marketing & advocacy like a flywheel. It’s not easy. But do it, and a bear market becomes not panic, but a story of how your business weathered the turmoil and furthered the relationships you have with your customers today while you marched side by side into battle with them to safeguard your company’s revenue engine: the customer.

...Join the discussion on #advocacyleak! Thoughts?