Three Reasons Why Marketers DON'T Invest In Brand Advocacy

“Every company has a social media management solution.? But not every company has an brand advocacy program.? Why is that?”

Was talking with the CEO of a large marketing automation software company recently who made this remark.

He’s 100% right.?

Every company has employees, customers, partners, etc.? So why don’t they have an advocacy program?

From what we see and hear, there are three main reasons why brand advocacy isn’t something that every marketing team is doing, yet.? And I stress YET.??

1. Your marketing team thinks social begins and ends with their brand pages

The problem with brand pages is they don’t do much in the way of helping you to reach your target audiences.

Firstly, a lot of people don’t follow your brand page.? They just don’t and they never will.? First and foremost people follow PEOPLE.

Second, the content you post to your brand pages will only be exposed to a TINY portion of your your followers, UNLESS you boost those posts with ad spend.??

Which of course is the whole reason brand pages exist in the first place: the social networks created brand pages as a mechanism to extract ad dollars.?

Don’t get me wrong, a well maintained brand page is important.? People are searching your company on social media and you want your brand to present well.

But, brand pages are NOT an effective distribution channel.??

1. Your marketing team is intimidated about running an advocacy program

This is a far more valid concern.? Running an advocacy program does require your marketing team to build support in other areas of the organization.?

That’s not something that every marketer is comfortable with.?

There’s a reason we talk about silos in business; not everyone is willing to tap co-workers on the shoulder.

However, I think this concern is outdated for two reasons: 1) all of your co-workers are already on social media and 2) activating them as advocates is super simple.

Re the former, in years past not everyone was on social media, which made it hard to determine who you should approach to join your advocacy program.?

Remember those people who said “I’m never going to put my rolodex on Linkedin!”?? Yeah, those people on Linkedin now, just like everyone else.

Re the latter, the process of activating an advocate (anyone, an exec, a recruiter, an engineer, whomever) could not be simpler.? Couple clicks, less than 30 seconds and they’re done.

Plus, a modern advocacy platform like EveryoneSocial allows you to bring advocacy to your advocates, where they're spending their time every day: in Slack or Teams, via email, in Salesforce, your intranet, etc.

Point being, activating advocates is SUPER simple (did I mention everyone wants to be an advocate?) and it needn’t take time out of their already hectic schedule.

Myth busted.

1. You're marketing team is just too busy.? Too many things going on.? Not a priority.

Oh yes.? Totally get this.? Reaching your customers and buyers efficiently, effectively and authentically isn’t a priority for every marketing team.

There’s lots of other things marketing should be spending time on!??

Such as sending emails that get caught in spam filters, spending loads of money on ads, creating content that will never be seen.

Of course I'm being cheeky.?

The #1 goal (and responsibility) of EVERY marketing team is to be reaching their company’s target buyers efficiently, effectively and AUTHENTICALLY.??

We’re extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the fastest growing companies over the last 10 years.? Amazon, Meta, Qualtrics, and Adobe to name just a few.??

What these and our other clients understand is that the ONLY thing that matters in the world of marketing is alpha: the ROI on their marketing investment.

And in order to achieve alpha you’ve got to explore new frontiers.? As one of our long-time customer CEO (who is a former CMO) says, “marketers need to be bold!”.??

If you do the same stuff you and others were doing 5 years ago, guess what, your results are going to be less than exceptional. They're going to be the same as everyone else.

As I’ve said in recent posts, awareness is on everyones’ minds right now, including the biggest brands in the world.? And advocacy is an AMAZING way to build awareness.

There's never been a better time to invest in an advocacy program and frankly, given the macro environment, it's exactly the solution most companies need to reach their key customers, buyers, hires and other audiences on social.