UNLEASH YOUR ADVOCATE ARMY! Drive Positive Word of Mouth & Sales

The most important brand assets managed by Brand agencies is Trust, especially with customers, clients, employees and other stakeholders. The company works because people trust the business they support. 

Traditionally Companies would send executives to build personal relationships or independent, third party intermediaries – to represent their products or services. Companies who could afford marketing budget also augmented their sales force with various other forms of advertisements from print ads to pushing stories about their brands on social media. 

In my view branding is all about companies creating stories that connects emotionally to their target audience and today every marketing focus company allocated huge budgets to creative engaging and socially relevant stories. 

When you evaluate digital presence of most of the brands, whether on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and to an extend even Instagram, you will realize that nobody seems to be engaged with the stories been published by those brands. You will realize that most content created would have pathetic interaction with their readers, there are few likes, there would be even fewer shares and incredibly few comments. The ugly question asked to marketing manager especially in the digital economy is “Why are we spending all this money, when no one seems to be engaged or interacting with our content?”

Understanding Advocacy Marketing:

And the gist of the problem is simple, Most of the content that most of the marketers are creating on most of their social media platforms is, pardon me, corporate propaganda. It's not something that you would share with a friend. It's not something you would send to a colleague, It's basically either warmed over bleh. The alternative is not to try to get people who have learned to write one way over their entire marketing career and they create brochureware. And put it on a social platform and expect magic to happen, it doesn't. Boring content is still boring content. 

Advocacy Marketing is the solution that address your problem of “Creating Boring Content”. It is the form of marketing where instead of creating stories by themselves, marketers work with different group of people out there who are creating engaging stories, stories that people are commenting on, stories that people are sharing, stories that people are commenting on, Stories which are being discussed in colleges, homes and offices. Stories created by these group are people are authentic, relatable to real life and carry credibility of their author. These are the stories that drive brand conversations, consumer engagement and drive purchase pattern of their readers.

Who are these storytellers/Content Creators?

Huda Kattan (Beauty Creator), Lele Pons (Sketch Comedian), Zach King (Digital Musician), Summer Ray (Fitness star) and Cameron Dallas (Actor Model) are some of the world’s most popular story tellers within their industry. These are the people who are though leaders, trendsetters and Opinion leaders with their industry. They may be social media users, journalists, industry analytics, high profile executives and may simple be one of the your employees influencing the behaviour of his friends on his social network. They spend their days developing new content — videos, photos, blog posts, and podcasts — and engaging their followers. They build active communities both online (on different platforms) and offline (at events) around seemingly any topic imaginable — everything from beauty to AI to e-sports. Their audience turns to them for industry insights, new product information, and recommendations.

They already have the trust of thousands, if not millions, of your target customers. The basic premises of relationship marketing is to weave your brand into their story, rather than telling yours from scratch.

SUCCESS STORIES OF ADVOCACY MARKETING:

While there are many companies in the fashion, Food and Retail Industry who have tried some variation of Relationship Marketing, One noticeable implementation has been by IBM. It  manages a global network of “IBM Futurists” who are subject matter experts on emerging technologies, commerce, and marketing. IBM’s relations team actively manages and builds its Futurist community, engaging influencers in different parts of the world to participate in events, co-author educational white papers specific to the influencer’s expertise, and co-host webinars for local audiences.

Another variation of such program are Google Developers Expert program implemented by google to manage community of Developers working on technologies build by Google.

Another Successful campaign in the relationship marketing was executed by Luxury Automaker MASERATI last year The Italian carmaker epitomizes luxury and class. Its streamlined vehicles start at over $74,000 and are meant to go fast, in style. To promote its luxury models, the brand travelled to the Alps with three influencers, effectively living up to its reputation for creating, “Masterpieces of elegance, luxury, and sports car performance.” 

The trio of influencers involved included macro-influencers Scott Schuman (@thesartorialist) and James Walker (@mrjww), as well as micro-influencer Jenny Walton (jennymwalton). Maserati organized a photo and video shoot in the snowy mountains of Courmayeur, Italy with beautiful views of Mont Blanc.

To know more about Advocacy Marketing and how you can use the it to enhance your brand Visibility, engage sales and increase Return from your marketing dollars connect with us on 

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