If you’re in the customer advocate practitioner community you already know why developing and curating customer-centric content is a must-have component of your customer advocate program. When it comes to making decisions about technology, B2B buyers value peer opinions above all other vendor-produced content.
Setting a quota of X case studies or videos in a vacuum is not a viable program goal. Aligning your content development plan to your company’s primary growth goals, your north star, is paramount. This eBook covers the process of goal alignment. Once you’ve got that locked in, take these things into account.
What’s surprising, given all this data on the value of customer content, is that many companies aren’t optimizing their use of customer stories beyond the marketing qualified lead generation stage. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2019 B2B Trends survey, employing well developed customer-centric content throughout the sales cycle is still relatively rare. Certainly, customer stories are great tools for lead generation, but once prospects do connect with sales, it is even more critical to deliver the most meaningful content to propel prospects through the rest of the journey.
The sales journey isn’t straight or consistent from prospect to prospect. Different questions and concerns will surface at different times. Still, you need to provide a variety of customer-derived content to meet prospects’ needs. When prospects are just testing the waters, short, catchy sound bites or video testimonials can be just the thing to grab attention and open the door. Later on, a robust ROI case study may be the tipping point leading to a final reference call or site visit. A Gartner study found, “95% of buyers buy from someone who gave them content at each stage of the buying process.”
How do you ensure you’re spending your content production time wisely? By consulting with your stakeholders to pinpoint exactly what they need, and when. Here are the most common stakeholders that should be included in your discovery process because they rely on your program’s “assets.”
Here are the questions that you should ask when meeting with your peer groups:
This last question comes from a context of ranking all content on a spectrum relative to the content’s level of candor and granularity. More granularity assumes the buyer is ready to commit more attention and effort to understanding your solution. Think ROI case studies or analyst reports.
The clear takeaway is that if you make your content easy to find and designed to meet the needs of Marketing and Sales, you’ll be ahead of many of your competitors. Gartner found that “Less than 40% of marketers engaged in content marketing have a defined and documented strategy.” Without that strategy, how can a Sales or Marketing organization deliver precisely what your prospects want—relevant, trustworthy content that speaks directly to their requirements and increasing confidence in their decision.
Producing the content is just the beginning of the process. Here’s how you maximize your investment:
To find out more ways of making your customer reference program indispensable, download our free eBook or read our customers' success stories.
As this infographic illustrates, a mature advocacy program is responsible for continuously identifying advocates, maintaining accurate advocacy data, protecting customer relationships, and aligning with top company goals to accelerate growth.
The infographic contains six key components. Here's a description of each for you to translate into your own talking points.
Every advocate starts as a customer.
The journey begins when account teams, customer success managers, support teams, and services organizations create positive experiences that build trust and confidence.
As customers achieve success, some become enthusiastic supporters of the company, its products, and its people. These customers are identified as potential advocates and introduced to the advocacy team.
The advocacy team interviews these individuals, learns about their experiences, captures important details about their interests and expertise, and creates a searchable advocate profile.
The result is a discoverable advocate: someone who can be found, matched, and engaged when the business needs credible customer voices.
Without this process, valuable customer relationships remain hidden inside co-workers’ heads or team spreadsheets, unavailable to the broader organization.
Great advocates are rarely discovered by the advocacy team alone. It’s really just too much to ask of any one part of the organization. Every customer touchpoint plays a part in cultivating and retaining advocates.
Customer success managers see customer enthusiasm firsthand. Account teams hear success stories during business reviews. Support teams witness customer loyalty. Product teams interact with passionate users who influence future direction.
A successful advocacy program creates a systematic way for all customer-facing teams to identify and nominate potential advocates, as well as a means for customers to self-identify..
Think of it as building a talent pipeline.
The broader the participation across the organization, the stronger and more diverse the advocate community becomes.
This collective effort ensures the advocacy database reflects the full spectrum of customer success stories across industries, products, geographies, and use cases.
The advocacy team serves as the steward of the organization's advocacy data.
Their responsibilities fall into three primary areas.
First, they recruit continuously. Advocates change jobs, priorities shift, and customer enthusiasm naturally evolves over time. Maintaining a healthy advocacy community requires constant replenishment.
Second, they keep information current. Customer stories, product deployments, business outcomes, and willingness to participate all change. Outdated advocacy data quickly becomes unreliable.
Third, they measure and report value. Advocacy programs must demonstrate their contribution to business outcomes such as customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Beyond maintaining records, the advocacy team actively shapes the composition of the database to align with company growth objectives. This is essential if the program is to be seen by executives as a strategic lever vs. a low-level function an intern can run.
If the company’s strategic direction includes expanding into healthcare, launching a new product, selling through a new channel, entering Asia, or targeting a specific buyer persona, the advocacy team ensures the advocate population evolves accordingly.
In many ways, they function as portfolio managers for one of the company's most valuable assets: customer credibility.
Most organizations initially think of advocacy as a sales resource.
Sales certainly benefits from customer references, but advocacy creates value far beyond the sales organization.
The common thread is credibility.
Advocates provide something no marketing budget can purchase directly: authentic proof from real customers.
Most mature advocacy programs include additional components that extend value for both advocates and the business.
These activities are connected mechanisms that strengthen relationships, increase engagement, and create additional opportunities for customers to contribute.
Together, they help transform advocacy from a transactional activity into an ongoing customer experience.
The ultimate purpose of customer advocacy is not activity.
It is business impact.
In Summary
Advocates are valuable assets. The advocacy team's job is to make sure those assets are available when needed, protected from burnout, and aligned with the organization's most important priorities.
When done well, customer advocacy transforms customer success into measurable business value. It is an enterprise capability built on trusted relationships, reliable data, and authentic customer voices.
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