User feedback is essential to continuous improvement. For marketers, it can be from community interactions, NPS surveys or other forms of customer satisfaction surveys, the customer success team and advisory boards. Turns out, the same channels apply for customer marketing managers seeking stakeholder feedback from sales, marketing, customer success, PR, digital, RFP & Proposals, social media and so on.
In this blog, we share what we’ve learned about leveraging surveys to gain insights that help inform your program decisions related to your advocate database and the output of that database: customer content. If you don’t have the right advocates you’re nothing more than a collector of happy customers. If you produce customer content (videos, case studies, etc.) that isn’t relevant then it just won’t get used and you’ll have wasted a good deal of your limited time and budget in the process.
How many and what questions to ask are, together, what will guarantee a good result. Remember, you’re asking people to spend their time on your survey, which they will do if they understand it will benefit them. You could probably ask 100 questions if you’re the curious type. But you only have so much of their attention span and time. So make your wish list of the things you want to know, then prioritize that list to 10-15 questions. More than that, and people tend to bail out. You’ll want to pretend you’ve been asked to take the survey and time it out. If you can promise a 10-minute experience in your survey promotion and invitation, completions will be much higher.
Every participant should be able to answer every question without getting stuck: “None of these answers quite fit my situation; now what do I do?” This can easily be avoided with an “Other” choice when it comes to multiple choice questions. For reporting, you want to minimize this, keeping the responses limited to specific answers; but not at the risk of the participant getting stuck.
When you include “on average” or “typically” or “annually” or “in the last quarter,” you provide important direction. Be as specific as possible so answering and making sense of the results is easy. We’ve seen program managers ask questions like, “What type of content do you find most valuable?” If the first reaction is “It depends,” you’ll gain limited value from asking it. Some people will answer as if you mean “to close the deal,” and some will think you mean “to open the door,” for example. Another potential can of worms is something like, “Did you find what you need in our advocate database?” If the answer is yes, then you can probably make some deductions based on the stakeholder’s role. If a seller is focused on Fortune 1,000 health insurance providers, then you know the database has ample Fortune 1,000 health insurance advocates.
What if the answer is no? Think about the possibilities.
The list could go on and on. So, choose your questions carefully to gain actionable feedback versus simply causing even more guesswork from the answers. Branching questions can help get to the important stuff, as can providing a text field for more detail. But in every case ask yourself if your design decisions will get useful information.
An anonymous survey may yield more honest answers, particularly if a stakeholder has some dissatisfaction to vent. Unfortunately, if they do, you won’t be able to gain additional detail or confirm you’ve solved their grievance after making changes. Our belief is that if you have a reasonably good relationship with your stakeholders, then they’ll know they can be frank, and you’ll take it the right way.
You want a statistically significant number of responses. If you send a survey out to 250 people and get eight responses, that’s not helpful. That small number of results may be highly skewed. If you race off to make changes and later learn that 200 other people felt differently about something than those eight, you’ll have squandered your time and still not made things better. What you’ll want to do in advance is get some management support, especially from those people who manage the participants on your list. It needs to be clearly communicated that these surveys are infrequent, but important; that the purpose is to make the program better, not to make busy work. There will be follow-up on what actions were taken as a result. Someone will be monitoring the uptake rate. Lastly, they will know when to expect the survey and when their submissions are due.
You know how frequently you’re asked for your thoughts, but then you have no idea where those thoughts went, if they were used, or if they resulted in changes? It sucks, right? The less you care about the thing you’re being asked to take a survey for, the less likely you are to even start that survey. Do I care to provide my feedback on a recent purchase of printer paper at Office Depot? Nope. But if my job performance hinges on leveraging customer advocates and someone is offering to make that part of my job easier, I care. The trick is to make it clear their feedback does matter, the program is adapting, and that future feedback requests will have the same positive effect on their work lives. So, formalize the outcome of the survey results. Share them in team meetings or a newsletter or whatever makes the most sense in your environment.
We would be remiss if we didn’t make the case for another awesome source of continuous feedback and that’s a stakeholder advisory board for your program. Every high performing customer marketing program has one.
Harnessing the power of well-constructed surveys can transform your customer advocacy and content strategies. By asking the right questions, prioritizing stakeholder insights, and ensuring a manageable survey experience, you can unlock valuable data that guides your decision-making. Remember, the goal is not just to collect feedback but to act on it effectively—making each advocate’s contribution meaningful and each piece of content impactful. As you refine your approach, keep the feedback loop active, transparent, and integrated into your ongoing strategy. Your advocates are more than just voices; they are pivotal partners in your journey towards more targeted and successful marketing endeavors.
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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