Lately, we see too many companies commit all their efforts to either customer communities or customer advocacy programs. That’s like cooking with only salt or pepper.
Enter the ultimate dynamic duo: customer communities and customer advocacy programs. These two are like peanut butter and jelly—great on their own, but absolute magic together. When you combine them, they supercharge engagement, build unshakable trust, and accelerate sales faster than you can say “conversion.”
We all know that satisfied customers are your best advocates. Customer communities keep them engaged through activities like feedback sharing, exclusive sneak peaks, awards, product betas, and yes—content creation opportunities. Once you’ve got them hooked, guess what? They make perfect candidates for your customer advocacy program. Their glowing stories become the secret weapon your sales team didn’t know they needed.
Basically, it’s like this: customer communities plant the seed, and advocacy programs harvest the rewards.
Who doesn’t love a good review? When customer communities do their thing, they churn out a treasure trove of user-generated content (UGC)—from reviews to testimonials. This is gold! And your customer advocacy program swoops in to deploy this content, whether through personalized reference calls or shiny new case studies and videos. The result? You’ve got social proof working overtime, and your prospects are now convinced your product can solve their biggest problems.
Let’s talk sales. One of the best perks of this tag team is how they shave off precious time from the sales cycle. Customer communities keep a steady stream of content coming, which your advocacy program uses to connect the dots for prospects. With targeted advocates ready to knock down any objections, your prospects stop dragging their feet and start signing on the dotted line. Everyone wins—except your competition.
While your customer community is busy engaging the masses, the advocacy program focuses on those key one-on-one moments that make deals happen. The community is the farm, and the advocacy program is the chef, serving up perfectly ripe advocates at the right time. Together, they create a seamless, scalable system for driving engagement and closing sales.
The best part? This combo makes the customer journey a joyride. From onboarding in the community to becoming a rockstar advocate, customers feel valued every step of the way. By the time they’re telling their success story to your next big prospect, they’re fully invested in your brand—and ready to bring more buyers into the fold.
In short, when customer communities and customer advocacy programs work together, they’re an unstoppable force. More engagement. More trust. Faster sales. If you’re not tapping into this power couple, you’re missing out on the kind of growth that can take your business from good to mind-blowingly great.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you tap into mind-blowingly great results.
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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