Customer advocacy – the process of identifying and sharing the stories of success and delight from satisfied customers to educate prospective buyers about the value a company offers – has enormous potential to meet B2B buyer demand for peer references, and positively impact company revenue. To realize this potential, however, customer advocacy programs must be strategically designed to ensure advocacy efforts support the needs and interests of customers and align to broader business goals.

The core components of a successful, sustainable customer advocacy program are:

1. Recruitment

2. Fulfillment

3. Materials Creation

4. Process and Data Management

5. Program Management

6. Metrics and Reporting

Recruitment ensures that a program has a diverse pool of satisfied customers (advocates) to connect to opportunities to share insights on the value a product/service provides with prospective customers.

Fulfillment enables the strategic matching of customer advocates to these opportunities, based on key characteristics shared between the advocate and the prospective customer interested in learning more about a solution.

Materials creation empowers a program to generate a variety of reference content in the customer voice, which allows customer advocacy to be leveraged at numerous points throughout the buyer journey and support the business goals of various internal stakeholders.

Process and data management are critical for establishing an organized, cohesive strategy to managing the various components of a customer advocacy program and the copious amounts of customer data necessary to provide relevant, meaningful references to buyers.

Program management is essential for aligning the customer advocacy program with the broader goals and KPIs of the business and ensuring a program provides tangible, immediate value to the company.

Lastly, metrics and reporting are necessary for assessing the effectiveness of each component of the program, strategizing program improvements and communicating the program’s value to internal stakeholders.

When one or more of the core components of a program is missing, customer advocacy is still possible though its execution is likely to detract from the overall impact the program intended to have. For example, without a carefully planned and continuous recruitment effort, the pool of available customer advocates could become burned out by being invited to too many reference engagements.

If a materials creation strategy is not in place, the types of reference activities advocates can engage in are limited and invaluable opportunities to scale the reach and impact of individual customer success stories are missed. A lack of program management could result in the focus of the customer advocacy program falling out of sync with business priorities, leading to smaller budget allocations or in the worst-case scenario, a denial of program funding all together.

However, when a program addresses each component of the framework, the potential for success abounds! At Referential, we’ve amassed best practices and strategies for designing and implementing each component of the program framework over decades in the industry, both creating and contributing to customer advocacy programs of every shape and size.

Unsure if your customer advocacy program adequately embraces each component of the program framework? Or looking for guidance on how to strategize each component while building an advocacy program from scratch? Consider registering for one of our online or in-person training courses or contact us to learn more about our customer advocacy consulting services.