Activating and Engaging Customer Advocates with Leslie Barrett

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Introduction

Revealing the secrets behind a successful customer advocacy program, Leslie Barrett, the founder of CMA Soulmate, delves deep into the core components of storytelling and content creation. Through her affiliation with Testimonial Hero, she equips you with the tools needed to scale your customer marketing ventures, building on the solid foundation laid in her first course, "Measuring the ROI of Customer Marketing and Advocacy." So, without further ado, let's get right into the course!

1. Customer Marketing is Essential

Customer marketing serves as a guidepost, leading consumers through their journey with your brand. Crafting accurate, relevant, tailor-made content for each stage of the customer journey is integral. By identifying customer advocates and maximizing the resources at hand, you supercharge your advocacy program into a powerful growth engine.

2. Laying the Groundwork

Preparation is key to creating compelling content that hits its mark. Start by analyzing the content pieces you already have and identify gaps that need filling. Getting started entails:

1. Interview your customers: Engage with your customers on a personal level. By getting on a phone call or conducting a survey, you can gather invaluable insights into their personas, challenges, and learning preferences - all of which can shape future marketing strategies and messaging.
2. Interview your sales team: Your sales team interfaces directly with customers and prospects. Their input on what resonates with customers and areas of friction can significantly inform your marketing tactics and content creation.
3. Organize your needs to the marketing funnel: Cater to the diverse needs of your customers depending on their position in the funnel. Top-of-the-funnel customers may need eye-catching logos and success stories. At the same time, those at the bottom may benefit more from personalized videos and one-to-one interactions. Also, advocacy doesn't stop after making a sale. Enhancing the post-sales customer experience by providing relevant content significantly increases customer loyalty and repeat business.
4. Look at your data and metrics: Scrutinizing your data can give you meaningful insights to guide your content creation strategy. Tools like Tableau, Amplitude, or your preferred data management platform can be invaluable in this process. Dive into specific metrics, such as the ACV (Average Customer Value), and build your content strategy around these insights.
5. Create a wishlist: Create a wishlist of companies you would like to see advocate for your company and what story you would like them to tell.
6. Create a slide for your sales team: This slide will help your sales team promote your advocacy program early and assist the onboarding team. Finally, create a script for the CSMs to promote the program often.

3. The Art of Identifying Customer Advocates

At the heart of this course, Leslie shares ten effective methods for pinpointing customer advocates.

1. Utilizing the Net Promoter Score (NPS) – This widely-used metric can elicit immediate action from customers, particularly if the call-to-action is sent soon after receiving their score.

2. Implementing a Customer Success-Qualified Advocate (CSQA) program – Train your customer-facing team to identify potential advocates based on their interactions and offer incentives for doing so.

3. Building smart lists in your marketing automation – Understand who is engaging with your emails, and use this data to invite these engaged customers into your advocacy program.

4. Engaging with highly invested customers – If a customer just renewed their subscription or purchased an upsell option, they may be more likely to become an advocate for your brand.

5. Analyzing usage reports - Build dashboards and performance analysis of what your customers do most and least. Use that information to target and create a more personalized outreach.

6. Monitoring online communities and forums - Look for customers who consistently provide helpful advice and promote your brand.

7. Asking after renewal - Ask your customers who just renewed with you or had an upsell deal come through. Customers with a high customer lifetime value are more likely to be advocates; they are invested more in your brand, and they are motivated to see it succeed.

8. Reviewing support tickets - Generally, more support tickets mean a more robust user. Most of the time, support tickets suggest that they use the platform a lot and try new things. So, they would benefit from our advocacy program or our community to learn from each other.

9. Adopting account-based marketing (ABM) tactics – Engage your customers directly with personalized emails or retargeting ads tailored to their specific needs.

10. Setting up Gong trackers - Create a system to capture the positive sentiment of customers by utilizing relevant keywords within customer conversations.

Conclusion

Building a thriving advocate community demands continuous engagement, unbridled excitement, and personalized outreach. As you nurture an exclusive community that customers aspire to join, you unwrap the limitless potential of advocacy to fuel your brand's growth. In adopting the strategies shared by Leslie Barrett, you are on course to finding engaged advocates who would be thrilled to champion your brand. Good Luck!

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Resources

Links

• Course: Measuring the ROI of Customer Marketing & Advocacy
• eBook “Unlock Growth with Account-Based Customer Marketing”

Templates

• Customer Success Qualified Advocate Program
• Customer Success SPIFF