80% Of Brands Are Missing Out On Advocacy Marketing
Learnings from Dan Spicer, VP of EMEA Community at Hootsuite - Building an Advocate Community for Your Brand.
At #FBSPRINT in London, I attended a presentation given by Dan Spicer, VP of EMEA Community at Hootsuite, where he discussed Building an Advocate Community for Your Brand.
Of course there are millions of other great reasons to have a Community; but from my experience in the corporate world, it’s usually split fairly evenly into either customer self-support or advocacy marketing.
We’ve all heard these golden truths of Marketing:
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It costs 6-7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one (Bain & Co.)
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Increasing Customer Retention Rate by 5% can increase profits by up to 95% over the long-term (Harvard Business School)
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High engagement on your home base can increase revenue by 25% (MSI)
Yet, Dan pointed out, only 20% of brands use advocate and experts programmes in their marketing (Marketing Charts 2014) while 92% of companies view customer experience as one of their top priorities (Forrester, State of Customer Experience 2013).
It’s clear to me that Advocacy Marketing is not only a viable solution, it’s the sensible solution. By engaging your influencers, cultivating their loyalty and trust, giving them transparency into the business, allowing them to help shape corporate objectives, goals and even products, you’re asking the people whom love you most to help you be more successful. And in turn, you help them be more successful too.
Dan says that by sharing product releases with their 1000 worldwide Ambassadors, they’ve increased engagement by 200%. He shared some other amazing ROI metrics:
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13% of prospects in 2014 Hootups (their version of meetups) converted to Hootsuite customers
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200 blog posts written in just 2 quarters
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10% of Hootsuite app reviews on iTunes have been contributed by their Ambassadors
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Total Twitter reach of their Ambassadors: 4.5 million people
These are numbers that would make any Marketing team rub their hands together with glee!
But Hootsuite isn’t just using their Community for Advocacy Marketing - they’re actively listening to their feedback and incorporating it to make the users’ experience of the product and the company better. You can read my blog post about that here.
I’m a big believer in Advocacy Marketing but that’s just one impact of managing Community.
When rolled into an official foundation of trust and transparency, your Community will gift you with loyalty, knowledge and insight.
What company, whether you make widgets or enterprise software or shot glasses, doesn’t want that?
If you want to check out Dan’s slides, click here.
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