As a business, having customers that actively advocate for your brand can be incredibly valuable. Not only do they help to promote your products and services, but they can also act as a trusted source of information and feedback for potential customers. Highly engaged advocates can also lead to longer retention and increased product adoption. Customer Advocacy can drive business growth and have a significant impact on the bottom line.
However, in order for your customer advocacy efforts to be truly effective, it's important to not only generate activities and outcomes, but also to measure business impact. As advocate marketers we must showcase the holistic value engaged customers bring to the business.
The Importance of Measuring Advocacy
Measuring the impact of your marketing efforts goes beyond validating what's working; it provides essential insights that guide strategic decisions, optimizing both resources and returns, and helps gain buy-in from internal stakeholders and c-suite.
Watch our podcast episode on Building Case for Advocacy
Aligning with Business Goals
When determining how to measure success of customer engagement and advocacy efforts, and which KPIs to focus on, start with C-level priorities. Whether the goal is to increase market share, enhance customer satisfaction, or boost revenue, measurement allows you to see if your marketing efforts are contributing effectively towards top level targets. Without this alignment, advocacy initiatives can easily be considered a cost center rather than a revenue driver. Or worse yet, a nice-to-have effort rather than a critical business function.
Driving Decision Making
Measurement drives strategic decision-making. With data-driven insights, you can make informed choices about where to allocate budgets, which campaigns to scale up, and which ones to rework or retire. This not only ensures that dollars are spent wisely but also increases the overall efficiency of advocacy and marketing operations.
Enhancing Customer Understanding
Moreover, effective measurement provides deeper insights into customer and advocate behaviors and preferences. By understanding which aspects of your strategies resonate most with your audience, you can tailor future campaigns to better meet customer needs and expectations. This enhances engagement and loyalty, which are key drivers of long-term business success.
Proving ROI
Another crucial aspect is the ability to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of advocacy efforts. Stakeholders and executives often scrutinize advocacy and marketing for its cost implications. By quantifying the economic benefits derived from your advocacy portfolio, you reinforce its value as an essential business function.
Facilitating Continuous Improvement
Most importantly, the right measurements facilitate continuous improvement. It enables marketers to learn from successes and missteps alike, fostering a culture of innovation and agility within the advocacy team. By continually refining strategies based on measurable outcomes, CMAs can adapt to changing market conditions and consumer trends more effectively.
Understanding the ROI of Customer Advocacy
It's tempting to dive straight into tactics that drive immediate business results and paint a straight line between your work and the bottom line. However, the art of customer advocacy demands a more subtle and sustainable approach. It takes time to nurture and embrace the DNA of Advocacy.
Start by enriching the customer experience. Offer exclusive benefits, personalized content, and access to educational resources that deepen their connection to your products. This creates a strong loyalty loop. Customers who find tangible value in your offerings are likely to stick around and become vocal advocates for your brand.
But here’s a vital piece of advice: customer advocacy is not a sprint; it’s a marathon. Building genuine, trusted relationships takes time and a fine balance between systematic and authentic interactions. By engaging regularly and valuing customer feedback, you communicate that their input and success matter. This approach not only fosters loyalty but also turns your customers into credible endorsers of your brand.
Metrics that Matter
One of the most important things you need to do with your advocacy initiatives is to align strategies and KPIs with your business goals. The real magic happens when you shift focus from meeting immediate needs to achieve long-term business outcomes. It helps you identify what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to refine your strategies for even better results.
Customer Advocacy should be treated with as much strategic importance as any other business initiative, but to do this you need to measure what matters to c-suite. While advocacy professionals require advanced soft skills; their efforts cannot be soft on measurable impact across the business.
How do you measure the success of your customer advocacy? Many organizations early in their advocacy maturity start with measuring outcomes. Examples of outcomes might be:
- How many customers have joined your customer programs
- The monthly or quarterly engagement rate of program members
- Reference activities completed and which types, such as number of case studies, reviews or reference calls
- Quantity of customer feedback or program member NPS
While it’s easy to count activities like case studies or social shares, in 2023, leaders demand deeper insights. Focus on metrics linked to customer acquisition, retention, and business growth. For instance, look at how often case studies lead to closed sales, or compare deal speeds and churn rates between advocates and non-advocates.
Keeping Up with the Metrics
In today’s competitive landscape, effective customer advocacy is crucial. By focusing on key business impact metrics and routinely reporting on them, you position the advocacy function as an essential driver of strategic growth, meriting continued investment and executive support.
If you're keen to dive deeper into the mechanics of customer advocacy and discover metrics that truly matter, consider joining our CAP Certification course. This program is designed to arm customer marketing and advocacy professionals with cutting-edge strategies that set their work apart in this rapidly evolving field.
Customer-led marketing isn’t just about making customers happy—it’s about making them partners in your success. By strategically measuring and managing advocacy efforts, you not only boost your brand’s reputation but also its financial health. Isn’t it time your customer advocacy efforts got the spotlight they deserve?
