Why Customer Advocacy Is Critical for Business Growth

Want to grow your B2B business? Make customer advocacy a priority. Customer advocacy, that is getting customers to be your champions and explaining how your product or service solves their key business problems, is critical for any B2B demand-generation strategy. 

Done well, and it can slash sales-enablement time, drive demand organically and ensure sales and marketing work cohesively, especially when companies are growing in new and emerging markets. Poorly mishandled, however, and customer advocacy programs can quickly become a cost centre and detrimentally impact your bottom line.

Research reveals customer advocacy boosts the bottom line

​Customer advocacy is about building and nurturing relationships with your happiest customers to turn them into your biggest brand champions. If you can get your customers to explain, in their own words, why they chose your product or service over your competitors, this level of brand endorsement is far more powerful than any other first-party promotional content. In fact, a 12% increase in well-executed advocacy can represent up to a 200% increase in revenue.

Prospects trust other consumers, and not necessarily the brand, to tell them the truth. This is particularly the case in B2B technology, where it can be extremely difficult to choose which tech platform is the right fit when so many tech vendors are 'singing the same sales tune’.

Therefore, an endorsement by a customer goes a long way in convincing potential new customers to give your business a try. In fact, customer advocates are 83% more likely to share information and 50% more likely to influence a purchasing decision. Customer advocates are also two times more likely to generate sales than paid advertising.

Benefits of customer advocacy to business growth

To achieve true, valuable customer advocacy, the relationship must be mutually beneficial and reap a wealth of sales and marketing rewards for both parties.

​Customer advocacy can result in extra exposure, engagement, awareness and coverage for both your business and your customer when skillfully executed. For example, a written case study, featuring your happy customers can be placed in the media and on both of your websites. A video case study can be featured across paid and organic social campaigns. And a live customer Q&A can be featured at a ‘lunch and learn’ or on stage at an industry summit.

Of course, there is a lot of work that needs to be done behind the scenes to bring all of this together to ensure the relationship lasts and everyone is on the same page. A good B2B customer advocacy program needs specialist skills. Many times, however, companies simply don't have the internal capability to pull it all together. They need specialist external marketing partners and agencies to help scale customer advocacy programs, particularly if they're expanding across multiple global regions.

Critical mistakes to avoid when scaling your customer advocacy program

At AZK Media, we've launched hundreds of exceptional customer advocacy programs across the world for some of the biggest technology vendors. We’ve seen the good, the bad and the downright ugly. Below, our team compiled some red flags to avoid when scaling your customer-led demand gen program:

1. Too much ‘heavy lifting’: Customers are doing your business a favor by becoming advocates, so you need to respect their time and take care of the heavy lifting. If you are asking them to participate in articles, show up in webinars,attend video productions or speak to the media; what value are you giving them in return? Ensure you have the right media agency or partner that can help you do all the leg work, so the time investment on behalf of your client is as minimal as possible.

2. All about you: Making the relationship ‘all about you’ is the fastest way to end it, losing you both an advocate and a valued customer.

3. Process overkill: Before any kind of assets can be developed, a strict workflow and sign-off process must be put in place, ensuring everyone is clear about what their responsibilities are as well as the time frame they have to complete them in. However, many technology vendors make the mistake of over-complicating the process, turning what should be a seamless and simple process into a drawn out and painful experience for everyone involved.

4. Pitch/place without signoff: Every single aspect of your program needs to be agreed upon in writing. This ensures customers are fully aware upfront of what they need to do to participate, in order to make an informed decision.

5. Throw them in the ‘media deep end’: Never pitch customer interviews to the media unless that customer has been properly media trained and prepared. Media training and practice questions are absolutely vital because, done poorly, it could damage both of your reputations within the media and at large.

6. Too many revisions: This often happens in top-heavy organisations. Just because your marketing head wants a customer case study crafted in a particular way, doesn’t mean the customer can accommodate. Customers are not at your beck and call. Therefore, any program needs to have significant lead time built into it ,so it is not onerous for your customer to participate. Going back and forth to your customer with multiple revisions and requests is disrespectful of their time. This can turn them off to the idea of participating in any future campaigns with you.

Streamline and scale

Like anything, good communication and streamlined processes are key to launching and growing your customer advocacy program – and this is where engaging a trusted B2B customer advocacy agency is invaluable. A B2B marketing and media agency that specializes in these kinds of relationships has the right kind of experience to ensure everyone is happy with customer advocacy efforts. They can help get the most out of your customer champions, whether you are growing in the US, the UK, Europe or APAC!