- What Makes a Successful Advocate Marketing Program?
- Who Are Advocates?
- What Is the Value of an Advocate?
- What Value Do Advocates Get from Being an Advocate?
- Highlights and Takeaways
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
What Value Do Advocates Get from Being an Advocate?
Advocates benefit from their advocacy. Even minor acts of kindness provide a feeling of satisfaction. It feeds the soul or makes them feel better about themselves. They know inside that they are helping someone in a way that would improve the life of that stranger, friend, or colleague.
According to Bob Nelson in his book 1001 Ways to Reward Employees, people are motivated by three drivers to engage: money, recognition, and reward. Because we know advocates cannot be paid, we can conclude that the motivators for an advocate to share their feelings about a product or service will be recognition, reward, or both.
So, what is the benefit to the advocates? Increased visibility within your organization. They gain power and some control. Their importance to you provides them access to your executives. They are seen as thought leaders in the industry because your company is providing their third-party validation. Your organization, in return, becomes an advocate for them. If you are scoring your advocates or identifying advocates, your advocate marketing program allows you to identify which new members would be great new additions to your customer advisory board or other special groups. You can identify those people based on their participation in client-focused activities by their comments about you. As you track clients’ activities, you can set up an assessment process that helps you distinguish advocates from other clients. We’ll discuss this further in Chapter 3, “The Net Advocate Score: Building on the Net Promoter Score®.” Many advocates volunteer to host regional user group meetings, which minimizes your costs. They benefit because they become the big fish in the little pond for the event, gaining some level of control over other participants, who are then psychologically at a disadvantage. Home field advantage can sometimes help their end game as an advocate.