If you’re like most advocate marketers, you probably have some pretty lofty goals to hit. You’re expected to source customers for case studies, crank more referrals into the pipeline, and get references for sales by the end of the quarter.
To achieve these objectives, you need to create an experience that’s seamless and delightful for advocates. But what happens when you’re staring at your computer screen, and the creative juices have run dry?
The Influitive product team spoke to many advocate marketers, and this was the #1 thing we heard: “I want to hit my objectives, but building creative campaigns consistently is hard!”
That’s why we built Campaign Manager, and we are excited to announce its launch across all customer AdvocateHubs today.
Campaign Manager is a new feature that allows you to run highly engaging campaigns for your advocates using our templated campaigns. All the colourful and exciting elements of a campaign are pre-built for you, and the entire experience is designed to help you drive your most important advocacy goals.
Read on for a look inside our the brand new Campaign Manager. Plus, we’ll share how you can start building your own campaign today!
Why we created Campaign Manager (hint: our advocates told us to!)
Campaigns are second nature to most marketers. A typical marketing campaign consists of a set of goals, a theme (or “creative”), and a system to measure metrics and prove ROI. We believe that advocate marketing should be no different. (Check out this blog to read more about the campaigns-based approach to advocate marketing pioneered by Influitive.)
Over the last several months, the Influitive product team has seen clever advocate marketers hack together Challenge-based campaigns in their AdvocateHubs and achieve incredible results.
This prompted us to think about how we could make this approach simple and accessible for all of our customers, and led us to develop Campaign Manager.
Here are the top 4 reasons why you’ll love the new Campaign Manager.
1. Save time with ready-from-the-box templated Campaigns
Putting pen on blank paper (or fingers to keyboard) can be very daunting. Building an advocate marketing campaign requires a lot of time to properly develop a creative and cohesive concept, complete with Challenges, game logic, and badges.
This can make the cost of building a campaign from scratch very high in terms of time and effort. We want to minimize this tactical overhead and enable you to be more strategic than ever with your time.
That’s why we’re offering a library of templates (known as the Campaign Content Library) that you can purchase and implement using Campaign Manager.
A look at the new Campaign Manager
Each campaign is designed to achieve specific advocacy goals like references or referrals, and is packaged with a fun theme, with game dynamics built in. You can either deploy as-is or customize to fit your company’s needs.
2. Quickly visualize and configure your Campaign at a glance
With Campaign Manager, you can quickly visualize an entire campaign in a single view. This allows you to see how the advocate experience will flow, at a glance. You can ensure the campaign is helping you hit your business goals, while also offering a seamless and delightful experience for your advocates.
An example of a templated campaign
You can also customize Challenges to lead to whichever calls to action you need to support your goals.
Once configured, you can also target the campaign to all of your advocates, or a just subset of your advocate community (e.g. new advocates, or those with high NPS scores.)
3. Plan ahead for busy periods to set yourself up for success
We understand that the amount of time you dedicate to AdvocateHub may fluctuate depending on the demands of your role. We want to ensure that you can still keep your AdvocateHub buzzing with activity when you’re swamped with other responsibilities, or even when you’re on vacation.
Schedule your campaigns ahead of time
That’s why campaigns can either be published immediately or scheduled for a later time. Campaigns enable advocate marketers to be more strategic in planning for outcomes in a calendar year, by automating much of the tactical work.
4. Understand how the campaign is performing
Tracking the progress of the campaign against your key success indicators is crucial. This provides insight into what elements of the campaign are performing well, and what could use a course-correct.
Access reports to keep tabs on performance
This is why we’ve built a reporting tool within campaign manager to get instant reporting on every campaign.
What our customers think so far—better advocate engagement with less effort
Over the last 2 months, we’ve had several beta testers involved in improving Campaign Manager.
We found that on average, most AdvocateHubs reported an increase in advocate engagement ranging between 20% to 200%, while also reducing admin time required.
Along the way, we also got a lot of fantastic ideas from our advocates on how to make Campaign Manager even better.
One of these ideas was to enable marketers to change campaign goals by adding or removing stages, which we’ve since implemented. This allows a campaign for driving reviews, for example, to be transformed into a campaign for getting NPS scores or testimonials.
Here’s what one of our advocate beta testers had to say about the new features:
“Engaging more of our customers was a top priority,” said Kim Saloner, Community & Customer Marketing at Zenefits. “We deployed the ‘Trivia Time’ campaign to our Clubzen program and it immediately increased engagement. It mixes quiz-like challenges with company-driven requests, motivating important actions such as completing product feedback surveys and submitting online reviews and referrals.”
Curious to try it yourself? Launch your own campaign today
With the launch of Campaign Manager, all Influitive customers will receive two free campaign templates: Obstacle Course and Trivia Time.
Out of the box, each campaign incorporates at least one advocacy goal. For example, the Obstacle Course is focused on driving NPS, referrals, and reviews, and Trivia Time focuses on collecting references, in addition to driving referrals and reviews.
We invite you to try out these campaigns today. We are excited to help you smash your goals, while also saving you time to focus on what’s most exciting—your advocates
