“Every company has a social media management solution, but not every company has a brand advocacy program,” the CEO of a large marketing automation software company said to me recently. “Why is that?”
He’s 100% right. Every company has employees, customers, partners, etc., so why don’t they have an advocacy program?
From what we see and hear, there are three main reasons why brand advocacy isn’t something that every marketing team is doing yet. And I stress YET.
1. Your marketing team thinks social begins and ends with brand pages.
The problem with brand pages is they don’t do much in the way of helping you to reach your target audiences.
Firstly, a lot of people don’t follow your brand page. They don’t and they never will. People follow PEOPLE, not brands.
Secondly, the content you post to your brand pages is exposed to only a tiny portion of your followers — unless you boost those posts with ad spend. (After all, that’s the reason brand pages exist in the first place: They’re a mechanism to extract ad dollars.) 🤑
Don’t get me wrong, a well-maintained brand page is important. People will search for your company on social media and you want your brand to present well.
But the truth is that brand pages are NOT an effective distribution channel. They’re a tactic — not a strategy.
2. Your marketing team is intimidated by running an advocacy program.
This is a far more valid concern. Running an advocacy program requires your marketing team to build support in other areas of the organization, and that’s not something that every marketer is comfortable with.
There’s a reason we talk about silos in business; not everyone is willing to tap co-workers on the shoulder.
However, I think this concern is outdated for two reasons:
- All of your co-workers are already on social media.
- Activating them as advocates is actually super simple.
In years past, not everyone was on social media, which made it hard to determine who you should approach to join your advocacy program.
Remember those people who said “I’m never going to put my Rolodex on LinkedIn”? Well, those people are on Linkedin now just like everyone else.
As for the process of activating an advocate (an exec, a recruiter, an engineer, or anyone), it couldn’t be any simpler than it is today. It’s just a couple clicks — fewer than 30 seconds — and they’re done.
Plus, a modern advocacy platform like EveryoneSocial allows you to bring advocacy toyour advocates, to where they spend time every day — in Slack or Teams, via email, in Salesforce, your intranet, etc.
Point being: Activating advocates is SUPER simple. (Did I mention that everyone wants to be an advocate?) And advocacy doesn’t need to take time out of employees’ already-hectic schedules.
Myth busted. 👊
3. Your marketing team is just too busy, so advocacy isn’t a priority.
I totally get this. Reaching your customers and buyers efficiently, effectively, and authentically isn’t a priority for every marketing team.
There’s lots of other things marketing have to spend time on, such as sending emails that get caught in spam filters, spending loads of money on ads, and creating content that’ll never be seen.
Of course I’m being cheeky. 😉
The #1 goal (and responsibility) of EVERY marketing team is to reach their company’s target buyers efficiently, effectively, and AUTHENTICALLY.
Here at EveryoneSocial, we’re extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the fastest-growing companies over the last 10 years, including Amazon, Meta, Qualtrics, and Adobe, to name just a few.
What these and our other clients understand is that the ONLY thing that matters in the world of marketing is alpha: the ROI on their marketing investment.
And, to achieve alpha, you’ve got to explore new frontiers. As the CEO of one of our long-time customers says, “Marketers need to be bold!”
If you do the same stuff you and others were doing five years ago, guess what? Your results are going to be less than exceptional. They’re going to be the same as everyone else’s. 🤷
As I’ve said in recent emails and posts, awareness is on everyones’ mind right now, including the biggest brands in the world. And advocacy is an AMAZING way to build awareness.
There’s never been a better time to invest in an advocacy program and, frankly, given the macro environment, it’s exactly the solution most companies need to reach their key customers, buyers, hires, and other audiences on social.
