Let's talk about what each of these sections should include.
Advocacy Situation
In this section of the Advocate marketing plan, you need a brief statement of your Advocate marketing challenge or opportunity. Here are a few examples:
Negative word of mouth. There are numerous negative reviews online about our products and/or company. This is hurting our sales and reputation.
Not amplifying positive word of mouth. We have many Advocates but we're not leveraging them to amplify positive Word of Mouth and help drive sales. This is a missed opportunity.
Need to get more word-of-mouth referrals. We get about 50 percent of our business from word-of-mouth referrals, but we're not fully leveraging our Advocates to get more referral leads, also a missed opportunity.
Create positive word of mouth for a new product or service. We're launching a new flagship product in Q2. We need to increase awareness and create positive word of mouth for this new product.
You may want to include in this section information that supports your situation analysis. This may include:
Net Promoter Scores for your company or products, and/or for competitors.
Summary of online ratings for your products and services plus a few examples of comments from these reviews.
Sales or market share data.
Advocacy Goals
What are the goals for the Advocate marketing program or campaign? What's the focus for your advocacy effort?
Here are a few examples of advocacy goals:
Increase advocacy for your company, brand, product, or service, including a new flagship product or service.
Increase advocacy for your company, brand, or a particular product or service among a certain market segment or in a particular geographic region.
Increase advocacy for a product category or experience, rather than for a particular brand, product, or service.
Combat negative word of mouth or amplify positive word of mouth.
Support the launch of a major new product or service.
Ideally, advocacy goals support your company, business, and marketing goals. For example, if your company is seeking to expand its business in China, your advocacy goal may be to increase advocacy for your products or services in that country.
Here are a few real-world examples of advocacy goals:
Increase brand advocacy. In a recent pilot, Norton, the consumer brand of security software company Symantec, wanted to boost advocacy overall for its brand rather than a particular product. After identifying Norton Advocates, the company invited them to answer this question: "How has Norton saved your bacon?"
Boost product advocacy. Intuit, the makers of the popular accounting and financial software for individuals and small businesses, wants to keep word of mouth about its products positive. As described earlier in this book, the company has historically enjoyed high levels of advocacy. But after a spate of negative online reviews, the company decided to create an advocacy program.
Increase advocacy for a category or experience. Ball Corporation, famous for producing glass canning jars, wants to leverage Advocates to introduce the home canning experience to a new generation of women. As the dominant leader in the category, Ball marketers know that getting women to recommend the canning experience will help boost sales of its products. (Ball no longer produces the glass fruit jar. The license to produce the jar is now owned by Jarden Home Brands. Jarden produces all lids for all brands of fruit jars at its Muncie, Indiana. plant.)
Advocacy Action Plan
This section of the Advocate marketing plan provides more detailed information about your advocacy program or campaign. At Zuberance, we use the acronym POST to organize this information. (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, co-authors of the fabulous book Groundswell, created the POST method and acronym. We've focused this method on advocacy.)
P = People. Who are your ideal Advocates? Which prospects do you want them to recommend to? Getting a clear picture of this is fundamental to an effective advocacy program or campaign. Remember to use the Triangle of Trust.
O = Objectives. While goals are general intentions, objectives are precise. Your advocacy objectives should be clear and measurable.
S = Strategy. Your advocacy strategy describes how you're going to achieve your objectives. For example, if your objective is to energize 5,000 Advocates, your strategy discusses how you plan to do this.
T = Technology. What advocacy apps or tools will you give to Advocates? How and where will they access these tools? "T" also stands for tactics.
People
There are two groups of people key to any Advocate marketing program or campaign.
Advocates: customers and others who will recommend your company, brand, and/or products or services.
Prospects: the people who you want your Advocates to recommend to.
In both cases, you want to create a profile of the ideal Advocates and prospects. (By "ideal" I mean the people you would most like to be Advocates and prospects. For example, if you're a public relations agency, your ideal Advocate may be the VP of Marketing or CMO of a client of yours, rather than the junior marketing manager.)
The profile of ideal Advocates and prospects may include:
Demographic profile (e.g., gender, age group, segment, location).
Industry, vertical, job title, major responsibilities.
Advocacy profile (e.g., Creator, Sharer, Power Advocate).
Social media profile (How active are they with social media? The book Groundswell includes an excellent framework for grouping people based on their social media usage patterns, and it can help here).
Creating personas is an effective way to build profiles of ideal Advocates and prospects. A persona is a fictional person who, for the purposes of this plan, represents the ideal Advocate or prospect. A persona usually includes a name and picture. You may want to include a quote that sums up why the Advocate recommends you and how they go about recommending you.
Here are a couple of examples of the people section of Advocate marketing plans.
A fitness company found that moms were the biggest influencers of whether families would join its clubs. So the company focused on finding and energizing its members who are moms and also are Advocates to recommend the club to other moms.
A professional baseball team is focusing on women who are their Advocates to recommend attending baseball games to other women.
A nursing home wanted to encourage family members of its patients to recommend the facility to other people with elderly parents. The choice of a nursing home is often made by family members of patients, not the patients themselves.
Usually the most effective approach is to get Advocates to recommend to peers and other people who are similar to them in some way (age, gender, job title, culture). Birds of a brand feather really do flock together.
Objectives
This is the most crucial part of the Advocate marketing plan. Objectives drive actions. It's vitally important that everyone involved with the advocacy effort is clear about what you're trying to achieve.
Unlike advocacy goals, advocacy objectives are quantifiable. This lets you answer the key question: how are we going to measure success?
There are three key elements in this section:
How many Advocates do we plan to identify?
How many Advocates do we expect to energize?
What types of recommendations do we intend to generate and how many?
Here's an example of measurable objectives:
Identify 10,000 Advocates
Energize 3,000 Advocates
Generate 5,000 recommendations
2,000 Advocate reviews
2,000 Advocate stories
1,000 offers shared by Advocates
You also may want to set other objectives, such as:
Generate 1,000 referral leads or referral clicks.
Increase online ratings from three to four stars.
Generate 5 million trusted impressions.
Increase engagement on product pages of our website by 25 percent.
Generate 30,000 Facebook sign-ups.
Increase sales by 25 percent.
Be careful when setting sales objectives. Your ability to increase sales by energizing Advocates may be hampered or impacted by other factors like attractiveness of your offers, pricing, availability, competition, and so on.
Strategy
An advocacy strategy describes how you're going to achieve your objectives. Table 27.1 gives you a few examples.
Table 27.1: Advocacy Strategies and Objectives Open table as spreadsheet
Advocacy Objective
Advocacy Strategy
Identify 10,000 Advocates.
Ask the Ultimate Question at multiple customer touchpoints (e-mail, web, social).
Create 5,000 positive product reviews.
Make it easy for Advocates to create reviews and share or publish them online.
Get Advocates to share 10,000 offers.
Provide Advocates with unique, compelling offers.
Many marketers and others often confuse strategy and tactics. Strategy is what you're going to do. Tactics are the actions you're going to take to fulfill the strategy.
Technology
The "T" in POST stands for technology. Understanding People, Objectives, Strategy first determines what advocacy technology you're going to use and how you're going to use it.
Here are a few technology choices you need to make.
Which advocacy tools or apps will you use to empower your Advocates? If your objective is to generate more positive reviews, you obviously want to arm your Advocates with a tool that makes it easy for them to do this. If you want to encourage Advocates to create content and share offers, you'll need other advocacy tools that enable this.
What's the advocacy flow? Once you've identified Advocates, what's next? Should you take Advocates immediately to a review app, stories app, or offer sharing? What's the sequence?
Where and how will you identify Advocates—e-mail, web, social?
Advocacy Calendar
The final element of the advocacy plan is a calendar that maps Advocate activities to a timeline, typically 12 months divided into quarters.
Open table as spreadsheet