Thursday, April 11, 2013

Advocate Marketing: An Introduction

Very recently I made the decision to shift to a different aspect of marketing that involves mobilizing your biggest fans or your advocates. This was a bigger shift then I thought it would be after specializing in marketing automation for almost eight years. But it's been extremely exciting to be part of building a new frontier in marketing.

To summarize this concept of advocate marketing, it stems from studies today that demonstrate that B2B buyers don't trust traditional forms of marketing like they used to. Online ads, email promotions and other forms of PR have lost the impact that they previously had with all of the noise that exists in today's digital world. Buyers are also skeptical of sales people. They are going to do their own research via their social networks and through other means. Buyers trust people that have the same challenges that they do. Buyers trust people that went through a similar buying process. This is where your advocates come in and can help help bring authenticity and assurance that the buyer is making the right decision. The difficulty for the seller is connecting buyers and advocates together in a mutually beneficial and efficient manner. The key to this is forming an advocate marketing program.

Mobilize your advocates

I've been doing my research on this topic and have listed some resources that I thought you would find useful as a primer on this topic:
I hope you have found this useful and if you have other resources that primers for newbies in this area, please add these in the comments.

@chadhorenfeldt
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