5 Myths of Advocacy Marketing

Though the many virtues of Advocacy Marketing have been expounded upon on the internet, we have noticed that many brands have a few apprehensions about starting off with Advocacy Marketing. This is largely because of the myths that surround the concept of Advocacy marketing. So we at team SOCXO have put this blog together to alleviate your concerns about Advocacy Marketing.

Myth-1: Advocacy Marketing only works effectively for brands with a large customer base

True, other companies may have followers that reach into the millions, but the fact is that it’s not all about the numbers – these are the wrong metrics to look out for. Rather, it’s all about the ratio of conversions and brand advocates per follower. You could have a small social media following, but if the majority of them are your advocates then you’ll be doing much better than the big brands that have the millions of followers but far fewer advocates.

Myth-2: It’s impossible to measure the ROI of an Advocacy Marketing campaign

From the early days of sandwich board advertising to today’s social media marketing, this has always been a concern. It’s not unique to advocacy marketing definitely, but with the tools at hand today it can be a whole lot easier and accurate to measure your marketing efforts. Technologies such as link tracking to measure the number of click-through and traffic monitoring can give you quantitative metrics to show the results of your campaign. However, advocacy marketing is best evaluated through qualitative evaluation such as the kind of content that is being shared most often, where it is being shared and why, how engaged the advocates are and how they respond to engagement requests. Further, looking at the correlation between these and your business’s other metrics (such as sales graphs), will give you the bigger picture of where your business stands today with your advocates.

Myth-3: Advocacy Marketing will destroy my brand’s reputation  

This myth has arisen thanks to inexperienced campaign managers and production of poor content. However, if it’s done well, advocacy marketing will not only boost your brand’s reputation amongst your current advocates but also in turn build your advocate base. The key? Get the experts to do it for you. We at team SOCXO are ready to give your brand that turbo boost!

Myth- 4: Producing content for an Advocacy Marketing campaign takes too long

Creating new content such as infographics, blogs, tweets and posts could be a resource drain if you do it all on your own and have to start from scratch. However, the beauty of advocacy marketing is that your advocates are already interested in learning more about your brand and so rather than curating new content, share existing content that you have but which they haven’t seen before. Rehash your existing content into different formats that advocates prefer to share.

Myth-5: Employees and customers will not really support advocacy efforts

You may be discouraged by stories of lack of enthusiasm towards your advocacy efforts from employees and customers. There is no reason to feel though that you will not get the required support. Engaging your brand advocates with relevant and valuable information can definitely activate and get them to advocate more effectively for you. We will be discussing more about how you can do this in the coming blogs, so stay tuned.

So as you’ve seen, all these myths about advocacy marketing do not hold ground if they are addressed properly. Work together with team SOCXO to make your advocacy marketing program a reality in today’s digital world.