The 5 Secrets of Mobilizing an Advocate Army

Editor's Notes

1. Let’s start by giving you a quick background on DoubleDutch… We’ve been developing our mobile event product for over 3 years. Since then, we’ve powered over 1,000 events and have over 200,000 app users. Our company headquarters are in San Francisco, and our international expansion efforts include Bangalore and Amsterdam. Our event app powers conferences across the globe.And yes, that is the view from our offices.
2. Let’s start by giving you a quick background on DoubleDutch… We’ve been developing our mobile event product for over 3 years. Since then, we’ve powered over 1,000 events and have over 200,000 app users. Our company headquarters are in San Francisco, and our international expansion efforts include Bangalore and Amsterdam. Our event app powers conferences across the globe.And yes, that is the view from our offices.
3. For those that are unfamiliar with our products, DoubleDutch builds mobile applications for marketers that host corporate events, meetings, and conferences. Branded to your event, with customized content and features, this is a product that we sell to both event professionals, event marketers, and CMOs alike.
4. So we can bring your event agendas, speaker lists, exhibitor profiles, etc all into an interactive mobile event app, with your branding. We’ve layered in game mechanics and networking opportunities to increase attendee engagement, and have features like badge scanning and lead qualifying, to engage exhibitors.
5. What we are really doing, at a higher level is something much bigger. Imagine Google Analytics and what it does for your website. It tracks and monitors the important engagements with your visitors. Our product applies that same data-driven, digital approach to live, in-person events.Being data-driven is important to us  it’s baked into our product and in the tools we use at the office (like Marketo and Influitive). It all speaks to our larger company goals…
6. Growth. We are the fastest growing mobile event app company in the space, and we want to keep it up. What can we do to continue to grow at this pace? Marketing is a big part of that. And, it turns our, our brand advocates are also a large piece of the pie. Scalability. How do we scale our initiatives that are working, to generate more opportunities for the company? How do we eliminate the friction in building an advocate army? How do we keep this army growing loud and proud as we scale? These goals are the driving force behind the marketing initiatives we conduct, and the technology choices we make to power those initiatives.I’d like to introduce Jen, who runs marketing for DoubleDutch, to talk about this in more detail.
7. 1st is about Growth – we are doing a lot to increase marketing sourced leads – we spend about 50% of my budget on event marketing, but we have a strong emphasis on PPC, content, PR, email marketing, and more. In order to generate / nurture high quality leads  at the beginning of the year, we rolled out marketo. As most of you are aware, we were able to massively increase the number of touches on our leads and track them through the lifecycle. We’ve streamlined the lead capturing process and are really able to nurture leads like never before.2nd is about making sure all of our efforts are scalable. Our marketing team has scaled from 1 to 4 in the past 2.5 yearsOur sales team has scaled from 1 to 20 over the same time frame  added pressure on marketing to support sales and scale with the growing demandMarketo has helped with this, and even influitive helps us monitor3rd - Build brand advocates that can augment our marketing and sales efforts  this speaks to both growth and scale. If we can get our customers referring prospects to us, we can grow. If we can do this at a larger scale, that’s even better. I’ll let Chris will speak to this more, but Influitive is helping us take this to scale.I’m going to focus the majority of my time today talking through goal #3 – and tell you a little bit about what it takes to build an advocate army.
8. I was at an event with Lawrence in LA called BizBash, where our app was being used in full effect. A lovely woman came by the booth and had fantastic things to say about the app. This is what got me thinking about advocates and how important they are. Luckily, I was able to get her to repeat herself on camera. Check out this footage I took in the middle of the expo hall – on the fly, with my iPhone….Woah! She wants to shout about DD from the rooftops! That got me thinking – how can I enable her to do so? That brings me to the 5 secrets….
9. The first is to capture moments of praise whenever possible. When people gloat about your brand, record it! A sub-par recording with an iPhone is better than no recording at all. If people are shouting about your product from the rooftops, you need to find ways to capture that. If someone says a glowing testimonial on a phone call, write it down, and ask if you can use it on your testimonials page, or in your next case study. In fact, we will be doing a short filming of customer testimonials in our office – would you want to come to DD HQs for a few hours and participate? In exchange, we will get you lunch and you will have the chance to talk to our product team to share all your wants and needs with the product! Your opinions are valued and we you will have the chance to influence our product roadmap.
10. The first is to capture moments of praise whenever possible. When people gloat about your brand, record it! A sub-par recording with an iPhone is better than no recording at all. If people are shouting about your product from the rooftops, you need to find ways to capture that. If someone says a glowing testimonial on a phone call, write it down, and ask if you can use it on your testimonials page, or in your next case study. In fact, we will be doing a short filming of customer testimonials in our office – would you want to come to DD HQs for a few hours and participate? In exchange, we will get you lunch and you will have the chance to talk to our product team to share all your wants and needs with the product! Your opinions are valued and we you will have the chance to influence our product roadmap.
11. Social media is made for B2B. Twitter in particular. Some think of Twitter as a place for self-expression and for tweens to post questionable statements with poor grammar. I think of Twitter as a good place for consumers, it’s true, but let me tell you - Business professionals are taking to twitter to build their professional reputations, position themselves as thought leaders, and generate leads for their business.That video was a great piece of content to push out to Twitter. By giving Kim, our advocate, some Tweet love and positioning her as an industry thought-leader it exponentially expanded the reach of that content – plus it made her feel great. We also used social media during that event to encourage product usage. The tweet on the right got people all fired up, and increased app usage dramatically.
12. Twitter is a platform for your brand advocates to show off when you are doing something ground-breaking or press-worthy. Our investor and board member was on Bloomberg West talking about DoubleDutch, and it was shared across Twitter by some of our advocates. Free PR!
13. Promoting industry thought leaders and influencers. Creating connections in the real world. Because of Twitter (and a poker chip) we got this influencer to our booth for a demo of our product, during an event. If you have good content, compelling marketing campaigns, and can speak to your audience in a language they understand, then Twitter is a powerful platform for building brand advocates.
14. I was on a panel at Twitter HQs a few weeks back with head marketing folks from New Relic, Lyft, and DocuSign. All 4 companies target very different audiences and are able to have great success with Twitter. Lyft, being the main B2C company present, does lots of real-time support through Twitter. New Relic targets a very particular kind of techy-savvy engineer and through interest-based targeted is able to connect with their audience and generate solid leads through the platform. No matter what your target audience is, Social Media can be a great way to mobilize an advocate army.
15. I was on a panel at Twitter HQs a few weeks back with head marketing folks from New Relic, Lyft, and DocuSign. All 4 companies target very different audiences and are able to have great success with Twitter. Lyft, being the main B2C company present, does lots of real-time support through Twitter. New Relic targets a very particular kind of techy-savvy engineer and through interest-based targeted is able to connect with their audience and generate solid leads through the platform. No matter what your target audience is, Social Media can be a great way to mobilize an advocate army.
16. Make it easy to love you. Using tools that enable advocates to shout about your brand from the rooftops easily and organically. Twitter is one. Influtitive is another.People want to help, so you just need to share with them what you them to do for you and your brand. When sales reps have a quarter-end push, and you’re going to make the purchase anyway, why not throw the guy a bone and hustle the paperwork through? I’ve done this before, you’ve probably done this before… it’s just a small examples of how when you've built a relationship, people really want to help out where they can. It's important to make it easy for people to help you. For example, if you are constantly asking your best customer for references, they will burn out. If you can employ technology within your CRM, like Influitive, to select customers based on certain criteria, you won’t overask from your prized customers, and you will help build a larger, more robust base of brand advocates.From the advocate perspective, if they are able to see, at any time, what things matter to you and your brand, and how you can help… they will be more likely to do so. Bringing transparency (and a little bit of fun) around this is a great way to eliminate the friction for brand advocates.
17. I was on a panel at Twitter HQs a few weeks back with head marketing folks from New Relic, Lyft, and DocuSign. All 4 companies target very different audiences and are able to have great success with Twitter. Lyft, being the main B2C company present, does lots of real-time support through Twitter. New Relic targets a very particular kind of techy-savvy engineer and through interest-based targeted is able to connect with their audience and generate solid leads through the platform. No matter what your target audience is, Social Media can be a great way to mobilize an advocate army.
18. Just like with your personal relationships, advocate relationships are 2-way. Something we often forget is to give back to our advocates. Find out what is important to your customer advocate, and give back in a way that matters to them. For example, if your customer advocate is avidly trying to build their klout score, give them some twitter love!If you have a customer that’s given 3 reference calls, take them out to lunch! If they have an epic t-shirt collection, send them a branded t-shirt and handwritten note in the mail! If they are getting on an airplane to speak with your executive on a panel, send them a branded travel pack with vitamins and a neck pillow, to prep them for their journey and share an extra little thank you.
19. I was on a panel at Twitter HQs a few weeks back with head marketing folks from New Relic, Lyft, and DocuSign. All 4 companies target very different audiences and are able to have great success with Twitter. Lyft, being the main B2C company present, does lots of real-time support through Twitter. New Relic targets a very particular kind of techy-savvy engineer and through interest-based targeted is able to connect with their audience and generate solid leads through the platform. No matter what your target audience is, Social Media can be a great way to mobilize an advocate army.
20. Bring advocates together. (this is the army part – whether it’s in a doubledutch-powered event app, the marketo community, a linkedin group, forums, in-person product discussions, user summits, influitive, etc).The buzz of 100bees flying together, is a lot louder than a 100 bees flying apart.
21. These are just snippets of what we’ve learned so far at DoubleDutch. To review, we started with:Capture offline moments of praise.Use Twitter.Make it easy to love your brand.Give back. Help advocates unite.
22. Here's how to mobilize advocates around the Attract stage: Xactly, a fast growing provider of sales compensation management software relies extensively on end user reviews to attract new buyers. That's why they have focused so much attention on advocate marketing over the last year. In fact, their sophisticated program called "FOX, friends of Xactly" that encourages happy customers to spread the word was the key reason for Xactly getting some prestigious industry awards. In 2012, after amassing more than 262 reviews, follows, and shares, LinkedIn names Xactly one of the top 12 business business profiles of 2012. AND Xactly was selected by salesforce.com customers for the Salesforce AppExchange Customer Choice Awards. Salesforce.com customers rely on testimonials and feedback from their peers to determine the most important solutions to power their businesses.
23. Here's how advocate marketing drives referrals. One customer example- one SaaS customer of ours, does it right (this is Act-On but cannot USE their name). They have perfected their referral programs, relying on it as a huge source of business. This client sells to SMB with a capital S and they have raving fans. So they introduced their referral program in Q1, and were astounded with the results. More than 36 qualified leads converted and an unbelievable 25% rate within 3 months of launch.But here’s how they did it. They were clever with their campaign. Instead of hitting up customers with a “do you know anyone” email out of the blue, they invited customers to join an exclusive community that offered perks and privileges for supporting the company through advocacy. And only after advocates contributed through meaningful online support were they asked for a possible referral. A few tactics that helped – 1 making the referral program competitive. Contributors could see how their suggestions elevated their rank within the program2. Suggesting potential names through Linked in – this is the same as prefilling a form – it makes it so much easier for the referrer. 3. Thanking the advocate and providing regular updates on the progress of their referred leads4. Immediately alerting the referred lead with the name of their referral
24. So what do you do as a B2B marketer when you don’t have enough case studies. Here’s an idea.Ektron knows the value of customer-generated content. That's why they put such emphasis behind their annual Ektron site of the year awards at their annual conference. Awards are a great way to not only recognize a customer for having 'best in class' implementation of your product, but also to gather dozens of customer-generated testimonials and case studies - priceless content for nurturing programs and campaigns. Ektron systematically cultivated end user excitement for it's awards as part of its "inner circle" advocate marketing program - and generated a 500% increase in submissions in just one year!