This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Advocate Marketing Decoded: 5 Proven Steps to Powering Advocates in Retail. We assembled a panel to do a deep-dive on this topic, consisting of Greg Shove, the Founder and CEO of SocialChorus, and Carlos Gil, the Head of Digital and Social at Save-A-Lot. This webinar was sponsored by SocialChorus.
Greg set the stage with a discussion of why advocates are more powerful than fans. He described the significant difference between random content in your news feed versus content from someone you trust in your news feed. It turns out that just 135 advocates can have the same reach as 1,000,000 fans on Facebook. This gets to the heart of what he calls "turning social media inside out" by harnessing the power of your advocates you can get them to create and engage with more authentic content across all your social channels.
Carols took over after Greg and talked about the 5 proven steps to powering advocates in retail. Since this webcast was a deep dive on this topic we took questions on each of the steps along the way. Carlos really did a great job informing the audience of how he is able to harness the power of user generated content and how he likes to ensure every advocate post is followed up on in 15-20 min of the post (while the user might still be in store)!
The 5 proven steps to powering advocates in retail are:
1. Identify goals & align to business objectives
2. Define success metrics
3. Activate brand advocates
4. Create a plan for long term engagement
5. Scale and grow program
Now, if you have ever been on a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Some of the questions we covered were: Do you use any incentives to get your advocates to join your program? How do you handle pictures taken in store - are there guidelines or rules that you follow? What type of business outcomes have you seen from advocates?
If that piqued your interest, you will want to hear the replay of this webinar or review the slides from this webinar. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! The next webinar is on Marketing at the Speed of Life: Engaging Consumers When, Where, and How They Want, sign up for it or you can view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.