This presentation was delivered by Alex Ruddock, Product Marketing Manager at Influitive, at the Product Marketing Summit, Las Vegas, 2022. Catch up with a variety of talks with our OnDemand service.
My name is Alex Ruddock, and I run Product Marketing at Influitive. At Influitive, we think about advocates all the time.
The way that we think about them is you have a bunch of different types of customers – you have your happy customers, your neutral customers, and your dissatisfied customers. They can all advocate. I'm going to share how best to engage with them.
In this article, I'll focus on:
- The modern approach to customer engagement
- Customer marketing vs. product marketing
- Our advocacy platform at Influitive
- How product marketing leverages advocates
- Making the rewards as unique as your customer
But first, a quick story
Before we get down to how you can use customer advocacy to boost your product marketing function, let me tell you a quick story.
We had a key customer who was in the middle of implementation and wanted to see some best-in-class work. We didn't want to just show any old demo; we wanted to go beyond our regular demo environment and show as many examples of customers as we possibly could, so we put out an ask to our advocate community via the software we use to communicate with customers.
We had a very tight deadline – the call was the next day. This request took me about two minutes to design and publish, and three hours later I had 32 logos say yes. Not only did they say, “Yes, you can use our logo,” but they were happy to let us demo their environments in real time. That was pretty cool.
The key takeaway for me is that an engaged advocate community allows you to rapidly recruit customers when you need them most, and that's awesome.
The modern approach to customer engagement
I'm going to talk a bit about our approach to customer engagement. It's not necessarily a 100% new approach, but it’s pretty novel in the post-sale world.
