Partner Advocacy Marketing: Make It A Two Way Street

This past week I had the opportunity to attend a Mass TLC seminar where Advocacy Marketing was discussed. It was a good session and the focus of the seminar was on customer advocacy marketing. It is interesting to consider how to apply advocacy marketing principles to channel marketing and integrate Partner Advocacy marketing into a partner program. 

While advocacy marketing is not new, it is increasingly important and there are signicant opportunities to leverage social media, mobile, and other technologies to take advocacy marketing to a new level. Advocacy marketing can encompass a wide range of approaches from traditional customer references and case studies to finding innovative new ways to engage your customers and encourage or reward them for being digital champions.  

For me the interesting question is how to apply advocacy marketing to channel marketing. The most obvious scenario is leveraging your channel partners as advocates for your products and applying newer advocacy marketing techniques to your partners.  If you market and sell your products through channel partners then you also need to involve those partners in developing and fostering customer advocates. 

Can you extend the principles of advocacy marketing through your channel partners by enabling and rewarding them for creating customer advocates? 

In addition, one of the most valuable ways to reward your partners is to become advocates for your best partners. Again, there are some good techniques that have been around for along time to recognize partners; such as partner recognition awards or events.  But many of your partners may be challenged to create a broader social advocacy program. 

How do you leverage your own organization to create an online or social advocacy for your top channel partners?  

Think about how to apply these advocacy marketing practices to your channel marketing program.  I would encourage you to think about three simple principles to incorporate into your partner program:

• Reward your partners for being advocates
• Help and reward your partners to create customer advocates
• Be an advocate for your top partners

This can be a differentiator for your channel program and a lever to improve your partner value proposition, especially if you can leverage social media tools to create a multiplier advocacy effect out through your partner channel. Advocacy marketing can also help you and your partners generate more leads.  

Thanks to Mass TLC, SiriusDecision, Acquia, Influitive, and Rapid7 for putting together the Customer Advocacy Marketing session this past week, it was a good session.  

If you are interested in discussing how to apply Advocacy Marketing to your channel marketing program, please contact Pereion Solutions by sending an email to Steve Perry at slperry@pereion.com.