With digital marketers excitedly gathering for annual The Digital Marketing Show this week it seems like a good time to look at what the difference is between influencer and advocate marketing.
There’s no doubt both disciplines can help a brand grow its reach profoundly but there’s still a lot of confusion – even within the digital marketing world – about what the difference is between the two types of marketing.
What is advocate marketing?
This is essentially about encouraging people who like your brand to talk about you more and create authentic content about you, online or off. These could be satisfied customers, recent adopters or just people who aspire to your brand.
Turning a satisfied customer into a superfan is at the heart of advocate marketing. And it involves making it easier for customers to create and share content about you.
What’s the incentive for a customer to do this? Affinity with your brand: attention from you and the social rewards that come with that are often enough for advocates and superfans.
Sure, advocates generally have less followers and fans on social media sites than influencers – that’s why harnessing the power of advocates at scale is key; recruiting hundreds is critical to success.
Can we measure this? Results from Qube Media’s advocate platform Qubist show that 100 advocates can deliver millions of brand impressions a month and thousands of engagements every month. This creates a huge business impact - all by engaging and helping your customers talk about you. This is something we've been running successfully at ICAEW BAS.
What is influencer marketing?
So, these are the guys with the followers, right?
To some degree yes, but what’s important for brands is to develop relationships with influencers who resonate with your brand values and who you can build a sustainable relationship with. There certainly needs to be a strong strategy in place with any influencer relationship and your activity together needs to be tied to solid business results. Aligning with the right talent and keeping your credibility is vital.
Influencers are mainly defined as people who have a large online following on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. However, again, reach doesn’t necessarily equate with influence, so evaluating their metrics and your KPIs is essential.
Influencers often make a living from their online influence - they spend time and money building their online profiles and enter into commercial relationships to promote brands.
Examples of this may include blogger trips to hotel chains or instagrammers taking part in a product launch... as long as they discuss their experience online. There are many niche influencers now and they have fast become a staple part of any digital marketing stack for successful online brands.
Influencers usually enter into commercial arrangements, either by being paid directly or with product samples or a product experience.
Influencer marketing campaigns often involve smaller numbers than advocate campaigns - a handful of influential bloggers, for example.
An example of this is luxury hotel group Constance Hotels and Resorts recent InstaTrip partnership with 7 influential fashion, travel and lifestyle instagrammers who were invited to experience ‘Constance Moments’ in the Indian Ocean. Each instagrammer documented their experience to create an incredible variety of content to existing and new audiences and grow Constance’s Instagram following by a huge 960% between January and November 2015.
Another example of influencer marketing is Constance’s work with Marie Claire working together on the Marie Claire beauty shoot at one of their properties in the Seychelles. This allowed Constance to reach out to fashion, lifestyle and travel influencers and engage with them.
Marie Claire blog posted daily to their 1.5m followers on Facebook, posted to Instagram and shared on the models and photographers instagram accounts. Socially there were 88 posts during the campaign with a reach of 1,772,869 impressions and 35,714 engagements.
Is there any crossover between the two?
Absolutely - in the right circumstances. By monitoring your digital statistics carefully - who is visiting your blog, who is engaging with your brand on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. you will start to build a picture of who your potential advocates are.
Crucially, some of these advocates - people who already love your brand - will also be influencers. These people should become a priority to target with any advocate marketing campaign, as you may be able to harness the power of an influencer within your advocate marketing campaign without having to incentivise them financially.
By Harpreet Panesar, Marketing Manager, Enterprise, Business Department, ICAEW.
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