1. I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
What’s The ROI Of
Advocate Marketing?
How to prove advocate marketing is
worth the investment.

2. I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Introduction: How can you show the ROI of advocate
marketing?
How will advocacy increase your revenue?
How can advocates save you money?
What are the intangible returns on advocate marketing?
What other parts of your business can benefit from
advocacy?
What should you do to gain buy-in for advocate
marketing?
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I N F L U I T I V E . C O M

3. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
3 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
Fast-closing deals usually land in your sales
reps’ lap thanks to one powerful force: positive
word of mouth from advocates. A referral, genuine
customer review or relevant success story makes
all the difference when it comes to boosting brand
awareness and accelerating pipeline.
Unfortunately, many marketers don’t believe they
can engineer advocacy. Instead, they spend money
on less effective and more expensive tactics, like
event sponsorships, ads, or paid content distribution,
hoping to fill their funnel with as many leads as
possible—no matter how cold they are.
However, if you focus on creating a pool of vocal
brand advocates, you can actively drive word of
mouth and improve the results of your existing
programs. Advocates add an authenticity to your
marketing that clever copy and slick graphics just
can’t compete with.
The best way to engineer worth of mouth is to create
an advocate community where you can build 1:1
relationships with your advocates and recognize
them when they help out your brand. An advocacy
platform, like Influitive’s AdvocateHub (recently
ranked as the market Leader in G2 Crowd’s Spring
2016 Brand Advocacy Grid℠ Report), helps you do it
at scale.
I N T R O D U C T I O N :
How can you
show the ROI
of advocate
marketing?
market Leader in G2 Crowd’s Spring 2016
Brand Advocacy Grid℠ Report

4. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
4 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
“Customers are often the solution to many departmental
business objectives. Engineering depends on customers for
new version user acceptance testing and product advisory
boards. Product management engages customers for visionary
executive councils. Human resources receives new employee
referrals. Support has lightened its load by having customers
support other customers.”
-Carlos Gonzalez, Vice President of Customer Success Operations at Ceridian
But first, you’ll need to show the value of advocate
marketing to get buy-in from your boss. Don’t worry!
It’s easier than you think.
You can tie advocacy directly to revenue through
referrals, references, influence from customer-generated
content, and cross-sell/upsell opportunities. There’s
also the intangible impact an army of eager advocates
can have on the initiatives you already pay for—such
as collecting feedback, creating content, running focus
groups, boosting brand awareness, social sharing and
more.
Ask yourself and your executives: what would it be
worth to you if all of those things were easier, faster and
a better experience for your customers than they are
today?
In this short guide, you’ll learn how your advocate marketing strategy will pay for itself by:
• Increasing revenue and accelerating pipeline
• Decreasing costs thanks to advocate input
and feedback
• Boosting brand awareness and demand
• Increasing customer retention and
account growth

5. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
5 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
How will
advocacy
increase your
revenue?
The easiest way to show the ROI for your program is to measure how acts of advocacy directly affect new
business and pipeline. To demonstrate the link between advocate activity and revenue, you can track:
You can use and track these strategies
through product integrations between
Influitive’s advocacy platform and:
• Marketing automation tools such as
Marketo, HubSpot and Eloqua
• CRM software like Salesforce
• Reference platforms like
RO|Innovation
1. New business and pipeline from advocate referrals
Success Story: Michael Beahm, Senior Marketing Manager at Blackbaud,
started the Blackbaud Champions advocate community to create a
humanizing touch point between the brand and its customers. In return,
Blackbaud’s advocates helped Michael exceeded his annual referral goal
by helping him generate $530,000 in referral pipeline in 2015.
Learn more in this eBook.
2. Faster time to close with advocate references
Success Story: Kim Ellis, Director, Customer Connect at BMC Software,
launched an advocate marketing program to give BMC’s advocates a place
to learn about BMC products, submit feedback and enjoy exclusive perks.
Thanks to Kim’s hard work, advocates influenced $100 million in revenue for
the brand by acting as references.
Learn more about the program in this blog post.
3. Influenced opportunities with advocate-generated content
Success Story: Bo Bandy, Director of Marketing for ReadyTalk, empowered
her company’s advocates to create and promote content through the
ReadyTalk Summit Club advocate community. As a result, Bo’s marketing
team exceeded their content goals, resulting in 3 closed-won deals and an
extra $60,000 in sales pipeline.
Learn how in this case study.

6. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
6 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
1. Saving money on third-party feedback collection
“One of our challenges is being able to qualify some of our gut feelings.
Invariably, we go to a third party. They’ll do some telephone-based
research—it might take them six weeks and cost $10,000. The truth
is they’re reaching out to customers you already know. We used
Influitive to remove that layer. To test new branding around customer
communications, we put a challenge up in the Influitive community.
Within 24 hours, we had 60 unique pieces of feedback which allowed us to
say, ‘Yeah, this direction is right.’”
-David Coates, Senior Marketing Manager at Iron Mountain
How can
advocates
save you
money?
Asking for advocate feedback can help you
cut costs on already-funded initiatives, which
can then be re-allocated to pay for your advocate
community.
By continuously engaging your advocates and
asking for their input, you can:
• Eliminate investments in third-party research for
product or branding feedback
• Reduce support costs
• Save on headcount-related costs
• Scale back product testing and quality
assurance spend
• Save your team time and effort tracking down
customers for fire drill requests
Here are a few ways Influitive customers generate cost savings through their advocate communities:

7. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
7 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
3. Making advocacy scalable and faster for your whole team
“AdvocateHub helps us to communicate with over 1,500 advocates at one
time…We are able to get feedback from our advocates on future products,
marketing materials and strategies. It saves me tons of time! It replaces
and scales back the manual task of individually emailing advocates when
we need something. It wouldn’t be possible to run a global program like
ours without AdvocateHub.”
-Jessica Mitchell, Marketing Manager at SMART Technologies
2. Reducing the burden on CS, support and marketing resources
“We believe that the Teacher Learning Network saves Edmodo at least
$500,000 yearly. Our 1,000 ambassadors [are] covering most of our
support wall, [so] we haven’t had to hire as many support agents. They’re
essentially our social media leg of marketing; they host our meetups and
help our event manager so she hasn’t had to hire an event coordinator. The
certified trainers have hosted over 240 trainings in the last three months.
They have impacted around 3,500 training participants who had probably
never heard of us before, and now they’re spending an hour with a teacher
who’s actually used the platform.”
-Kevyn Klein, Director of Customer Success & Advocacy at Edmodo

8. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
8 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
What are the
intangible
returns on
advocate
marketing?
Advocates can make channels you already invest in for brand awareness and reputation-building much
more effective and valuable.
Here are a few examples:
Success Story: Code42 operates in the hyper-competitive backup software
space. To stand out, Angela Higgins, Director of Customer Engagement,
asked Code42’s advocates to share feedback by writing online reviews across
third-party websites. Her efforts inspired the brand’s advocates to increase
Code42’s number of reviews by 900% and make the brand the Backup
Software market Leader on G2 Crowd.
Learn how they did it in this blog.
1. Advocate reviews can solidify your brand’s image
According to a Google study, 60 percent of B2B technology buyers consult product reviews from
peers before making purchasing decisions. This means having genuine reviews on third-party websites
like G2 Crowd, AppExchange and Spiceworks is vital to making the first cut during your prospect’s
evaluation phase—which happens well before they reach out to anyone at your company.

9. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
9 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
Learn more in this case study.
Success Story: A few months after re-launching its Ambassador program
in February 2014, the Hootsuite marketing team started using Influitive’s
AdvocateHub to mobilize advocates at scale. By making it easier for
Ambassadors to interact with each other, Hootsuite decreased its new
customer drop-off rate and increased its “self-solve” rate from 30% to 65% in
its support forum. Ambassadors also helped generate 81 million Hootsuite-
related social impressions on Twitter.
Learn more in this case study.
2. Advocates make content creation easier, faster and better
It’s estimated that B2B firms with 250+ employees allocate roughly $558,400 worth of internal marketing
headcount on content development annually. If they outsource to agencies or freelancers, they’re
investing an additional average of $202,800 annually. Advocates can quickly help you create better,
more authentic content faster—and for far less.
3. Advocates boost social engagement and build better communities
It can be tough to evaluate the business value of social media and online communities. According to a
Social Media Examiner report, B2C marketers (71%) were much more likely to develop a loyal fan base
through social media than B2B marketers (62%). However, advocates can help boost engagement on
these channels while removing some of the burden on community and social media managers.
Success Story: Chris Peltz, Customer Success Operations Manager at HP
Software, used the ITSM Insiders advocate community to challenge their
customers and partners to provide their best tips for IT service management.
ITSM Insiders happily responded by writing world-class advice that HP
Software easily compiled into a full-lengtheBook.

10. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
10 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
Success Story: Lauren Berry, Customer Marketing Associate at Okta, gave
the brand’s advocates special treatment before, during and after its annual
Oktane conference using its advocate marketing program, the Okta Ozone.
As a result, Lauren built pre-event buzz by driving 1.1 million social impressions
for #Oktane16, and sourced 38 advocates speakers. She also received tons
of advocate quotes and stories to use in next year’s event promotions and
upcoming demand gen campaigns.
Learn more on page 7 of this eBook.
Success Story: Bo Bandy has created a special group in her advocate
community for passionate advocates who are no longer ReadyTalk
customers, either because they moved to a new company or their business
was acquired. Maintaining these advocate relationships has been valuable
for influencing future deals. “Sometimes, a prospect will ask to speak to
somebody who’s no longer a customer. From that standpoint, it’s nice to tap
into this group,” says Bo.
4. Advocates improve the effectiveness of event investments
A Regalix study found that nearly half of marketers say that events make up 10 to 25% of their
budget. However, the returns on event sponsorship are usually questionable; Kissmetrics
found that 82% of marketers can’t quantify attendee interactions at their corporate events. Your
advocates’ authentic passion will make pre-event promotion and attracting prospects to your
booth easier and more worthwhile.
5. Advocates take you with them when they change companies
When a happy customer changes companies, they often bring their love for your brand along
with them. The value of second-order revenue from advocates buying you at their new company
can be difficult to track, but, as Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr—the largest community of SaaS
founders and entrepreneurs—says: “They’re more profitable (no additional marketing or customer
acquisition costs).”

11. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
11 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
What other
parts of your
business can
benefit from
advocacy?
Advocates marketing doesn’t just impact sales and marketing departments. Advocate communities
also help:
“As a technology business, our clients always want to know what's next
for our software, so we developed a campaign to get our users voting for
features and releases. The one with the most votes was pushed to the top of
our roadmap and users got insider information on when they could expect
it on the platform.”
-Jillian Zacchia, Content Generation Specialist at Acquisio
1. Develop better products by providing valuable feedback, insights, feature requests
and eager beta testers to product teams

12. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
12 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
“My CMO will call me up and say, ‘Kim, I need to test the messaging
on whatever solution we’re about to work on.’ Within a day, I can get
him feedback from customers. When we first started, the business [and
executives] used to ask us, ‘Why do we need an advocacy program?’ Now,
they say, ‘OK, the advocate program is off the table. We have to have it. ’”
-Kim Ellis, Director, Customer Connect at BMC Software
3. Equip executive teams with real-time customer feedback.
(No more “going with your gut.”)
“Across our business, the advocates that engage with us, or come back [to
the program] frequently, are the ones that typically renew with us. They
ask us specific questions (directly tied to retention or renewal) that I give
back to our customer success and account management teams. ”
-Kevin Lau, Sr. Marketing Manager, Customer Retention & Advocacy at NetBase
2. Support client success teams by educating customers and identifying cross-sell,
upsell and renewal opportunities.

13. What’s The ROI Of Advocate Marketing?
13 I N F L U I T I V E . C O M
What should
you do to
gainbuy-in
foradvocate
marketing? New business and pipeline from
advocate referrals
Closed-won deals sped up or influenced
by advocate references
Advocate-generated content that
influences opportunities
Cross-sell and upsell opportunities
Support
QA/product testing
Feedback/research
Online reviews
Advocate-generated content
Social media/forum mentions
Community engagement and growth
Improve effectiveness of events
Second order revenue from
long-term advocates
Improved product development
and adoption
Time savings communicating
with advocates
Advocate Marketing ROI Checklist
Revenue Additional Benefits
Cost savings
Aside from forwarding a copy of this eBook on to
others at your company, here are a few articles to
help you get internal buy-in:
1. Learn how to introduce the idea of advocate
marketing at your company.
2. Share this resource with other departments:
“4 ways advocate marketing helps your entire
company—not just marketing”
3. Use this step-by-step guide to get your
colleagues excited about the idea of an
advocate community.

14. transform customer love into sales
pipeline and revenue growth
Now that you can demonstrate
the value of advocate marketing,
you’re ready to learn about the
best platform for engaging your
advocates.
Contact Influitive now to see
how AdvocateHub can help your
company achieve its biggest goals.