“Advocate marketing” and “influencer marketing” – two terms with almost the same end or objective but are widely different concerning the resources they leverage. First, let’s come to the similarity. Both of them employ one or more third parties to spread the word about your service and product. Therefore, you can understand that the two terminologies serve the same purpose.
However, you cannot use them interchangeably. That’s because each has its specific uses and advantages. Understanding their differences can help you comprehend which one will best suit your business needs.
How can advocate marketing help your company?
This mode of marketing strategy uses the bottom-up approach to reach the potential customers of a business. It includes a community of people which direct experience concerning the product, service, or brand. Thus, they can tell stories of their experience to associates like friends, families, and colleagues. This will make other people aware of that company.
Also, it is seen that individuals cater to suggestions especially if it comes from someone they know. Brand advocates play an effective role in this end.
However, you must note that it is different from paid reviews that companies use to misguide consumers. Contrarily, advocate marketing leverage the customers’ opinions to promote its business.
Advantages of using advocacy as a marketing tool:
- More than 50% higher conversion rates for proposals shared by reliable advocates in comparison to offers shared by employing other marketing strategies.
- It can help you to reach a higher number of audiences cost-effectively as advocates will share contents like white papers and product launches from their social networks.
- Effectively boost engagement if you can establish an authentic advocate base on social media platforms. Activities like referrals, surveys, content creation, polls, and other measures often help companies with advocacy marketing. That’s why it is essential to take the marketing experts’ advice to know the different ways of creating strong advocate communities.
Is influencer marketing as effective as its counterpart?
Influencer marketing is all about using the power of influencers to guide the behaviour of your potential customers. Such influencers are mostly people who are respected, knowledgeable, and considered as a provocateur in their field of work.
They may or may not be famous; that entirely depends on the product or service you’re selling. That’s why many companies employ well-reputed bloggers who deal with the same subject, to reach their target audience. Therefore, influencer marketing is about bringing to the team someone who has expertise and prominence in the same field as yours to endorse.
Positive aspects of having influencers
- It helps in building trust and credibility. Followers know that someone who is famous for what they do will not put their reputation to harm for promoting a fake or unpromising product.
- Establishes relevance with the audiences; in fact, influencer marketing can generate higher ROI because it induces relevance among the influencer’s fans.
- It isn’t too pushy as influencers share valuable and authentic content to make the followers aware of your product. Consequently, these insightful contents like videos on YouTube also add value to your niche audiences.
Now that you know the driving forces and impacts of these two marketing strategies, it’ll be easier for you to decide which one will help your business more.
