Even the best manual advocacy marketing management system is going to eventually fall short. Switching to a dedicated advocacy marketing platform can improve both your brand ambassador program and your work life. Find out how!

As more brands continue to look towards advocacy marketing as a proven method of getting around Facebook’s pay-to-play model (what’s the point in a large Facebook audience if only 1% of your fans see your content anyway), we are starting to see more clients come into the SocialToaster family with an advocacy audience already built. It’s not uncommon to see a brand managing 20 to 50 advocates using some sort of manual system.

Typically, these manual systems take the form of a some spreadsheets, separate email lists, and time-consuming social audits. Making a change is never easy, but if you want to take your advocacy marketing efforts to the next level, consider making the switch to a dedicated advocacy marketing platform.

Here’s why.

Where Manual Systems Fall Short

Even the best manual advocacy marketing management system is going to eventually fall short. Here are just a few ways switching to a dedicated advocacy marketing platform can improve both your advocacy marketing program and your work life.

Delivering Your Content

Advocacy marketing campaigns are all about getting your Superfans to share your content on their social feeds. This not only gets more eyeballs on your content, it also increases third-party credibility, which means people are going to trust the message more than if they hear it straight from your brand.

Your Superfan sharing your content is a form of social proof gold.

If you’re using a manual system to email your advocates in mass through a dedicated email list (or worse, BCC-ing everyone on a single email), you’re missing out on a ton of potential shares by making your advocates go through more steps to complete a content share than necessary.

Think about the advocate’s journey for a second. In most manual systems, to share your content they need to:

• Open your email
• Open their Facebook page
• Copy and paste your content link
• Copy and paste your post content (or write their own)
• Hit share
• Go to their next social account and repeat

Not a short process.

Compare that to an advocacy marketing platform that allows you to not only easily create the message that gets emailed to your advocates, but also allows them to share your content from within their email.

That 6-step process becomes a 2-step process for the Superfan:

• Open your email
• Click on the share button to automatically share your message

The easier you make it for an advocate, the more likely they are to share your content.

Scaling A Campaign Without Increasing The Time Involved

Sure, when you have ten or twenty advocates, it isn’t too hard to manage them in a system of spreadsheets and BCC emails, but once you start scaling to the hundreds or even thousands of advocates, those spreadsheets are going to become unmanageable time sucks.

Switching to an advocacy marketing platform, means switching to a system that can handle your audience no matter what their size. Whether it’s 1,000 advocates or 10,000 advocates, when you use an advocacy management platform, the man-hours required to email them all remains the same. We have several clients who spend 15 to 30 minutes each week on their advocacy programs of 35,000+ Superfans.

Measure ROI

The old business adage rings true, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure!”

When you’re using a manual system, tracking program performance commits you to hours of auditing your advocates social pages to see what’s been shared, an inefficient use of time for any size audience. However, even worse than losing all that time, a manual audit isn’t going to give you the full details you need to determine how successful your advocacy efforts are.

At a minimum, switching to an advocacy marketing platform will automatically track:

• Post share rate
• Total shared content impressions and clicks
• Total shared content engagement
• The earned media value of all this exposed content
• Per-posts KPI breakdowns

Nobody has time to individually count how many likes each of your advocates are getting on each post they share for you.

Awarding Points or Rewarding Advocates

Most advocacy marketing campaigns use an action-for-points reward model to encourage advocates to share content. Every action is set to a specific point value. In a manual system, the individual manager typically awards points by manually tallying up the actions each advocate has taken. Talk about tedious!

Making the switch to an advocacy marketing platform means being able to quantify the value of specific advocates without having to manually tally up the scores. Plus, these scores can be shown on a public leaderboard, giving your program an added level of transparency and competitiveness.

Moving your Brand Ambassador Program to an Advocacy Marketing Platform: Get Your Advocates On Board

The hardest part of switching to a new advocacy marketing system is making sure your current advocates make the journey with you. If you want to make your switch a success, be sure to keep the following in mind:

• Give people a heads up for the switch
• Explain the benefits of the switch – remember to talk about their benefits, not yours
• Celebrate the launch day and thank people who made the switch
• Consider holding a mini-contest to reward early bird converters
• Have a small overlapping window where both systems are being used wherein you continue to encourage advocates to sign up for the new platform
• Let people know the specific day the overlapping window will be closed, and the manual system will no longer be supported

Leave Your Manual System for SocialToaster

Considering leaving your manual system behind? Schedule a free demo today and see what the SocialToaster platform can do for your advocacy marketing program!