The Advocacy Channel: A Customer Marketing Podcast

Join us as we explore the world of referral marketing in our final episode of the first season of The Advocacy Channel Podcast, featuring referral marketing expert Keith Posehn. Keith brings over 17 years of experience to the table, offering vast knowledge and expertise from his time leading referral programs for tech startups and tech giants, including Caviar and Uber.

In this episode, Keith sheds light on the complexities of referral marketing, highlighting the common hurdles companies face and offering practical advice to overcome them. It's an episode filled with Keith's professional anecdotes and wisdom, offering tips and tricks to help you launch and run successful referral programs.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Strategies for overcoming resistance: Learn how to win over skeptical stakeholders by aligning referral program objectives with broader business goals, and discover why past failures shouldn't deter new efforts.

• Innovative approaches to incentives: Beyond mere discounts, explore creative ways to incentivize customers, focusing on what truly adds value to their experience and encourages genuine advocacy.

• The role of timing and promptness: Keith emphasizes the critical moments for prompting referrals, illustrating how well-timed engagement can significantly enhance program participation rates.

• Building a holistic marketing effort: Gain insights on seamlessly integrating referral programs into your  marketing strategy, and smoothly transition from product-focused initiatives to broad market-wide campaigns as the program matures

Welcome to 2024!

Are you a customer marketer looking to develop more effective case studies in 2024? Don't miss out on our latest episode, packed with helpful insights!

Emily Amos, CEO of Uplift Content, a B2B SaaS content marketing agency, joins us to share her insights on creating successful customer case studies. Emily's expertise in storytelling, data analysis, and market trends provides a comprehensive guide for anyone eager to learn about this essential customer marketing tool.

She also shares insights on the latest data from her report on B2B SaaS case studies to help you craft more informed and effective customer case studies. Tune in to learn from a seasoned professional and enhance your marketing strategy in the upcoming year!

Welcome to another enlightening episode of The Advocacy Channel podcast!

Today, we're thrilled to have customer marketing expert Patrick Kalie from Swoogo join us on the show. Patrick brings a wealth of knowledge in customer marketing and joins us today to discuss its evolution, misconceptions, and the multi-faceted roles it plays in a business. From in-person events to digital communities, Patrick provides insights into how customer marketing can be a game-changer in building and maintaining customer relationships.

Join us as we explore:

• The evolution and current trends in customer marketing.

• The important role that both in-person and digital events play in building customer advocates.

• Strategies for post-event engagement, including how to leverage FOMO.

• Patrick's personal journey in customer marketing, his top learnings and advice. 

Don't miss this episode, where we dive deep into the evolving world of customer marketing. Learn from Patrick's expertise on how to blend in-person events and digital communities to create lasting customer relationships.

Welcome to another insightful episode of The Advocacy Channel!

We're thrilled to have Joel Klettke, founder of Case Study Buddy and a renowned specialist in case study development, join us for today’s episode. With years of experience under his belt, Joel is an expert in harnessing the power of storytelling, customer reviews, and case studies to drive business growth.

In today's rapidly evolving marketing landscape, it's crucial to understand how to create persuasive stories and maximize the impact of customer advocacy. Joel's expertise sheds light on the best practices for leveraging these key components in your marketing and sales efforts.

Listen in as we dive into a range of engaging topics, such as:

1. The critical aspects of crafting captivating case studies

2. How to make the most of customer reviews in your marketing strategy

3. The role storytelling plays in fostering trust and credibility with your audience

4. Proven methods to uncover and highlight your best customer success stories

5. Overcoming common hurdles in collecting and managing valuable customer feedback

Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from a seasoned industry expert and elevate your marketing game by embracing the full potential of storytelling and customer advocacy.

Are you looking to build a successful customer education program but not sure where to start? This episode has got you covered! 

For Episode 18 of The Advocacy Channel, we had the pleasure of speaking with Shannon Howard, the Director of Customer and Content Marketing at Intellum - a leading customer education platform.

Shannon is a customer marketing expert with years of experience building education programs for companies like The Predictive Index, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, and Litmus. Her expertise spans from marketing to curriculum development to SaaS product management, making her the perfect person to guide us through the process of creating a successful customer education program. 

She helps us answer questions about education programs like: 

• When is the best time to start one? 

• What are the top mistakes to avoid? 

• How do you use data to make better program decisions? 

Tune in to learn from one of 2023's Top 100 CMA Influencers & Strategists and start developing more power users and advocates of your product. 

Welcome to a brand new year of The Advocacy Channel!

Our first guest of 2023 is Dana Alvarenga. As the VP of Customer Experience at SlapFive, a customer marketing and advocacy software platform, Dana has plenty of experience developing customer marketing programs and knows how to make an impact.

While it’s now more important than ever to demonstrate the value of your marketing initiatives and get buy-in from your leadership team, Dana helps us understand how you can prove your value as a customer marketer, and show what customer marketing can do for your organization.

Tune in to learn her keys to success in customer marketing, how to show that your programs are influencing revenue, and her four-step approach to building a customer program.

Welcome to our final episode of 2022!

After so many incredible discussions with customer marketing experts from all over the world, we’re delighted to welcome back special guest Scott K. Wilder to The Advocacy Channel to round out the year.

As the VP of Customer, Partner and Community Engagement at Base, Scott has over 20 years of experience delivering customer advocacy programs for companies like Hubspot, Google, Marketo, Coursera, and Apple.

Scott joined us in Episode 8 to help us understand several important lessons in customer advocacy, and is back to discuss what's new in customer marketing and what to expect in the new year.

Happy holidays from everyone at The Advocacy Channel! We can’t wait to share more with you in 2023.

What do you do when a hot prospect asks for a customer reference?

Is it a last-minute dash on Slack with everyone trying to find a happy customer?

Or do you have an organized way of finding the best match?

No matter where you are between these two extremes, a customer reference program might be just what you need.

To help you get started, David Sroka has joined us on The Advocacy Channel to provide his expertise. As the CEO of Point of Reference, David has years of experience helping large enterprise companies like Benevity and Amplitude run successful customer reference programs.

Tune in as David and Will discuss when you need a customer reference program, how to get started, what to avoid, and the importance of training your sales team.

Get prepared for 2023 with new strategies to leverage the power of your advocates.

With an increasing number of businesses offering services purely online, trying to make genuine connections with customers is only getting harder. How do you build loyalty when you’ve never even met your customers?

To help us fill in the gap of human connection for internet businesses, we’re excited to welcome Matt Barnett to Episode 14 of The Advocacy Channel. Matt is the CEO of Bonjoro, a platform that lets you send personalized videos at the perfect time to convert more leads, onboard customers, and build customer love and loyalty.

Drawing on Matt’s experience helping companies develop customer loyalty with human connection, Matt and Will discuss what true customer loyalty is, how to score your advocates at each lifecycle stage and properly engage them, plus the secret sauce required to delight any customer.

Grab your coffee, get comfortable, and take out your notebook as there are plenty of golden nuggets from Matt that you’ll want to jot down!

Welcome to The Advocacy Channel's very first bonus episode! Today marks the one-year anniversary of the show, and what better way to mark this special occasion than to welcome back our very first guest? Rachel Gershon is the assistant professor of marketing at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, and has been uncovering fascinating insights from her research on referral programs.

In Episode 1, Rachel shared with us her game-changing research on the psychology of referrals and rewards, and what encourages customers to participate in your referral program. If you haven’t checked out that episode, now is a perfect time!

To learn even more, tune in to this bonus episode with Will and Rachel where she shares a few teaser tidbits from her not-yet published research around the value of a referred customer, and the role of rewards in social commitment. 

We’d like to send a big thank you to our listeners for supporting The Advocacy Channel this year! We can’t wait to share even more customer marketing insights with you.

As customer marketing and advocacy initiatives gain more attention and discussion across industries, you might be wondering - What’s next in customer advocacy?

To help us dig into the past, present, and future of customer marketing, we’re thrilled to welcome two very special guests to Episode 13 of The Advocacy Channel. Deena and Liz are the founders of Captivate Collective, an advocacy agency that works with large companies like Adobe, Sage, and Amplitude to build their customer advocacy programs and strategies. Their goal is to help companies maximize success by capturing customers with relevant and remarkable experiences, and activating them with meaningful opportunities.

Tune in as Deena, Liz, and host Will Fraser share advice on how to get started with your own advocacy program, how to evolve your strategy after you’ve launched your first program, and what’s next in customer advocacy.

Hint: It’s about unlocking advocacy for your entire customer base!

How does a customer marketer at a leading multimedia software company build brand advocates, and drive loyalty, retention, and ongoing demand? Hear it straight from the source as we welcome Kevin Lau, Global Head of Customer Advocacy at Adobe to episode 12 of The Advocacy Channel. With over 12 years of experience as an industry thought leader in customer advocacy and lifecycle marketing, Kevin is a well-known expert in the customer marketing space with a wealth of knowledge, experience, and tactical insights to share. Hear host Will Fraser and Kevin discuss his journey as a customer marketer, how he maintained and even grew the Marketo community through a merger and acquisition, his top tips for marketers building advocacy programs, and much more.

Are you itching for more real-world advice from experts in customer marketing who continue to innovate and educate? So were we! Welcome to Episode 11 of The Advocacy Channel with special guest Leslie Barrett from Sendoso.

As the Director of Customer Marketing and Advocacy at Sendoso, the leading sending platform for personalized gifts, branded swag, eGifts, and more, Leslie is passionate about the power of customer advocacy. In this episode, learn about her journey to becoming an award-winning customer marketer, her approach to developing advocates from the beginning of the customer journey, and the important lessons she’s learned along the way. Tune in to hear Leslie’s invaluable knowledge, experience, and tactical insights to boost your own success in customer marketing.

How do you know it’s the right time to start a customer advocacy program? How can you tell if a customer is ready to participate? What can you learn when asking them to join your program? To help answer these questions, we welcome a seasoned customer advocacy expert to The Advocacy Channel for our 10th episode.

Pablo Fernandes is the Product Manager and Head of Consulting Services for Customer Advocacy at Wings4U, an organization that helps B2B tech companies close more deals faster by leveraging the voice of their customers. Host Will Fraser chats with Pablo about identifying your advocates and how to measure the impact and success of your program.

Did you know that 78% of people trust online product reviews just as much as a recommendation from a friend or a family member? So how do you go about capturing and sharing customer testimonials in a way that helps you reach new prospects and convert more leads?

To help, we’re excited to welcome Lauren Locke-Paddon to The Advocacy Channel. Lauren is a customer advocacy expert with over 12 years experience, and is the VP of customer success and marketing at Vocal Video - a video marketing platform that lets you easily capture and share video testimonials from your customers, partners, and employees.

Join host Will Fraser as he and Lauren dig into the importance of authentic customer stories, how customer success and marketing can work together on customer advocacy initiatives, how to get started on building your library of customer stories, and much more!

Welcome to Episode 8 of The Advocacy Channel!

Today we’re joined by Scott K. Wilder - an advisor to global technology companies with over 20 years experience developing customer advocacy programs for brands like HubSpot, Google, Marketo, and Coursera.

Scott’s extensive experience in customer marketing has inspired him to develop and share ways that marketing and product teams can work together and learn from each other to help customers find more value and more success with a company’s products.

Tune in as Will and Scott discuss the importance of coordination between teams to drive customer centricity, how to leverage a product approach to customer marketing, and how customer advocacy doesn't only include the customer, but also involves your employees.

As marketing technology continues to evolve, there’s a bigger shift towards more customer-centric products and platforms. Companies are focusing on engaging their customers, and listening to and prioritizing their feedback to create better product experiences and stronger relationships.

To help us understand what this looks like in practice, we’re excited to welcome guest Ozkan Demir to The Advocacy Channel. As the CEO and Co-Founder of Pisano, an all-in-one customer experience management platform, Ozkan helps us uncover what feedback loops are, how to collect the best feedback from your customers, and how to actually use that feedback to build stronger, more profitable relationships with them.

If you’re wondering how to start collecting and using customer feedback in your organization, this is one episode you don’t want to miss!

Connect with Ozkan on LinkedIn:

Welcome to our first episode of 2022! We’re excited to kick off the new year with special guest Trisha Diamond, Director of Customer Success at Fiverr. With over 15 years of experience developing resources and support programs for customers to drive client satisfaction and retention, Trisha shares her unique approach to building genuine customer connections in a double sided marketplace. Plus, we get an inside look at how she helped build the customer success department at Fiverr from the ground up. If you’re trying to drive a customer success department in your organization or just improve your customer relationships, tune in as Trisha and host Will Fraser discuss how customer success can best work with other departments and build long term relationships with your brand’s top users. 

Wondering how to get started with a customer advocacy initiative in your organization?

Whether you’re a marketer, product manager, or growth leader eager to bring customer advocacy projects to your 2022 strategy, it can be difficult to understand how to get started and earn support from the rest of your team. This is why we’re excited to welcome Jon Ashley to The Advocacy Channel. With over 20 years of experience developing customer advocacy programs for large companies in the UK, Jon brings a wealth of valuable knowledge and advice when it comes to kicking off a customer advocacy project.

In our final episode before the New Year, Jon and host Will Fraser break down how you can get company buy-in for your customer advocacy initiatives, how to set realistic expectations and goals, and what to consider for the best results.

Connect with Jon on LinkedIn:

As a marketer in the 21st century, you’ve likely come across the term “growth marketing” before. While it’s gotten a lot of buzz, not many people actually take the time to break it down or understand what it means and compare it to related areas like product growth.

This is why we’re excited to welcome Maria Cuasay to The Advocacy Channel. Maria has over 10 years of experience working on growth and customer marketing programs, and is currently the Principal Product Manager of growth at Ancestry.

Tune in as Maria and host Will Fraser discuss how growth marketers can best work with product teams, and even make the switch from marketing to product growth. Maria shares what she’s learned from navigating between marketing and product, and gives valuable advice for running a successful referral program based on her time at top ride-sharing app Lyft.

2020 made a lot of marketing tactics more complicated, and customer acquisition was no exception.

While it’s no secret to anyone who has managed a paid ads campaign before, a 2019 report from Profitwell indicated that customer acquisition costs for both B2C and B2B are up nearly 60% compared to 5 years ago.

Competition in the online ad space has been growing for many years due to increased saturation and new channels being created and filled with content. Because of the pandemic that defined most of 2020, more fuel was added to this fire and digital advertising costs have only continued to increase as nearly all businesses were forced to transition online.

As a marketer, how do you adapt?

Today we’re joined by Rory Capern, advisor to Canadian SaaS companies with over 20 years of executive leadership experience at companies like Google, Twitter, and Microsoft. Rory and host Will Fraser discuss market trends, and how you can adjust your marketing strategy to combat rapidly increasing customer acquisition costs, get creative with other avenues of acquisition, and get the most value out of the customers you already have.

Connect with Rory: 

Wondering how to start a customer advocacy initiative in your organization?

To help, we invited Rebecca Kapler to join us as a special guest on the show. Rebecca is the Marketing Manager at Jobber - an award-winning business management software for small home service businesses. She has led many successful customer advocacy and community programs that have directly contributed to Jobber's explosive growth over the last few years. 

In this episode, Will chats with Rebecca to understand how she leverages these programs to build customer advocacy, why it's important, and how it contributes to Jobber's continued success. Rebecca shares: Tips for anyone new to building customer advocacy in their organization, what to keep in mind when planning your 2022 marketing strategy, and more!

Listen to the full episode or keep reading to learn our favorite take-aways from the episode that will help elevate your customer advocacy strategy.

Tips for Building Customer Advocacy

Communicate with your customers!

When it comes to building customer advocacy and creating a referral-worthy product or service, it’s important to understand the needs of your customers so you can better engage them with relevant and desirable products and offerings.

While it’s tempting to make assumptions about your audience, no one knows your customers better than your customers! Rebecca highlights the importance of taking the time to actively communicate with your customers to eliminate the guesswork and be confident that your selected initiatives will make a difference. Even a quick 15 minute call with 3 or 5 of your customers can go a long way.

Leverage your connections

While conversations around customer advocacy and customer marketing are quickly gaining traction, they are still relatively new topics in the marketing world. This means you may not find the step-by-step handbook on customer advocacy with years of data and proven research to back it up.

Rebecca notes the importance of reaching out to connections - both inside and outside your company - to gain different perspectives and ideas to help you.

Scale when you can

While there is certainly a time and place for personalized, non-scalable interactions with customers, Rebecca reminds us that too much manual work will prevent you from scaling effectively.

Advice for 2022

With the new year less than two months (!) away, it’s time to start thinking about marketing strategy for 2022. We asked Rebecca what insights she has to help with planning for the new year and making it a successful one for both your brand and your customers.

She shared two valuable tips:

1. Don’t underestimate the power of customer advocacy
2. Customer advocacy is something everyone in your organization can plan a role in
   

Want to know more? To hear even more insights from Rebecca, listen to the full episode! Special thanks to Rebecca Kapler for being on the show!

Can a single-sided referral program work just as well as a double-sided program? Should you reward the referring customer, the referred user, or both?

To help answer these questions, we’re thrilled to welcome guest Rachel Gershon to the show. As the assistant professor of marketing at the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego, Rachel’s teaching and research specializes in the realm of consumer behavior and human decision-making. Her published article, “Why Prosocial Referral Incentives Work: The Interplay of Reputational Benefits and Action Costs”, dives into the psychology of referrals and rewards, and what encourages customers to participate in these programs.

In this episode, host Will Fraser chats with Rachel about her innovative research on referral program reward structure. She shares the game-changing findings and insights, and new ideas when it comes to designing and sharing a winning referral program that converts.
Connect with Rachel: