By Aixa Bellido de Luna
Published September 12, 2023

Sixty-seven percent of companies expect to spend more on advocate marketing this year. This doesn’t surprise me. As people’s media and consumption habits evolve, the ways of reaching those people must evolve, too. 

But spending, without a strategy or process in place, is wasted spend. In this article, I'll be digging into parts of our process – namely, why we look for “advocates” vs. “influencers” and how to find the right advocates for your brand.

Pro tip: Our advocate marketing methodology consists of 5 steps – Insights, Identify, Analyze, Manage, Activate, and Measure. We’ll mostly focus on Insights, Identify, and Analyze here, but there’s more where this came from.

Why We Focus on Brand “Advocates” vs Influencers

One of the first steps to consider is WHO. There are various terms for “influencer” floating around, but the primary ones to be familiar with are content creators, influencers, and advocates. Each of these has a specific skill set, content style, and approach that makes them successful at what they do.

1. Creators leverage their ability to produce amazing CONTENT. Creator is the broadest term of the three; both influencers and advocates are creators.

2. An influencer’s value lies in their personal brand and the COMMUNITY they’ve built. They often believe the bigger their community, the better.

3. Advocates are inherently AUTHENTIC creators because they genuinely care about or can connect to the brand through their content. They do influence, they do build community, but size isn’t their main concern. Authenticity is.

We target brand “advocates” with the overarching goal of organically spotlighting – or fostering – their love and/or connection to a brand. This mentality of relationship-building and finding the right brand advocate that will cut through the clutter – versus hiring a creator simply for their reach or low cost – has paid off.

Advocacy Marketing Example

We developed an advocacy campaign for our client and pet toy brand, Brightkins, for National Pet Month. It involved collaborating with a mix of previous partners who had historically performed well, and new partners who hadn’t experienced our products until this partnership. 

In the post guidelines, we offered each partner the creative license to make fun, engaging Instagram Reel content any way they preferred as long as they featured the product and named the brand at least twice in their video. The brand advocates we worked with previously outperformed the newcomers, and average campaign engagement rate almost quadrupled our KPIs (8.2% vs. 2.5%). 

Now, that doesn’t mean the newcomers didn’t perform well. They contributed to over 378K impressions after all. It does mean that step one toward relationship-building – or making them advocates – is complete. And we’d expect even higher performance if we worked with them again.

Finding the Ideal Brand Advocate

Don’t base your decisions solely on a creator’s follower count. Instead, consider a diverse set of criteria that helps you pinpoint authenticity. We developed a standard Carve Advocate Scorecard to help us identify those ideal advocates, and adapt each scorecard criteria based on the specific client’s objective.

In this example for a toy client, we scored potential advocates across criteria including if they’re active on multiple platforms, if they’ve worked with competitors, and do their children appear often in the content. The campaign focus was driving awareness on Instagram and TikTok amongst a parental audience for a specific toy product. They also wanted to see the product in use. 

Like the Carve Scoring System, we assign numbers to each of the criteria and give each potential advocate an overall score. While not every creator will check every box, consider what are the “dealbreakers” for the purpose of the advocate marketing campaign. 

In some cases, you’ll spot some creator “red flags” as you search for brand advocates. These are the most frequent: 

• Engagement rate below industry standards. In general, look for engagement rates above 2.5%.

• Every (or almost every) post is an ad. It’s extremely hard to build up authenticity when you’re always selling.

• Boosting numbers with fake followers. Yes, we can tell when one’s engagement is not up to par with what it should be based on follower count.

Make sure your agency invests in real measurement tools that address pain points like deep-analyzing creator profiles and recruiting advocates. Using services such as Rizer, Grin, and CreatorIQ can help marketers spot red flags, easily find engagement rates, and more. 

Setting Your Advocate Marketing Strategy Up For Success

Formulating a plan of action for your next advocate marketing campaign? Consider starting here:

• Decide what is the number one, non-negotiable criteria for your potential advocates. This will help you narrow down your choices from many to far less.

• Apply your broader set of criteria to your smaller set.

• Be clear on what success looks like for you.

Discover what factors are most important to your brand. Then, build a campaign with partners who are proud to connect their audience with your brand organically.