When Alan Hall founded TempReps (the company that would eventually grow up and become MarketStar) from his basement in 1988, the core offering was to provide brand representation to technology manufacturers. At the time, these manufacturers were desperate for knowledgeable, tech-savvy advocates who could go into retail locations and instill confidence and understanding in store associates who were used to selling word processors and staplers, not personal computers and cell phones.

As technology has changed and the way we communicate has evolved, the need for well-trained, tech-savvy brand advocates has stayed the same. We’ve noticed over the years the proliferation of many a creative name for programs targeted at influencing brand loyalty and consumer advocacy. Whether you’re considering hiring brand advocates, word-of-mouth marketers, brand butlers, brand evangelists or shopper marketers, it’s important to realize that regardless of what we call it, a successful influencer program will require a successful mix of the following:

1. Clear Objectives

It’s important to know from the beginning who you are targeting and what the desired outcome of your program is going to be. Brand advocacy is not a direct sales strategy making it more challenging to tie the program’s success to specific sales results. It’s important to have a good sample of data available and know specifically what your key metrics are prior to mobilizing an advocacy team, so you can measure the effectiveness of the initiative against past performance.

Because advocacy programs require a serious investment in headcount and subsequent training, it’s critical not to overextend the desired reach and engagement of your team. Since brand advocacy programs are built around creating relationships of trust, it takes time for those efforts to take root and bear fruit. It’s important to allow the trust to develop between advocates and the targeted audience and plan to scale your team based on measured success.

2. Research and Targeting

Whether you’re building your program around a new product launch or looking to rejuvenate a specific product’s sales, the success of any program will likely come down to your ability to target and launch in specific markets that have the traffic and sales volume necessary to move the meter. Using advanced geotargeting strategies, buyer demographics and sales numbers, your program and deployment should be focused on finding the densest population of your ideal customers taking into consideration the amount of retail outlets available for purchase and their sales history.

3. Advocate Education & Incentives

Traditional brand advocacy programs center around the retail store associate. The store associate is, in most cases, the individual trusted to make recommendations when the consumer is most likely to come to a decision and purchase (i.e. in the store). Brands that make a concerted effort to train, motivate and empower store associates have found they own the moment of sale on a more consistent basis.

Successful brand advocacy programs are built around providing field training to targeted audiences on your products and services. This training can take on a variety of levels from consumer awareness events to formal, classroom-style training. Once an individual is trained and empowered as an advocate, research has proven that programs leveraging some sort of incentive are more successful. We all want to be thanked and rewarded. Ensure that in addition to proper field training, you’re not taking your advocate army for granted.

4. Consumer Service & Connection

When a person is willing to accept an advocate role, they become a living, breathing extension of your company’s brand. This level of empowerment requires a very tactical and deliberate exchange of key information in order to ensure the individual is equipped to position your brand against the competition. Research is prevalent regarding the damage a bad experience or poor service can perpetuate. Also, the immediacy and audience tied to social and mobile tools can breed negative sentiment about your brand.

As technology continues to influence and evolve the sales cycle, we fully anticipate the roles and effectiveness of brand advocates to evolve and extend far beyond just store associates. In recent months, we’ve strategized advocate initiatives leveraging social media engagement, providing formalized in-store trainings to consumers, supporting community outreach events, and even handling service calls on the back-end. Any place your brand can benefit from a trained, empowered and personal brand experience is a place to consider an advocacy program.

5. Program Analytics and Data

Finally, no program should ever be considered without an executable plan for tracking, measuring and reporting on the efforts and impact of the initiative. Tying your program into a CRM application that allows you the flexibility to customize the reporting to track the interactions of your advocacy team on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis, will create a transparent view into the interactions and value of your engagement and perhaps most importantly, create the opportunity to refine and perfect your motion based on the experiences occurring in the field. Dashboards can be created to make these metrics not only available but digestible at all levels to ensure your ROI is measured and validated across your team.

This post is by no means meant to be an anthology on advocacy. Influence and advocacy are not exact sciences. MarketStar’s terminology and methodology are quelled from years of in-field experience. To learn how these best-practice principles have shaped our programs check our our SONY case study or read about what we’ve done for Blackberry

I’d love to hear what may be missing from my list as well as other considerations when strategizing formal brand advocacy initiatives.

Let me know what you think in the comments section.

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