Influitive

Anyone looking at creating an advocacy program that helps map ROI and rewards clients for enhancing brand reputation well, Influitive is an amazing platform for that. What's even better is the option to launch a referral program to widen your customer base and improve lead generation. The program has many features that help [the] B2B and B2C industry and proves to be an asset in multiplying your audience and maintaining brand loyalty.

Influitive is perfect for organizations that want to drive a community approach with customers that fosters closer relationships and mixes business asks with a balance of fun. The other options are that Influitive can be used in other scenarios, such as an employee or partner advocacy hub as alternatives to purely being about the customer.

Influitive is great if you are looking to build a customer advocacy program from the ground up and provide an experience for your customers that is easy and fun. It is also great if you would like to track customer advocacy activities as it integrates well with other software platforms such as Salesforce. Influitive is less appropriate if advocacy is not the primary objective of your program.

The Influitive platform is very easy to get into and get going when building a client advocacy program. It has many built-in features that make the startup very easy with a not-too-steep learning curve. Influitive provides a lot of examples and directions on how to utilize their platform. It is also flexible enough to be able to customize it in many different ways, to provide a very different experience for members depending on your goals. It can be very "transactional" with challenges and points, very "conversational" with forums and discussions, and anywhere in between. The hardest parts of using Influitive are probably thinking ahead at the beginning before diving in to create your experience - something that is made even harder by the fact that the tools are so tempting to play with - and the long-term management and maintenance. A good customer experience is going to require ongoing care and tending. Influitive provides a lot of tooling around that to help - automatic reminders to members to come and revisit (customizable), reporting to identify trends in behavior, future publication scheduling tooling and reporting, etc. However, it still takes someone sitting in the pilot's chair, or perhaps more than one person sharing responsibilities.

I used Influitive recently to submit a written response to a customer that I was trying to persuade to join my company and this app made it so easy to do so because it simplified the written response for me and the author liked it very much. Another way that they helped me is by growing my visibility on Twitter and Instagram as I grew my brand exponentially.

We have a lot of educational resources in many places, between our blog, TSU, Vimeo webinars, youtube, etc. Influitive has given us the ability to consolidate all of our educational resources into one place making it easy for our users to find the content that they need. Also, being able to engage with our customers and get to know them. Asking them questions about the type of content that they want to see that would be useful. It's a good way for us to create a content calendar with information we know our customers want to see. Lastly, helping with our product. Creating challenges where we ask our customers what changes they would like to see with our platform. So we know we're making improvements based on what our current customers need!

Influitive is well-suited for customer engagement, customer appreciation, [and] customer interaction.

Influitive AdvocateHub is well suited for challenges, quick activity, and brief responses. It is easily accessible while on the go and is useful for quick read articles. Interaction with other users make Influitive AdvocateHub a good application. I recommend other organizations, outside of Blackbaud, to use Influitive AdvocateHub for their communication activities with a group or membership.

AdvocateHub is perfect for companies that want to organize their advocacy programs. Having one place to go to in order to see opportunities, is much better than several individual emails. I imagine it's also much better for the administrators of the program as well. The gamification of the site is well-done and in competitive environments, it's a perfect fit.

If you company adopts the Inbound Marketing you need an Influitive Hub! Inbound Marketing is all about creating a relationship and building a customer loyalty. With Influitive things are easier, more efficient and moreover more fun.

AdvocateHub is an awesome platform for engaging your customers and identifying advocates or fans who you may not have known or been aware of. It is a budget friendly platform for companies of all sizes. Since it is so easy to use it is well suited for small to large teams. Our marketing team is less than 5 people, but we are able to share the workload and since the platform is so easy to use it is not time consuming, which allows us to add content, build challenges and respond to inquiries in a timely manner. Some executives may feel that you have to have a dedicated resource to manage the program. I have launched two Customer Advocacy Programs using Influitive AdvocateHub and both times, the program was managed by multiple shared resources and it works.

AdvocateHub is great for scaling customer marketing activities, and provides a simple platform for activating your best customers. For companies with multiple product lines, small customer bases, or who are much more focused on reference management than other advocate activities, Influitive might be a complimentary option to something else.

How many advocates do you have? If less than 200, would recommend not going for the solution because ideally 20% of the people will be active on the hub and 50-60% of the total people might join the Hub. You don't want just 25 active advocates, do you? So, my advice is if you are going for a customer advocacy only, you should be at 200+ customers.

The answer to this largely depends on the need. Our company is looking for a centralized location for internal communication and awareness, as well as a chance to have some fun and reward extra work. From an externally-facing perspective, fostering awareness/sharing and getting inside-reviews of your product by customers/partners would be very easy.

I think one challenge is some companies haven't got the concept of "advocacy marketing" yet. Advocate marketing encompasses many different marketing departments. First and foremost, I see that it's a demand generation opportunity because you can get referrals from employees and customer advocates for new business. That's really powerful and Influitive already has templates and training on how to do this. Second, I think it's a major social media initiative. Every Friday since January 2014 I've sent out customer success Fridays with a new customer success. This includes suggested tweets but then employees have to cut and paste the content. With Influitive it's so easy for advocates just to click a button! The other ways you can leverage customer advocates are for online reviews, customer references, identifying customers for press/case studies/videos and so much more! There are so many opportunities to leverage our advocates and I think of new ways every day!

I think every B2B SaaS, PaaS, IaaS company could use a product like Influitive's. There are no cases where it is "less appropriate". We thought it wouldn't work as we have a unique customer base, but if you listen to your customers and adjust the community then it'll be a success.

What does the training for this program look like?

If you have humans you work with, this will work. It doesn't really matter what you want from them,

• Community? Check.
• References? Check.
• New business? Check.
• Fun? Check.
• Education? Check.

But you should note that you can make this fail. If you don't pay attention to it after setup, you will fail. It's a bit time-intensive, so you have to dedicate resources (human ones) to it in order to succeed.

It keeps your company a team and always working together. Especially if you are a national company.