Customer marketers responsible for customer advocacy and references piece together an array of technologies to make their programs work. This includes niche solutions, purpose-built platforms, and multipurpose offerings. The Forrester Tech Tide™: B2B Customer Advocacy And Reference Technologies, Q4 2024, reflects this fractured market. As one practitioner noted, “There isn’t any single solution.”
Frustration about the lack of a one-stop shop for customer advocacy became acute after the recent disruption of Influitive. Yet while the changes caused angst, they also spurred innovation. Marketers have plenty of options, and some categories overlap as vendors extend into adjacent capabilities and address different use cases. Here are my takeaways from the research.
Moving From Random Acts To Strategic Advocacy Requires The Ability To Scale
Advocate management and activation and customer content generation were the two categories customer marketers consistently called out for current and planned investment. That’s not a coincidence: B2B companies need to grow their advocate armies, which is one of the benefits of advocate management. They need to create substantial amounts of content to activate customer stories, which is a primary use case for customer content generation. Both categories offer the ability to scale.
Example: Like the tree that falls in the forest, a customer success story can only influence buyers if that story reaches their ears (or screens). Creating content in consumable formats can be labor-intensive, especially in cases where the team might not have the skill sets or bandwidth to build quality testimonial videos or compelling event presentations. The customer content generation category benefits from generative AI and is the only one about which several practitioners, unprompted, said they could not live without.
Next step: Identify your ongoing content needs as well as the gaps you could fill with help. Then investigate some of the options to ease the burden.
Work Smarter With What’s In Place
Several of the technologies marketers use to manage advocacy programs, such as social suites and revenue enablement platforms, aren’t advocacy-first. But customer marketers absolutely benefit — which means that customers benefit — from extending the use of these solutions. When the vendor is already in place but a different function owns that relationship, better collaboration is the key.
Example: Social suites can identify potential customer storytellers and activate customers and even employees to extend reach by sharing customer success stories. The practitioners I spoke to sheepishly admitted that they wish they did a better job at collaborating with their PR or brand team on this.
Next step: Just ask! Speak to your colleagues and explore how your vendor supports advocacy use cases.
Be Willing To Break Up
There’s respect for the current state, and then there’s clinging to “how it’s always been done.” Experimentation makes sense when resources are abundant or a decision-maker expresses keen interest in a vendor. Loyalty is understandable if a solution is part of the fabric of your current process or a vendor has been a great partner. But categories mature and stagnate, and business value is fluid. This Tech Tide showed that practitioners are willing to reprioritize, even if letting go is a bit painful.
Example: For some programs, the authenticity of user-generated video serves the advocacy mission. For others, the need to plan and curate those videos and the risk of obtaining unusable material erase the perceived benefits. As one practitioner noted, just because someone can self-create a video does not mean that they should.
Next step: Plan an internal assessment for technology that’s due for discussion. If it’s data-supported and intellectually honest, you’ll make the right call.
Forrester clients can read the Tech Tide here.
