Advocate marketing involves managing a company's advocates to achieve business objectives, such as revenue growth or increased demand generation. It's a simple but powerful concept: as the power and influence of word of mouth grows in buying processes, B2B companies of all sizes, industries and niches need to proactively develop and manage their most important marketing asset - their happy customers and fans.

As you plan, build and execute on your own advocate marketing program, these five elements will be critical to its success:

1. Tying advocate marketing to your business objectives

Advocate marketing can serve a variety of business objectives, so it's important to tie your program to revenue achievement and specific sales and marketing tactics, such as lead generation, pipeline development and sales cycle acceleration.

You may also want to consider how your advocate marketing program can support other objectives, such as customer satisfaction, product marketing and product development.

2. Understanding who your advocates are and what motivates them

Customers are often a company's most important and influential type of advocate. They come in different shapes and sizes, and are seeking different experiences as advocates. It's essential to segment your advocates to align their interests with the right types of advocate activities.

You also need to understand other types of advocates, such as employees, partners, investors and influencers. These groups can contribute to your marketing and sales efforts by promoting your brand and content, referring new business and sharing their positive experiences with your business.

3. Designing an advocate marketing program that scales

Once it's up and running, a successful advocate marketing program will include hundreds - possibly thousands - of advocates. As you build your own program, you should carefully consider how yours will be managed, and how you can make the process more scalable, predictable and efficient. These are just some of the reasons marketers have started moving away from managing their advocate programs through email, spreadsheets or CRM applications in favor of all-in-one platforms built specifically to manage B2B advocate marketing programs.

4. Building engaging advocacy campaigns

Advocate marketing campaigns are how you engage with advocates. Campaigns consist of an "ask" where you ask your advocates to do something, such as writing a review of your product, and the "response" where the advocate responds by writing the review. Like any marketing campaign, the style, tone and creativity of these campaigns will greatly determine engagement and results.

The success of your advocate marketing program may also depend on your ability to "nurture" your advocates. In other words, it's probably not the best idea to jump right in with large asks that may turn off your advocates - start smaller, easier to complete asks and then build up to those larger campaigns.

5. Measuring and optimizing your advocate marketing program

Like most marketing programs, advocate marketing should be measured. Focus on strategic metrics that relate to core business objectives, like customer referrals, references and reviews. Just as important are operational metrics, like advocate and campaign engagement rate, and advocate growth and churn. Finally, use this data to optimize your advocate recruiting and engagement efforts.