I recently read Jure Klepic’s post “Advocates or Influencers — Which Are More Important to Your Brand Marketing Success?”, and I’ve been noticing lots of confusion lately between advocate and influencer marketing. It’s not without warrant. For example, this post titled “Who Does Influencer Marketing Best” actually speaks more to what I would call advocate marketing campaigns and platforms.
Ever since Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of influencers in his 2000 book, The Tipping Point, companies have been obsessed with the idea that if they can get their product to a select group of connected, vocal consumers, it will be only a matter of time before it goes viral.
With the display ad model failing there is no surprise advocate and influencer marketing get all the buzz, and I personally don’t think one is more important than the other. Actually, a healthy combination between the two can lead to some very powerful results. But it’s important to understand the limits of what each can or cannot do.
Here are three things to keep in mind about advocate marketing:
1. It Won’t Get You Massive Reach
Looking at the numbers, advocates won’t have reach that extends as far as an influencer’s. Reach isn’t everything (it’s not even most things), but to garner the attention of a wider breadth of audiences through advocates (with arguably equivalent or less sway with that audience), you have to deploy multitudes more than with influencers.
Again, it’s not a bad approach, but it does require greater scale to be as effective.
2. True Topic Authority is Limited
Trust is important; I trust my friends. But when I’m looking to buy a new snowboard, none of my friends have a topic authority even close to the authority that Jeremy Jones has in the space.
3. Lower Resonance / Impact
Advocates may or may not have a blog while almost all influencers do. If they do have one, their audience is small, relative to an influencer’s. That means when they blog something from a site with little or no steadfast traffic SEO or keyword optimization, it doesn’t hold a lot of power to stay afloat above other content firing off at rapid-speed. With a small audience in place and ready to “catch” it right when it comes out, its propagation half-life is more rapid.
In other words, it fizzles faster, making high-value advocate-sourced evergreen content marketing an anomaly.
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Is there value in advocates? Of course. Absolutely. And including them as part of a marketing strategy can be extremely beneficial. But there is a difference in what you can get from advocate vs. influencer outreach.