‘Advocacy’ is a term bandied about a lot in marketing these days. For some there is a certain level of mystery about what it actually means.

Very simply put: advocacy is engineered, systemised word-of-mouth (WOM).

Where WOM is the organic, informal sharing of information between peers about an event, advocacy is a deliberate, formalised strategy designed by event marketers to actively transform an event’s registrants, speakers and individuals representing sponsors, exhibitors and partners into brand ambassadors.

Event organisers’ staff also fall into the ‘should be advocating’ bucket, but their advocacy carries less weight than the more objective, credible advocacy of customers.

When advocacy is handled with rigour and consistency in creative and technical delivery (as every marketing channel should be), your event brand ambassadors will be successfully activated and leveraged. This is achieved by ensuring they take the right advocacy actions at the right time - sharing with their colleagues, peers and professional networks the specific, relevant and timely information about your upcoming event in a way that creates high levels of attention, engagement and commitment from many more relevant people they’re connected to.

When planned and activated well, advocacy is social proof with exponential reach and impact.

The great news for event organisers is that advocacy can be automated, scaled and measured with digital tools that require a fraction of the effort most event organisers put into their email campaigns.

And when advocacy does its work, you can be sure people pay attention.

Yet for too many event marketers, advocacy is seen as a ‘nice-to-have’ and an ‘if we can get to it’ kind of thing. This is somewhat tragic when we consider how easy and inexpensive it really is in comparison to other channels, and how well it performs.

Your customers’ networks are a goldmine. Their public endorsement of your event is the gold dust.

When a customer says something good about your event to their peers, what is likely to happen?

And when a customer shares these positive messages about your event on LinkedIn, who will see it?

How does this compare to the impact of your own marketing directly pushing messages on ‘unmissable’ features and benefits to the people you can reach via your owned and paid channels?

Advocacy allows you to reach more of the right people with more compelling messages via earned media - complementing your owned and paid channels.

Delegates know other potential delegates. Speakers have audiences in your sector. Sponsors and exhibitors have lists and social media followers full of exactly the people you are trying to reach. When they advocate for your event, they are delivering warm, trusted introductions to audiences you may never otherwise reach or engage effectively.

Earned media via customers is relatively easy to activate for events, so it really should be at the top of every event marketer’s list of ‘urgent and important’ things to pay attention to early in the campaign (at least 3 months out) - and then consistently well managed in the months leading up to the event.

As email performance declines, advocacy is one of the channels you need to start relying on and prioritising

Research conducted by MPG’s event marketing strategists has surfaced a very clear trend: too many event organisers are still too heavily reliant on email marketing, even while it is clear that email campaigns are not delivering what they did even a year ago.

Email deliverability has fallen dramatically, while engagement rates appear low and are almost impossible to reliably measure. You can read more about this in our recent blog on this topic. Email is still an important marketing channel, but it needs to be handled with great care. Your marketers must be using more targeted, personalised campaigns sent to smaller, more relevant email lists.

PPC via Google Ads and Paid Media via LinkedIn Ads have become a critical cornerstone of every event marketing campaign, and to get a decent ROI from these you need to use a specialist digital agency whose campaign managers understand B2B events and event marketing well.

And your event website is of course your most important marketing channel. Your customers have to find and visit your event website to find the information and registration facilities they need to access your event. Your website is the essential destination they need to arrive at and walk through before they reach the final destination you want them to get to - your event! (See MPG’s recent blog on why website optimisation is a commercial priority for event organisers).

When you add advocacy to the right mix of owned and paid media, you’re effectively putting your marketing on steroids. Your advocates will be trusted and believed in a way that no other marketing will.

The business case for investing in advocacy marketing is clear. Now event organisers just need to act.

Engineered and systematic word-of-mouth is in every event organiser’s reach. Every event marketing playbook should include advocacy marketing as an essential and central part of the mix. And success will come from how well it is executed. ‘Execution is everything’.

Gleanin is Team MPG’s favourite advocacy tool for the leading conferences, confexes, and tradeshows we work on. We’d be happy to spend some time sharing with you why it’s our automated advocacy tool of choice and how we can help you use it in the best way - get in touch to request a call.