Ah yes, content. The butter to the bread that is an advocacy marketing program. After all, you can recruit as many fans as you want into your advocacy marketing program, but without any content to share, they might as well be a hose in a rainstorm. Useless. Content marketing (whether it’s user-generated or brand generated) is what gives your advocacy marketing efforts life. If you don’t give your fans content, then they have nothing to share to their social profiles. No shares means no engagements or awareness for you. How you determine what to share (and how much of it to share) is known as your advocacy content strategy. The stronger your content strategy, the greater your earned media value and program ROI. Ready to take your advocacy content strategy to the next level? Here are 4 content marketing tips to help supercharge your advocacy marketing program!

Improving Your Advocacy Program’s Content Strategy

1) Take an Audit of Your Strongest Performing Content Across All Channels

Sure, you could start by sharing every single piece of content you create through your advocacy marketing program, but as a best practice, we advise against this approach. An effective content strategy is built on consistent quality. The more consistent you are with sharing quality content, the more valuable your content becomes to your Superfans. The greater your advocates value your content, the more likely they are to open your emails and share your content with their friends and family. It’s a cycle.

To find great content, take a gander at your analytics. Are some blog posts responsible for a bulk of your site traffic? What about on your social channels – are there certain content pieces that regularly receive more engagement? In your evaluation, focus not only on the specific pieces of content that performed well but also the topics of that high-performing content.

Build your advocacy content strategy around these high-performing topics.

2) Produce A Variety of Content Types

By all means, have your advocates share blog posts. Just don’t have your advocates ONLY share blog posts. Every one of your Superfans has their own preference for what type of content they prefer. Even more important, each one of the friends and family they are connected to on social media also has their preference.

A strong advocacy content strategy incorporates content of all types including:

• Videos
• Images
• Articles
• Podcasts
• 3rd Party Posts

3) Incorporate User-Generated Content

We’ve talked before about the power of user-generated content (UGC). Make no mistakes about it, when it comes to creating content that performs, your advocates hold an immense power: UGC posts show a 28% higher engagement rate than standard brand content on social media. UGC posts are also twice as likely to be shared when compared to a brand post.

Take advantage of all this UGC power by ensuring your advocacy content strategy defines opportunities for both soliciting the creation and distribution of UGC. In a recent study, more than 50% of consumers stated that they wanted a brand to tell them what type of content to create and share. Yet only 16% of brands have a system in place to effectively initiate and manage UGC – so be sure to give your advocates direction on what type of UGC you want them to create.

4) Have A Goal in Place

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there? It’s a cliché for a reason. Whether your measurement of success is earned media value, program size, or Ecommerce sales, give your plan some accountability by tying it to the KPI of your choice.

Having the goal in place not only helps you define program success to key stakeholders (and yourself); it also gives you a roadmap for the type of content you need to create.

Aiming for more engagements on social? Ensure you’re sharing content at the optimum frequency.

Want to drive more sales? Create content that drops more people into the top of your sales funnel and onto your remarketing lists.

Looking to generate more UGC to support your other marketing initiatives? Then create more opportunities to get your advocates into the game. SocialToaster makes this easy with our suite of UGC- tools including:

• Instagram Contest Management
• Built-In Survey Creation
• Fun Quizzes
• And more!

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If you’re only using your advocacy marketing program to share your latest blog posts then you’re leaving money on the table! Ensure you have an advocacy content strategy in place that identifies the type of content you need to be sharing and what your overall advocacy goals are.

Ready to get started enhancing your advocacy content strategy? Schedule a call with one of our advocacy experts today.