Advocates are fans, evangelists stimulators whereas influencers are neutral
Although advocates, evangelists and influencers will create awareness and are future looking people, their roles, actions and drivers are quite different.
Still in marketing and sales their roles are confused with each other.
Advocates
Advocates will defend a brand as if it was their own company or product.
Just like fans of rock and movie stars.
Advocates don’t have gained respect or are positioned in a special place to influence the decision makers.
Advocates will praise the company or products during work and after hours. They consider the brand as a part of their life or even way of living. The advocate is not paid by the company and will spread the message freely.
Advocates are not always rational as emotions play a part of their story, actions and life.
Advocates can promote multiple brands each from a different product segment.
Evangelists
Evangelists are marketers that are paid by the company for distribution and evangelizing the brand-message of the product or company both externally and internally. Evangelists need to stimulate other people to keep on going for the good cause or to make people believe in the future of the brand.
An evangelist is expected to tell the world about the brand both during work and after hours. However as he is being paid by the company as an employee, he will not have the same fierceness as the advocate.
Evangelists are single brand or single company.
Influencers
Influencers are people that have gained respect and trust from the decision makers and have a different status than most other employees in a company.
They should be unbiased and rational.
Influencers are multi brand and multi-company.
The rewards for advocates, evangelists and influencers
Evangelists are recruited and work as employees in a company.
Influencers are mostly technocrats that will never take a decision themselves, but will present the advantages, disadvantages, benefits and drawbacks of a brand or product – and they are being paid to do so by the purchasing company.
Advocates are almost lunatics as they promote and market a brand or product for free as there is no direct benefit for them. Their drive is social respect or social influence.
How to motivate ?
Evangelists are motivated as you pay them to evangelize the world (or the market) for a company. Still they need the necessary information, facts and know the vision of the company in order to be able to stimulate the others.
Influencers will search for facts, testimonies and references and use their intelligence to come to a conclusion or overview. Marketers can influence them by providing the required information in a organized, neat and clean communication. Some exploration might be imposed in order not to make their task to easy.
Advocates are people who are convinced of the benefits and advantages over other brands or solutions for many different reasons that can also include passion and non-rational reasoning. Hence the appropriate marketing messages are needed, where a kind of exclusivity can ignite the motivation to become an advocate.
Content marketing
It is clear that content marketing plays an important role in influencing or motivating advocates, evangelists and influencers.
- Advocates will re-distribute and hype your content.
- Evangelists will repackage your content to motivate.
- Influencers will summarize and extract the important suiting fact or features from your content in order to make it useful and understandable for the decision makers.
Just make sure these people can find your content – preferably online.
You have to generate interest to get customers.
Content marketing is important as it reaches further and can:
- Bring you advocates
- Feed your evangelists
- Win influencers.
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I found your take on this subject interesting. Actually, here are the players that I see in B2B decisions. I think, in this case, that an influencer can also be an advocate.
– Decision-makers — Decision-makers can be CEOs, CFOs, Executive VPs, department heads, purchasing managers and others. These decision-makers may not actually use the product or service being considered, but have a strong interest in the bottom-line benefit(s) it promises to deliver.
–Influencers — Influencers are the individuals at many levels of the company who have a problem your product can solve. They have an active influence on the purchasing decision.
– Stakeholders — Stakeholders have little or no say in the purchase decision but are acutely affected by it. For example, the decision to contract for an 800# and put it on all marketing materials may not involve the telemarketing manager. But it’s this manager’s staff who has to answer the phones.
– Preventers — These individuals have the authority to say “no” to a purchase, but may not be actively involved in any other part of the buying process. For instance, if the VP of Sales wants a specific CRM solution, the CIO could squash the request because this particular software is incompatible with the company’s current enterprise system.
Thanks Susan Fantle for your reply and your additional insight and analysis of decision-makers, influencers, stakeholders and preventers.
In some cases the preventers are the most difficult as they can popup at the end of the sales cycle and kill the deal.
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Interesting article,utilizing the roles of these three(advocates,evangelist, influencers)contributes to the success of marketing and sales efforts.And as what most us believed, “content is king”.