Best Customer Advocacy & Community Platforms

In my experience, I’d say the key features are:

• Advocacy Campaigns: Create and manage campaigns to encourage customer testimonials, reviews, and referrals.
• Community Engagement: Forums, discussion boards, and social media integration to keep the conversation going.
• Gamification: Points, badges, and leaderboards to make participation fun and rewarding.
• Analytics: Track engagement, measure ROI, and understand what’s working.

The main benefits, if you can unlock them with the technology (a big if), are:

• Boosted Brand Loyalty: Happy customers stick around and buy more.
• Increased Referrals: Your customers do the marketing for you.
• Enhanced Customer Insights: Get to know your customers better.
• Stronger Community: Build a tribe of brand advocates.

Who uses it? Typically, it’s owned and run by CMA (customer marketing & advocacy).

The users tend to be a mix of marketing teams, customer success managers, and community managers.

Basically, anyone who wants to leverage customer love to drive growth.

Implementing it? It’s a bit of a journey.

You’ll need buy-in from different teams, some initial setup to customize the platform, and ongoing management and resources — lots of rewards — to keep the community engaged.

Each platform has its own flavor.

Influitive is known for gamification and engagement with customer advocates (typically manager-level and below; director-level and above tend not to spend time logging in to an advocacy platform). Base is a fast follower of Influitive (read: attempting to do something similar). SlapFive excels in capturing and showcasing customer stories. Orca Customer Marketing is customer reference management software (and a native Salesforce app).

It’s all about what fits your needs best.

Cost? It varies, but it’s usually on the higher end.

These solutions are generally geared toward the mid-market and enterprise (as there aren’t too many SMBs with a customer marketing function.)

Expect five or six-figure annual subscription fees.

I was a marketer at Influitive for a year.

During that time, I got to know the Customer Advocacy and community Platforms well. I saw firsthand how Influitive used Influitive for its customer advocacy program.

Since then, I’ve followed the space closely, as my specialty in software user reviews is closely aligned with customer marketing and advocacy.