Giano Fiore

Introduction:

In September 2023, Nooks was an early stage start up that had just raised it's Series A funding round. The team was growing, revenue had more than doubled in the last year and leadership was making it's first round of key hires.

One of the first initiatives was to grow organic marketing channels on Social Media and Search to prepare for investments into paid advertising. 10K Club was an advocacy program designed to do just that, and the results we're astonishing.
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What is Nooks?

Nooks is an AI-powered parallel dialing software and virtual workspace that allows teams to dial multiple numbers at once using predictive algorithms so they can connect to prospects immediately instead of waiting on the ring tone.

This category has grown significantly since 2020 as more teams are learning the power of parallel and power dialing and seeing 5-10x the results they saw before. Coincidentally, users love implementing Nooks because it helps them get to quota faster and get paid their commission with the same effort.

Thus, Nooks 10K Club was born.

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What is Nooks 10K Club?

10K Club is a quarterly award to celebrate users who have made 10,000 outbound phone calls using the software over a three month period. At it's surface, it's just a simple customer appreciation campaign. However, it was designed to do three thing.

‍Top of Funnel Marketing: Drive users to post about their accomplishment to show their network what they can accomplish as a Nooks customer.

‍Customer retention: Show customer's management team proof of the increased results their sales reps are achieving. ‍

Increase product usage: Drive winner's colleagues to make a push for their chance to win the award.

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Here's 5 tips if you're thinking of doing something similar.

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1. Take advantage of competition

Everybody loves being awarded, especially when it helps them prove to their colleagues that they've accomplished something in their role. More importantly, nobody likes to see their colleague win an award and miss out on their opportunity to showcase their talents.

The key here to come up with an award system that gives your users the ability to show off what they accomplished (using your product) to their colleagues.

If you can provide them that value, they will provide you access to their network.

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2. Give them their assets up front

Many failed customer advocacy campaigns start with a marketer asking users to post about something... and then pretty much end there.

For real results where 10+ users post across multiple platforms, you have to give them everything they need to write their post in five minutes or less.

For this campaign, we designed each individual their very own graphic asset, wrote them a template to post and gave them a Google Doc full of post inspiration. It wasn't easy, but it was worth it.

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3. Focus on relationships

Us marketing folks in B2B tech have the most distant relationship from the customers of anyone on the GTM team. The Sales team is meeting with them multiple times a month during the evaluation phase, then customer success meets with them multiple times during onboarding.

Sometimes, our very first interaction with them is asking them to do something in our benefit. So even though we're busy, the investment we make in getting to know these customers will pay dividends. Try to set time to meet, learn about them, see if there's anything you can do for them.

If done correctly, you'll notice your advocacy programs growing all on their own.

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4. Be their #1 cheerleader

When users are participating in your campaign and making posts, don't expect others to engage if you're not. After all, the success of these campaigns reflect on your ability as a marketer.

Make sure to like, comment, share and brag about your users and how amazing they are on their post.

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5. Track attribution

These campaigns aren't easy. They're time consuming and involve so much relationship building. On top of that, it's hard to attribute revenue directly to a user post.

Our way to do this was to try to limit the competition to two weeks and then measure inbound during that period compared to the previous two weeks.

Example: "To accept your award, please post by next Friday!"

Then to tie it back together, we reported on our lead forms who selected "LinkedIn Posts" for how they heard about us.

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