Getting started with campaigns and the Campaign Manager

Advocacy marketing campaigns help your brand connect with target experts on ExpertVoice and strengthen their knowledge. Campaigns make up your ExpertVoice program and typically have an objective, a target audience, messaging, and a start and end date. These are the components of a campaign.

In the Advocacy Platform, the Campaign Manager is where you can view, create1, and publish campaigns targeting the experts most important to you. With the Campaign Manager, you have visibility into your campaigns and how they perform with your target expert audience.

What are campaigns on ExpertVoice

Campaigns are one of the primary means to engage your audience of experts.

Every campaign on ExpertVoice has these components:

1. An audience - Broadly or narrowly targeted, the cohort of experts on ExpertVoice you want to reach
2. A specific business objective - What you hope to accomplish with your campaign. Brand awareness, a new product launch, or seasonal retail training are examples of business objectives
3. Messaging - How a brand communicates the value of its products in actual words and phrases and also the feelings and emotions associated with what they say
4. A duration - All campaigns have a start date and should align with your yearly advocacy marketing calendar

The campaign card is the main location where your campaign is promoted on ExpertVoice. You can customize the copy and imagery on the card to match your campaign objectives and encourage experts to click on the campaign. 

Campaign cards are presented to experts on your brand page, the ExpertVoice home page (also known as the ExpertVoice feed), and elsewhere on the ExpertVoice platform. They can be found by searching and appearing in dynamic email newsletters and other expert-facing promotions. Different campaign types may show in different places across the ExpertVoice platform, on the web, and the iOS and Android ExpertVoice Apps.

A campaign will only show to its specific target audience of experts, so each expert's experience differs based on their team and brand access.

Campaign Types

Based on your ExpertVoice program objectives and subscription, here are the campaign types available that you can create and manage:

1. Education + Seeding Campaign: Educate experts about your latest products and reward those who pass your lessons.
2. Education Campaign: Provide experts access to lessons about your brand without providing a reward for completing your lessons.
3. Seeding Campaign: Provide experts access to an exclusive discount for your products without requiring any education to unlock the reward.
4. Activity Campaign: Activate your expert community with off-platform activities and track their completion (available with the Community Manager feature).
5. Product Sampling Campaign: Quickly gather expert recommendations and photos from a curated audience to amplify your upcoming product launches or boost your existing products. 
6. Survey Campaign: Gather expert insights and feedback on demand.
7. Challenge Campaign: Challenge experts to demonstrate their knowledge in a gamified, competitive format (available with the Community Manager feature).

Additionally, the award-winning ExpertVoice Studios can create full-service Custom Campaigns to align with your specific goals.

Because experts have 22x more conversations about the brands and products they love than the average consumer, it's essential to launch campaigns with the right experts at the right time to help more consumers make better purchasing decisions. Every time an expert logs into ExpertVoice, they can engage with campaigns and discover something new — whether it's learning about your brand's latest initiative, signing up for your expert community, or ordering a highly recommended product that recently piqued their interest.

Work with ExpertVoice Studios to create campaigns

ExpertVoice Studios can create campaigns or the components of a campaign on your behalf, or you can create these on your own using the Campaign Manager in the Advocacy Platform.

If you would like help creating a campaign from start to finish or a specific campaign component, contact your Customer Success partner at least three weeks in advance of when you would like your campaign to go live.

• Any campaign that ExpertVoice Studios creates for you will show up in the Campaign Manager in the Advocacy Platform after you approve the campaign
• Any campaign component, such as a lesson, that ExpertVoice Studios creates for you will show up in its respective library

How frequently should you publish campaigns

To keep your experts in the know throughout the year, it’s important to align your campaigns and your ExpertVoice program calendar with what’s happening in your organization. Here are a few questions to consider when determining how frequently to publish campaigns on ExpertVoice:

• What are your company goals?
• What types of experts do you want to reach?
• When are your key product launches or updates?
• What are your biggest selling seasons?
• What insights do you want to collect?
• Do you have the time and resources to create campaigns on your own?

With these questions in mind, you can run up to six campaigns simultaneously (not counting any Custom Campaigns created by ExpertVoice Studios) to help meet your program objectives and foster year-round advocacy for your brand and products. 

As you develop your ExpertVoice program strategy, work with your Account Executive to outline roughly when and how many campaigns you would like to launch throughout the year and if you would like to boost their reach with any promotional media. Your Account Executive will provide an example program calendar in your Solution Template to help you schedule upcoming campaigns.

Edit a campaign vs. create a new campaign

If the campaign has been running for more than a few weeks, we recommend that you start a new campaign rather than changing the lesson in the campaign that is currently running. Changing the audience(s), lesson(s) or incentive in your current campaign may introduce uncertainty to the reporting, making it difficult to evaluate your campaign’s overall performance.

Adding or removing lessons to a campaign, or adjusting an incentive, will only affect net-new experts to that campaign. Experts who have previously completed the campaign, including any lessons taken or incentives earned, will not have their experience changed retroactively.

Promote a campaign on ExpertVoice

Promotions help extend the reach of your campaign with the target expert audience. As you develop your ExpertVoice program strategy, work with your Account Executive to outline your promotional plan. There are currently four ways to promote your campaign on ExpertVoice:

On your brand page

Any campaign created and published by your brand or ExpertVoice Studios will automatically publish as a Campaign Card to your brand page.

On the ExpertVoice home and feeds

A brand can have up to six (6) total campaign cards promoted on the main ExpertVoice home page simultaneously. You can only promote campaigns in the feed to the pre-defined target audiences outlined in your Solution Template. If you created a campaign on your own in the Advocacy Platform using one of the pre-defined target audiences, contact your Customer Success Partner after you publish it to ensure that it's added to the appropriate ExpertVoice feed(s). After you make the request, it can take up to two business days for the campaign to be promoted on ExpertVoice.

Merchandised promotional media

When your Customer Success partner publishes your campaign to the feed, the campaign is also eligible to be included in an automated, dynamic ExpertVoice Newsletter emailed to target experts weekly. This newsletter is free for the brand and pulls in information from the brand's campaign card.

Promotional media

A form of communication brands can purchase to reach target experts on ExpertVoice and strengthen the power of their recommendations. A few examples include a homepage banner, brand-dedicated email, or multi-brand Flash Event. Brands that participate in promotional media see a 2x lift on average in site traffic, expert engagements, and orders. We offer limited inventory annually to brands, and placements are first-come, first-serve.