Co-creating authority with advocacy marketing
I believe Advocacy Marketing deserves renewed attention.
What do I mean by this term? Marketing that uses authoritative, independent advocates to reinforce or validate your corporate messages and build trust in your brand. (Ideally, while they’re doing that for you, you’re doing the same for them - a symmetry of interests. That’s the most reliable path to progress.)
This marketing model is well-suited to C-suite, policy, and specialist B2B environments. It’s Influencer Marketing for decision-makers: grounded in authority, affinity, and shared expertise. And with LLM responses increasingly shaped by trust signals, it’s a hugely important tactic for marketers to deploy now and going forward.
It comes under the micro-marketing umbrella, and I intend to talk a lot in the year ahead about the power of micro-marketing: high-impact approaches that engage the authoritative few, versus broad-brush methods that are too diluted for brands targeting senior decision makers.
That said, I think ‘broad-brush’ is too diluted for any brand these days. AI is enabling micro-influencer marketing for every demographic. Unilever’s CEO, Fernando Fernandez, recently announced the company will invest up to 50% of media spend into influencer and creator strategies, a more than twentyfold increase, with AI automating many stages in the brand–influencer transaction.
Back to decision-maker settings. At this end of micro-marketing, influence comes from intellectual affinity. We can think of it as an informal take on peer-reviewed research. Key opinion leaders (‘KOLs’) co-create with a brand’s subject matter expert because they appreciate being placed in the ‘peer reviewer’ position. They value opportunities to contribute genuinely to a meaningful narrative. And they also value visibility, as we all have to these days.
It’s not transactional (although a transaction of sorts will likely take place). It’s an endorsement. It’s elevating - bringing more authority to the discussion, and leaving room for varied points of view. (Even better. Far more interesting.)
What does advocacy marketing look like in practice?
A co-authored article. (I recently published one with a collaborator called Andrew Niccols here )
A magazine comprised of insightful op-eds like this publication, www.viewson.ag, which we had the joy of creating for Corteva.
A dual-branded white paper or a three-way discussion over a podcast
Since launching Casey Wishart, I have championed the idea that marketers targeting decision makers should somehow borrow from Influencer Marketing but it has taken us time to define what that looks like.
I’m clear now: it’s Advocacy Marketing: Influencer Marketing redefined for the KOL space. Co-creating authority.
Brands have been doing it instinctively for decades. With greater intent, consideration, and tailoring for the LLM-shaped landscape, we can help them do it far more powerfully, at scale.
