For too long, customer advocacy has been dismissed as too “relationship-based” to measure. And that misguided perspective has been extended to customer marketing itself – a sort of fuzzy, feel-good function; great for community vibes, but hard to quantify.

But here’s the thing: if you can’t show impact, it’s pretty tough to justify continual investment. And while your execs might love a good customer story or reference call, what they really want is proof that your programs are driving revenue, retention, and growth. That’s the bottom line they care about.

The good news? There are ways to measure customer advocacy and do it in a way that’s aligned with your company’s strategic priorities.

It starts with knowing these three things:

  1. What to measure
  2. Why it matters, and 
  3. How to make the case for your team’s impact across the customer journey.

So, if you’re tired of relying on vanity metrics or struggling to prove ROI, let’s break down the approach that’s worked for me.

Why it’s time to rethink metrics in customer advocacy

Most CMOs and C-suite leaders still focus primarily on demand metrics, something that’s been the norm for over 20 years. 

As customer marketers, that makes it challenging to show our impact, because so much of our work centers on building strong, strategic relationships with customers.

The difficulty is that we often don’t have the data or meaningful metrics to demonstrate the value of what we’re doing. That’s why it’s so important to build programs that are integrated and aligned with other go-to-market functions like demand generation, product marketing, and sales.

By doing that, we can more clearly influence strategic business outcomes. Sometimes that involves integrating tools and technologies, but at a foundational level, it’s about asking how your work supports broader goals, like new business, retention, cross-sell, and upsell, and working backwards from there to measure impact.

Choosing the right metrics for your customer marketing team

It really comes down to what your team is focused on. For most customer marketing teams, the foundational priorities are customer stories, customer references, and building community. As you grow in your role, that scope may expand, but let’s stick with those three core areas for now.

When it comes to community, you can track metrics like membership growth over time and how that community is influencing product adoption or retention. 

You can also look at things like reduced support ticket volume. These aren’t always easy to measure right away, it often requires deeper collaboration with your operations or analytics teams to clearly define what success looks like. 

But if you view community as a foundational part of the customer onboarding and success journey, and work backwards from there, you can start identifying relevant metrics.

For references, it’s a bit more straightforward. If you're using a reference platform, you can look at how your advocates are influencing deal progression. 

Metrics might include the number of active advocates in the program, how often they’re being used in the sales process, and how that’s accelerating pipeline velocity or increasing deal close rates.

When it comes to customer stories, the key is integration. Don’t just publish a case study and track page views, those are vanity metrics. Instead, make sure these stories are embedded into email campaigns, social channels, and, more importantly, used directly by your sellers. 

Whether it’s BDRs or account reps, if they’re using those stories in deal plays, that’s where you can start to draw a direct line to impact. Getting them into the hands of go-to-market campaign teams also helps maximize their reach and utility.

Proving ROI in customer marketing

Proving ROI can be a tricky subject, but it really comes down to what your team is focused on strategically. Some customer marketing teams are dedicated solely to supporting new business and the sales organization. 

But if you can support the entire customer journey, from lead generation through onboarding, retention, and expansion, you’ll be in a much better position to show impact.

It’s about aligning your programs to the company’s broader strategic goals. In my previous role at F5, we had a set of company-wide missions or promises. Our customer marketing programs are intentionally designed to support those specific missions, which helps demonstrate how we’re driving transformation across the organization.

Again, back when I worked at Adobe, we had similar priorities focused on delivering better customer experiences. The goal was to ensure customers were happy, wanted to renew, and were eager to expand their relationship with us. When you align your KPIs and OKRs to those higher-level business objectives, it becomes much easier to connect your efforts to tangible outcomes and prove ROI.

Moving beyond activity-based goals

Whether you use OKRs, KPIs, or something like the SMART framework, the key is to make sure your goals are measurable and tied to impact. Use whatever system helps you and your team clearly demonstrate value. 

But we need to move beyond just tracking activity-based tasks and start thinking about how our work drives meaningful, holistic outcomes.

Early in my career, I received some advice from an executive that’s stuck with me: if you’re working at a publicly traded company, listen closely to what your CEO and CFO share with analysts. 

What they highlight reflects the company’s true strategic priorities. If you can align your customer marketing programs to those themes, you'll be able to show impact much faster.

That mindset has shaped how I approach everything. I’m constantly thinking about how to reimagine what we do and how to increase our impact. 

When teams across the company see customer marketing not just as the group that manages relationships, but as a strategic driver of growth, revenue, retention, and the entire customer lifecycle, that’s when you know you’re doing it right.