The Advocacy Channel: A Customer Marketing Podcast

One of the best episodes yet! Will Fraser does a fantastic job digging into Mal Chia’s expertise, uncovering smart and practical strategies for customer referrals, ambassador programs, and performance marketing. I loved the discussion on finding the right balance between incentives and authenticity—it’s a must-listen for any brand looking to grow through advocacy. Engaging, insightful, and full of real-world examples!

Love this podcast and the latest episode on trust-based marketing. It was great to reflect on the history of advertising/marketing - and fast forward to the way consumers want to learn about brands today. The emphasis on partnerships, and specifically customer referral partnerships, really resonated with me and the way I shop. A very informative show that covers highly relevant topics!

I’ll be honest — even though I’m a B2B marketer I usually stay pretty far away from business or marketing podcasts. But I spend a lot of time thinking about how to tell B2B customer stories well, so I was intrigued by the episode “What makes a successful SaaS case study?” I’m glad I gave it a listen, because it was great! Just a thoughtful discussion peppered with helpful insights, and not once did I feel like anyone was trying to sell me anything. I particularly appreciated Emily’s thoughts around metrics. The most applicable bit for me was the suggestion to ask clients for shareable metrics BEFORE the interview. I usually ask during and then follow up after. But it makes a lot of sense to prime your client to be thinking about key metrics they can share even before you sit down with them. Also, kudos to Will for asking good questions and then staying out of the way while his guest shared her expertise — that’s the mark of a great interviewer, IMO. I don’t review a lot of podcasts, but I thought this was a really good one and I wanted to say “well done!”

Listening to the Scaling E-commerce growth provided an insightful conversation with Mal Chia. Mal discusses his history with the advocate channel which he increasingly refers back to the idea of Trust. Trust is the basis for why people will buy your product. As Mal mentioned, “If I tell you I am great, you may or may not believe me. But if someone else tells you I’m great, you’re much more inclined to believe them.” This also suggests that the value of the customer through these channels are increasingly valuable to a brand compared to customer acquired through other channels. Mal also delves into optimization of the ambassador channel, where maximizing the reward doesn’t necessarily mean that the customer drives the behavior you’re looking for. I also think Mal has a true objective view of influencers and how to acquire customers effectively. He validates by testing to see where influencers are vs customer are. It showed that there are influencers with small, loyal followers with high engagements can actually be much more effective than the larger influencers. Community matters to people, rather than blindly following to the largest influencers with the most maximized amount of followers. Community leaders are important because they tend to be much more influential over their audiences/clients. I believe ultimately Mal’s ability to use Impact.com’s tools to more effectively test out his theories, strategize dynamically, and build custom rewards has become a net positive for the future of ambassadorship programs, your traditional give/get setups.