Jackie Shydlowski, InsightSquaredMarketers often receive accolades for creative campaigns that drive publicity (and hopefully results, too).

While garnering general interest from your audience is crucial from an acquisition standpoint, B2B marketers can also do a lot on the retention front.

That’s why Influitive likes to recognize B2B marketers who engage and mobilize their customers, partners and fans (AKA their advocates) to improve their marketing campaigns and results.

That’s why we started The Best Advocate Marketing Awards (also called The BAMMIES). These awards recognize customer marketers who are using the enthusiasm of their advocates to grow in 10 key categories. (See last year’s award winners here.)

The entry deadline for this year’s awards is January 29, 2016. If your customers love your marketing initiatives, we want to hear from you! Trust us: entering is really simple.

Wondering why you should enter? Here’s how three past winners felt when they received their Best Advocate Marketing Award, and some of the benefits you could experience if you took one home.

1. Building your personal brand

lizPLiz Pedro, Director of Customer Success Marketing at Mitel, and 2015 Advocate Marketer of the Year Award winner, created Mitel Champions, which was one of the largest B2B customer, employee and partner advocate marketing programs in the world.

Under Liz’s leadership, the Mitel Champions program became the vehicle for educating, aligning and mobilizing employees across 80 global offices to launch Mitel’s new brand in October 2014. Building on that success, she then engaged hundreds of partners and customers through the program as well. (Learn more by reading this case study.)

“Winning a BAMMIE was one of the highlights of my career! I worked very hard to build Mitel Champions and felt like winning the award validated the good work I had done. I felt very honored to win, especially against some of the competition!” says Liz.

Earning a Best Advocate Marketing Award can help you build your personal brand and confidence. Liz has also received several other awards and honors, including a Marketing Technologist Direct Marketing News Marketing & Tech Innovation Award and a finalist spot in the Forrester Groundswell Awards for Social Reach Marketing—which is quite an impressive resume!

2. Getting noticed internally

Michael_BeahmIn May 2014, Michael Beahm become Blackbaud’s first Customer Advocate Marketing Manager. He built Blackbaud Champions, an advocate marketing program designed to delight customers and help them succeed.

By incorporating a fun customer referral contest into the program, he generated $213,000 in new pipeline for Blackbaud, blowing past their referral targets for the entire year within a few short months—and earning himself the 2015 Best Referral Program Award.

“It felt very gratifying and professionally rewarding,” says Michael of winning. “I was ecstatic and immediately shared the great news with my marketing colleagues!”

Today, Michael is a Senior Marketing Manager at Blackbaud, and will soon be managing a growing team focused on customer advocacy. Winning awards for your customer engagement efforts can lead to internal accolades and rewards—including career advancement opportunities.

3. Deepening customer relationships

JAckie Shydlowski insightsqauredWinning an award doesn’t have to only be about personal or professional gain.

Jackie Shydlowski, Advocate and Digital Marketing at InsightSquared, used a series of fun and educational challenges in InsightSquared’s advocate marketing program, The Square, to drive their customers to write more than 100+ reviews across several websites.

So, when she received the Best Product Review Campaign Award, she knew she should share the submission with her customers and thank them for their help.

“We were thrilled to win the BAMMIE for best product review campaign, but knew we had some special people to thank,” says Jackie. “After the event, we reached out to all reviewers to share our celebration and thank them for their unwavering support. We wouldn’t be where we were without them, and wanted to make sure they knew how grateful we were.”

Building awareness for your win with your customers will make them feel a personal connection to you and your brand—which could help you win the BAMMIES next year.

Learn more about entering the Best Advocate Marketing Awards here.

Get inspired by the 2015 BAMMIES winners stories

Read these 10 award-winning advocate marketing success stories to learn how your brand can work with your advocates to generate more referrals, produce high-quality content, create better customer experiences, engage audiences on social media and more.

Download the free eBook now