Influitive
INCEPTION AND OUTSET STORY OF THE ORGANIZATION
Since 2010, Influitive has pioneered advocate marketing and built an easy-to-use SaaS platform that enables companies to engage their customers to promote their brand, adopt new product features, and become loyal advocates. Influitive accomplishes this by creating a destination for the customers’ advocates, which includes personalized journeys with advanced targeting, game mechanics, and rewards. Since the inception of the organization, Influitive has collectively recorded more than 100 million acts of advocacy and powered more than $1 billion in ROI value for its customers.
Led by CEO Dan McCall, Influitive is headquartered in Toronto, Canada with employees across North America and Europe. Global brands such as Adobe, Cisco, IBM, Mountain Dew, and SoFi rely on Influitive to help foster collaboration, build trust and deepen relationships with customers for top-line growth and bottom-line profits.
AIMS, VISIONS AND IDEALS OF THE ORGANIZATION
Influitive’s vision is to set the standard for creating engaging digital journeys that drive a positive change. Influitive’s software is the foundation for its customers’ digital experiences to increase engagement, improve relationships, create better outcomes and provide actionable insights.
Influitive has three core values:
- Customer First: Everything said and done is in the eyes of the customer and their best interests. Customer issues and concerns are the top priorities, and their success is the responsibility of every Influitive employee.
- Win as a Team: The greatest results are best achieved through teamwork and diversity of thought. Assume positive intent, insist on the highest standards, and support collective growth.
- Take Ownership: Be held accountable every day to focus and deliver on what’s most important and needed for forwarding progress and resolution. Act as leaders and agents of change.
PORTFOLIO OF SERVICES OFFERED
Influitive’s flagship product is its customer advocacy, community and engagement platform. An industry leader, the Influitive platform gives businesses a better way to mobilize customer advocates by combining powerful tools and expert services and leveraging the authentic voice of its customers to drive growth.
Influitive’s core platform comes in two packages: Customer Advocacy and Digital Community. The customer advocacy package is ideal for mobilizing customers to drive social proof and gather vital feedback to efficiently grow, while Digital Community helps businesses mobilize and engage all customers in a community throughout their lifecycle to enhance their lifetime value and experiences.
Influitive also offers Virtual EventHub™, a fast and easy way to create a live digital event for unlimited attendees. This all-in-one virtual event platform contains the same features and functionality as Influitive’s core platform, and customers with existing Influitive communities can either extend their existing hub to support a virtual event or create a separate event-specific hub that seamlessly connects to their community hub.
Influitive practice leaders and consultants offer a wide variety of services to help customers plan, design, implement and maintain their customer community. Packaged and a la carte services include program strategy, discussion, moderation, content development, graphic design, data analytics, project management, and administrator training.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE TECHNOLOGICAL SECTOR OF THE ECONOMY
At its inception, Influitive pioneered advocate marketing and has been a long-time leader in customer advocacy software. In recent years, Influitive has become a leader in online community management and a major player in customer engagement.
Every part of Influitive’s platform is targetable—including all the zero-party data it captures through member activities and feedback. This enables brands to create personalized experiences and unique journeys at scale that generate extreme customer and channel partner engagement. The platform’s four unique and core features are:
- Targeting: Influitive’s powerful segmentation engine lets you target content and activities based on all kinds of criteria. The platform allows you to build guided customer journeys for groupings like geography, business function, management level, product usage, NPS score, and much more.
- Personalization: Its scalable platform lets you personalize every aspect of what members see and do in your Influitive-powered hub, providing a fulfilling experience based on each individual’s needs, interests and behaviors. Plus, their team of experts is always reachable to lend a hand.
- Gamification: Influitive’s platform features best-in-class gamification that uses friendly competition, points, and badges to create authentic and effective customer engagement. It’s a sure-fire way to drive interaction, collaboration, awareness and learning.
- Rewards: Rewards go beyond catalogs and swag. They go deep into your brand and what you stand for. They help you bring together what your customer’s value and are motivated by leveraging proven methodologies from both B2C and B2B rewards/loyalty programs.
NOTABLE AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS
For 14 consecutive quarters, Influitive has been a G2 leader in Customer Advocacy and Online Community Management and has been recognized as a leader in Community software by its customers on TrustRadius, Gartner Digital Markets and Featured Customers.
In 2021, Influitive was recognized as one of the Top 100 Software Companies of 2021 by The Software Report and became Great Place to Work-Certified™ in Canada.
EFFECT OF THE PANDEMIC AND THE CHANGES IN THE MARKET
The pandemic significantly impacted the tech market in Canada, where organizations industry-wide needed to consider cutting software from their martech stack. Amongst their customer base of customer advocacy and marketing managers, Influitive saw four consistent trends:
- A significant re-prioritization on long-term customer engagement
- Increased focus on educational resources and nurturing customers
- A need to give customers a break with a bit of fun content like trivia, pop culture quizzes and recipes to try
- Increased interest from multiple business units and c-suite executives
At their 2020 B2B Summit, Forrester said that “customer-obsessed companies will prioritize customer engagement over net new acquisition to survive the COVID-19-induced downturn and that tech investment will follow to scale those early CX successes.” Influitive worked closely with its customers and prospective customers who needed a way to engage virtually with their customers and employees. Further, many Influitive customers experienced hardship with the cancellation of in-person events and conferences. With experience in event services and the right technology, Influitive offered clients its Virtual EventHub platform for free along with strategy sessions to help them get up and running quickly.
THE COMPANY’S VIEWS ON THE POST-PANDEMIC MARKET
The industry trend is clear and indisputable: Customer’s want omni-channel, personalized experiences from their vendors and business partners. Customers expect every interaction to be guided by “what came before” and there are enough companies that have successfully made this digital transformation that disconnected experiences have become an enrager.
The post-pandemic market has not only accelerated this trend, but it has also rebalanced marketing’s focus and budget on attracting new customers and mobilizing customers into advocates. The future will have customer engagement as a core business strategy that encompasses the entire lifecycle journey: from prospect to customer to loyalist and then finally to advocate.
From onboarding to advocacy and everything in between, Influitive allows customer-obsessed companies to serve up personalized experiences, supercharge activities across multiple channels and use cases, allow for branded sub-communities, and deliver next-generation gamification to audiences wherever they are online.
As the worlds of customer advocacy, loyalty, community and engagement collide, Influitive is in a unique position to bring those worlds together and support the customer marketing, customer success, and customer experience departments who are working together to make it happen.
ADVICE TO BUDDING ENTREPRENEURS IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL SECTOR
No matter what technology you are trying to bring to market, it matters not what you think, but how you make others think of you. Listen intently to and engage frequently with your customers—whether they are detractors or promoters—and take action to address their concerns or desires. In doing so, your customers will turn into loyal advocates and become your best (and most cost-effective) marketing and sales weapon to attract new customers and ignite growth.
