The Digital Marketing Podcast · Daniel Rowles and Ciaran Rogers

Influencers Vs. Advocates - Building Brand Advocacy

·37 min·2 clips

A little old lady in Manchester influenced a chain reaction that brought in other advocates.

Kieran opens by reacting to the GEO chatter, and the team uses that as an entry point into the bigger topic. The episode starts with a simple distinction between influencers and advocates. Influencers are treated as people who can reach an audience, while the advocates are the ones whose support feels more earned and genuine. The hosts also draw a line between classic lifestyle influencer culture and creators who make original work. That matters because the episode is really about real support, not just reach. The discussion moves fast from definitions to the question of how brands get actual people to speak for them. There is a clear sense that advocacy has to feel authentic or it will not hold. From there, the conversation turns to brand sentiment. The hosts argue that positive sentiment matters because large language models pull from many sources when they generate answers. They also point to share of voice as part of the picture. If more people are talking about a brand in useful ways, that brand is more likely to matter in the new search environment. The episode does not pretend the mechanics are settled. Instead, it treats GEO as a moving target that marketers need to watch closely. That leads into a critique of review platforms and their promises. The hosts question whether it makes sense to lean on systems that claim to help rankings while the search landscape keeps shifting. They note that people are already moving from traditional search toward asking AI tools about companies. The logic of reputation management changes when answers come from multiple sources at once. The conversation then widens to traditional PR. The hosts make the case that media coverage still matters and can be more powerful than many brands assume. They argue that getting a large audience through a traditional channel can be huge. That sits alongside a practical reminder that negative press or negative comments can be outweighed by enough genuine positive signal. The episode closes by tying PR, SEO, and GEO together. The point is that these channels now feed the same reputation layer, and brands should treat that connection seriously.

As heard by us

A practical case for making brand reputation visible across reviews, PR, and AI answers.

The episode makes a straightforward case that brand advocacy is not a soft marketing concept, but a real business lever. It draws a useful line between influencers, creators, and actual advocates, then connects that distinction to GEO and the way brand sentiment and share of…

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