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“Up to 90% of [marketing] spend goes to advertising and retail promotions. Yet the single most powerful impetus to buy is often someone else’s advocacy.” – David C. Edelman, Principal, McKinsey & Company, in Harvard Business Review”
Marketers are spending money in all the wrong places! To which we say…
Location: Fort Mason Center, San Francisco
Date: June 12-13
Hosted by: The Pulse Network
The Inbound Marketing Summit is a must-attend conference for digital, social and mobile marketers. With a unique mix of inspirational speakers including Kare Anderson, Rick Bakas, Chris Brogan, Laura Fitton, and Tim Hayden, industry watchers and experts like Allen Bonde, Jim Ewel, Esteban Kolsky, Scott Liewehr, Sameer Patel, and Paul Taylor, cutting edge content and real-world case studies, IMS is where innovative marketing professionals meet up, participate in sessions and network with their peers.
Zuberance is one of the sponsors of the conference and our Founder/CEO, Rob Fuggetta, will be hosting a book signing for his new book, “Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force.” He will also be speaking on the panel, “Fan Marketing Tools for Facebook and Beyond,” with the CEO’s of Argyle Social and Twylah.
We hope you’ll join us!
According to a recent IBM study, Customer Advcocacy is the #1 priority for CMO’s worldwide. As more and more brands begin to create a brand advocacy strategy, it’s important to consider these five best practices.
1. Identify Advocates using multiple touch points. If you want to build your brand army, you should be identifying Advocates every which way. Plot our your customer experience and wherever your customers touch your product, service, or brand, ask “How likely are you to recommend us to your friends?” Place this question on your website, in emails, on social channels, in-product, etc.
2. Give Advocates lots of ways to recommend. Brand Advocates like to spread the love in various ways. Some are active content creators; some are avid sharers. Give Advocates the opportunity to write reviews, rate products, create testimonials, share offers, whitepapers, and other content, answer prospect’s questions, and more.
3. Leverage Advocate content smartly. Advocate-generated content is pure digital gold. Lauren McCadney, Senior Social Media Manager for CDW, says that this content is better than any copywriter could write. Take advantage of your Advocates’ enthusiasm and place their content on your website and product pages, integrate it with email marketing campaigns, use it in advertising, and more.
4. Create an ongoing advocacy program, not a campaign. Advocacy should not be considered a one-off campaign. It’s an ongoing strategy and that builds over time and strengthens the brand-Advocate relationship. Advocates can support and amplify many of your marketing initiatives such as product launches, company announcements, community membership, etc. They’re even willing to give you feedback on new products, defend you from detractors, and answer prospects’ questions on your behalf.
5. Don’t pay or coach Advocates. Keep recommendations for your brand authentic and genuine. Giving customers incentives taints their recommendations and is just plain lame. If your company makes great products, there’s no need to waste precious marketing dollars on inauthentic advocacy.
To read about brand advocacy success stories, download “Turning Your Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force.”
Do you have any best practices to add? Let us know by leaving a comment!
Kim Johnston, VP of Marketing for Parallels, a desktop virtualization software company and also a Zuberance customer, was featured in BtoB Magazine today. In her conversation with CMO Close-Up, she discussed how the company is taking advantage of the trend of more Apple products moving into the enterprise, as well as how her experience at Symantec Corp. influenced her current approach.
The interview also highlighted the success Parallels has seen in energizing their Brand Advocates.
“Social for us is very two-way. We learn a lot from them, but it’s also a vehicle that we offer back out. In terms of customer advocacy, we turned on an advocacy program a couple of months ago through an agency called Zuberance. That program yielded well over 1,000 reviews, where business customers in their own words are talking about the impact that Parallels Desktop for Mac has had on their businesses. They’re not hesitating to share that with one another, too. The dialogue is so rich that the customers are sharing with one another. It’s been really nice to see that authentic word-of-mouth marketing is working and doing quite well,” says Kim Johnston.
Read the full BtoB “CMO Close-Up” here.
Kim Johnston was a guest speaker in a recent webinar, “How Box, AVG, and Parallels are Leveraging Customer Advocates to Drive Sales.” Click here to watch now.
Twitter Pumps Up Discovery Feature with Social Signals – CNET
Twitter’s “Discover” feature is getting more dialed in to users’ preferences, a blog post by Twitter Vice President Satya Patel announced this morning. The post says the feature will pay attention to “additional personalization signals” to figure out which stories to display, instead of just showing users what’s trending.
Facebook Sets IPO Date For May 18: Report – Forbes
Facebook has set a planned date for its initial public offering of May 18, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter.” The social networking giant is expected to start its roadshow on Monday to pitch the company to potential Wall Street investors, the Journal reports.
79% of Marketers Plan to Increase Spend on Social Media Marketing – eMarketer
As marketers spread their time and resources across digital, social media is becoming a bigger piece of the puzzle. Looking at spending on advertising and marketing tactics, 79% of US marketing professionals said they plan to increase spending on social media marketing or ads in the next 12 months, with mobile and tablet spending not far behind, at 75% and 66%, respectively, as the next areas that will see budget growth.
Report: Cover Images Draw Eyeballs on Facebook Timeline Pages – AllFacebook
Eye-tracking outfit EyeTrackShop turned its eyes to timeline for pages and found that the cover image was king.EyeTrackShop’s findings ran counter to those from another eye-tracking study earlier this month by Simple Usability, which concluded that the importance of cover images was overrated, saying that most users did not notice creative combinations of the cover image and profile image, and many thought of the former as advertising space.
LinkedIn Tops the Forbes Fast Fast Tech 25: Annual List of Growth Kings – Forbes
The crucial question for investors is how much weight you give to things you can’t begin to imagine. That leap of faith is what drives interest in our list of America’s 25 Fastest-Growing Tech Companies. All of them have shown a remarkable ability to defy sales gravity. We combed more than 5,000 publicly traded technology companies, looking for profitable companies with a minimum revenue of $150 million and a minimum market value of $500 million.
Here’s a scary stat for retail marketers: 7 out of 10 online shopping carts are abandoned before a sale is completed (Source: Forrester).
And unfortunately, abandonment rates are rising due to consumers seeking product information (prices, ratings, reviews, etc) from various online sources.
Charles Nicholls, founder and chief strategy officer for SeeWhy says that “…rather than being a rejection of the brand’s value proposition, [abandonment] can be a step in the decision process for some buyers and for the majority of purchases. This is visible in the way that some customers will come back multiple times as they consider the purchase, storing items in their shopping carts as ‘wish lists.’”
A greatly effective way to push the cart to checkout is to leverage the authentic enthusiasm of the customers who love you the most: your Brand Advocates.
Facilitate the Prospect-Advocate conversation: Give prospects the option to ask current customers questions about the product they are considering purchasing.
Here’s how:
Our customers have seen 13%-33% conversion to sale rates by connecting their prospects and Advocates. Watch the VP of Marketing for Ooma, a VoIP provider, discuss the benefits of energizing their Brand Advocates (including leveraging Advocate Answers) here.
Why it works:
To learn more, download the whitepaper, “The ROI of Energizing Brand Advocates.”
WOMM-U Info
Date: May 7-9, 2012
Location: Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel, Chicago
Hosted by: Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)
Zuberance and Restaurant.com are teaming up to present a fantastic case study at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s WOMM-U conference, “Advocacy is Delicious: Turning Restaurant.com Advocates into a Social Marketing Force.”
Restaurant.com is the leading provider of restaurant savings nationwide. The company offers the best deal on every meal at more than 18,000 restaurants nationwide with nearly 50,000 daily gift certificate options. Restaurant.com has helped customers save more than $2 billion since the Arlington Heights, Ill.-based company was founded in 1999. Restaurant.com will describe how they’ve created a thriving group of tens of thousands of Advocates and how they’re energizing these Advocates to spread positive Word of Mouth and drive sales.
Expert Speakers
Chris Krohn, President and Chief Marketing Officer, Restaurant.com (@ckrohn1)
Chris is a veteran of the e-commerce, hospitality and financial services industries. With his strong background in growing entrepreneurial businesses and expertise in marketing, business development and technology, Krohn oversees the Restaurant.com’s marketing and IT functions. Krohn joined Restaurant.com in May 2011 from Whitney Automotive Group, a multi-brand B2C retailer, where he was Chief Marketing Officer and VP Business Development. Krohn’s operating experience also spans the hospitality and financial services industries. He was formerly Vice President of Marketing at Harrah’s Entertainment, head of marketing for Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and Managing Director of CME subsidiary, OneChicago LLC.
Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO, Zuberance (@robfuggetta)
As Zuberance CEO, Rob is ultimately responsible for all aspects of the company’s business including product, engineering, operations, customer success, and sales and marketing. Rob is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley who has played a leadership role in three start-ups including Genuity, which went public in June 2000. Rob was formerly a partner at Regis McKenna Inc., the legendary Silicon Valley marketing and communications firm, where he co-led the global Apple business. Rob is the author of “Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force,” to be published by John H. Wiley, Inc. in June 2012.
Below is the recording of our recent webinar, “Brand Advocates on Facebook: What You Need to Know About Timeline, EdgeRank, and Leveraging Your Superfans.”
(Click here to view webinar recording on Slideshare.)
Featured Speakers:
Key Takeaways:
To learn more, download the whitepaper, “Turning Fans and Followers into Brand Advocates.”
Dear Brands,
Consumers don’t trust you.
Sincerely,
The truth.
OK, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but a new study by Nielsen found that consumers are indeed losing faith in paid media and looking to their friends for brand recommendations more than ever before.
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With the rise of social media and third party review sites, everyone has a voice these days. Even my Grandma told me she wrote a Yelp review of her local Hometown Buffet (she gave it 5/5 stars of course). It is now crucial that brands get their Advocates to venture out on the social web and recommend on their behalf.
Check out these success stories of companies empowering their Advocates:
To learn more about leveraging your trusted and influential Brand Advocates, download “Turning Fans and Followers into Brand Advocates.”
New Nielsen Study: Consumers trust recommendations from peers above all other forms of advertising – ZuberRants
A new study by Nielsen found that consumers are indeed losing faith in paid media and looking to their friends for brand recommendations more than ever before. It is now crucial that brands get their Advocates to venture out on the social web and recommend on their behalf.
Google+ Redesign: Here’s What’s New – Mashable
Google’s social network got a redesign that makes it prettier and easier to navigate. “It accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google,” Google Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra argued in a blog post announcing the redesign.
Foursquare and Tumblr Move to Capture Ad Revenue – Forbes
Nobody has Cracked the Engagement Code. As much as social networks would like brands to think that their targeting abilities will mean a greater return on investment, an 8% drop in ad engagement on Facebook in the last quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012, shows us that the “secret code” to reaching the online audience in a meaningful way has yet to be cracked.
Amazon and eBay Add Pinterest Buttons – ClickZ
Retail is inherently visual, so it comes as no surprise that two of the biggest online sellers – Amazon and eBay – have added Pinterest buttons to product pages.
LinkedIn Rolls Out New Targeted Follower Tools for Marketers – Business Insider
LinkedIn will launch two new functions for companies who have followers on LinkedIn, both of which will be of interest to marketers and advertisers: “Targeted Updates” and “Follower Statistics.”
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