Watch the recordingby clicking the orange “Play” button in the player below.
Rubio’s Fresh Mexican Grill’s (@RubiosTweets) mission is to “create raving fans.” Rubio’s has built an army of nearly 100,000 raving Rubio’s fans that it is leveraging to boost online ratings on Yelp, and to sell more tacos and burritos.
Key Takeaways:
Make it easy for your Advocates to recommend your brand
Don’t pay or provide incentives
Advocacy is an ongoing program
Get an advocacy system
Get help from advocacy experts
Fun Facts:
67% of diners will not visit after reading only 1-3 bad reviews
50% or more of your business is from Word of Mouth
92% of consumers trust Advocates, 25% of consumers are Advocates
Rubio’s created a thriving Advocate Army of 64,000 Advocates, and growing
Average star rating on Yelp is 4.7 out of 5 stars
Rubio’s Advocates have shared 69,000 offers, reaching 10.4M prospects
Rubio’s Brand Advocacy program saves money, reducing reliance on paid media and couponing
Karin Silk, VP of Marketing at Rubio’s Restaurants, Inc., is a proven marketing leader with expertise in building brands, creating andimplementing strategic growth plans, and innovation/new product development. Karin has 15 years ofexperience in traditional CPG brand marketing, restaurant marketing, and general management consulting.
Rob Fuggetta is the world’s leading expert on brand advocacy. Fuggetta is the author of the ground-breaking new book,“Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force.”Published by John H. Wiley & Sons, Inc., a major business publisher, Brand Advocates shows how companies are leveraging Brand Advocates to build their brands and businesses – and how you can too! Fuggetta is the Founder & CEO of Zuberance, a social media marketing company that powers Brand Advocate programs for top consumer and business brands. Prior to founding Zuberance in 2008, Fuggetta was the Chief Marketing Officer at Genuity, a Verizon spin-out. He also was formerly a partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., the legendary high tech marketing and communications firm in Palo Alto, where he co-led the global Apple account.
Watch the recordingby clicking the orange “Play” button in the player below.
You have a secret content marketing weapon: Brand Advocates. As your most loyal, engaged, and enthusiastic customers, they’ll gladly create positive reviews, glowing testimonials, and more. Unlike your high paid agency or in-house copywriter, you don’t have to pay them thousands or hundreds of thousands or dollars to create compelling content. Simply make it easy for Advocates and they will happily create fantastic and authentic content.
Key Takeaways:
The top three content marketing challenges are creating original content, having time to create content, and creating high quality content. By turning Advocates into content creators, marketers can overcome all three of these obstacles.
Brand Advocates are highly satisfied customers who recommend a brand or product without pay or incentives. They recommend because they’ve had good experiences with a product or service and they want to help others.
Advocates will create various types of content including reviews, testimonials (stories), answers to prospects’ questions, positive tweets and posts, plus multimedia content such as pictures and videos.
Compared to brand content, Advocate content is more trusted and credible, more influential, and less expensive.
Advocate content sells products by boosting conversion rates, increasing time on websites and average order size, and influencing purchase decisions of prospective customers.
A critical part of a content marketing strategy that involves Brand Advocates is to leverage the content they create smartly. Brands should post Advocate-generated content on their websites, put it in the consumer purchase path, on social channels, on third party review sites, and more.
Rob Fuggetta is the world’s leading expert on brand advocacy. Fuggetta is the author of the ground-breaking new book, “Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force.”Published by John H. Wiley & Sons, Inc., a major business publisher, Brand Advocates shows how companies are leveraging Brand Advocates to build their brands and businesses – and how you can too! Fuggetta is the Founder & CEO of Zuberance, a social media marketing company that powers Brand Advocate programs for top consumer and business brands. Prior to founding Zuberance in 2008, Fuggetta was the Chief Marketing Officer at Genuity, a Verizon spin-out. He also was formerly a partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., the legendary high tech marketing and communications firm in Palo Alto, where he co-led the global Apple account.
Watch the recordingby clicking the orange “Play” button in the player below.
Marketing author Bill Lee triggered a firestorm of controversy when he declared recently in a provocative Harvard Business Review blog post that traditional marketing – including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications – is dead.
What do you think? Is it time to sound the death knell for traditional marketing? Is traditional marketing still alive and well? Are paid, owned, and earned media merging?
Traditional marketing- including advertising, public relations, branding, and corporate communications- is dead. Many people in traditional marketing roles and organizations may not realize they’re operating within a dead paradigm. But they are. The evidence is clear.
The way that marketing is perceived by customers has dramatically changed. Buyers aren’t paying attention. They’re increasingly doing research on their own through online resources and social media before ever engaging with your brand.
According to a Corporate Executive Board study, 57% B2B customers buying decisions are complete before they engage with the supplier. By then, they don’t need to consult with any sales people. Instead they want to know what their peers and other customers think of the company.
CEO’s have lost all patience with CMO’s. 73% say CMO’s lack credibility and ability to generate sufficient business growth. 72% are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it all will generate increased business. 77% have had it with all the talk about brand equity that can’t be linked to actual firm equity or any other recognized financial metric.
The traditional marketing approach to marketing and sales doesn’t make sense especially in today’s connected world. Employees, consultants, partners, etc don’t come from the buyer’s world and they don’t share the buyer’s interest. This is not a promising arrangement to persuade people. Social media makes it easy for prospects to connect with buyers.
Stop trying to persuade buyers. Get skilled at getting your customers to persuade and influence your buyers using four pillars of new marketing:
Marketing (which encompasses everything from product, price, place, promotion) is not only alive and well, it’s core to a business’ success. In short, marketing isn’t dead. Marketing is everything.
Everything is with, not instead of. While some things might become antiquated or less powerful, they’re still very relevant.
Some brands in the pharmaceutical or finance industry, for example, have to live in the domain of creating a level of persuasion because they’re regulated by law or have products that have incremental difference to their competitors.
Advertising is not dying. In fact, it’s not on life support, it’s not sick, and it probably doesn’t have the sniffles.
Just because you trust your peers more than advertising, doesn’t mean you can’t see an ad. I don’t need peer reviews to decide to switch toilet paper. Some brands need to put the message into the general zeitgeist of the world that their product now has variance on it- it’s now on sale or has a new feature.
Brand advocacy programs are absolutely critical. However, the challenge we face is that if they’re successful, it takes a lot of work. It’s the difference between dropping a bomb and doing hand to hand combat door to door. Brands must be prepared for the success that will come with engaging Advocates.
If you want to inform a large audience about your brand, advertising is still very much alive (as is marketing, thank you very much). Saying that marketing is dead is like saying that product development is dead and that branding is dead. It may get a lot of clicks, but there’s no substance or truth behind it.
Bill is the President of Customer Reference Forum and Executive Director of The Summit on Customer Engagement. For the last nine years, his conferences have drawn leading customer engagement and advocacy practitioners from top global firms as well as dynamic smaller firms. In addition to its widely respected conferences, Bill and his team at Lee Consulting Group provide workshops, consulting, research and other educational and community building services to help clients reinvent customer relationships and achieve dramatic growth. Bill is the author The Hidden Wealth of Customers (Harvard Business Review Press, June 2012), which has been featured in Forbes Online, Fast Company Online, Marketing Magnified (CMO Council), CRM Magazine and other publications.
Mitch Joel is President of Twist Image – an award-winning Digital Marketing and Communications agency (although he prefers the title, Media Hacker) and author of Six Pixels of Separation (Business Plus, 2009). He has been called a marketing and communications visionary, interactive expert and community leader. He is also a Blogger, Podcaster, passionate entrepreneur and speaker who connects with people worldwide by sharing his marketing insights on digital marketing and new media. In 2008, Mitch was named Canada’s Most Influential Male in Social Media, one of the top 100 online marketers in the world, and was awarded the highly prestigious Canada’s Top 40 Under 40. Most recently, Mitch was named one of iMedia’s 25 Internet Marketing Leaders and Innovators in the world. His next book, CTRL ALT DEL will be published in May 2013.
Rob Fuggetta is the world’s leading expert on brand advocacy. Fuggetta is the author of the ground-breaking new book, Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force. Published by John H. Wiley & Sons, Inc., a major business publisher, Brand Advocates shows how companies are leveraging Brand Advocates to build their brands and businesses – and how you can too! Fuggetta is the Founder & CEO of Zuberance, a social media marketing company that powers Brand Advocate programs for top consumer and business brands. Prior to founding Zuberance in 2008, Fuggetta was the Chief Marketing Officer at Genuity, a Verizon spin-out. He also was formerly a partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., the legendary high tech marketing and communications firm in Palo Alto, where he co-led the global Apple account.
Webinar Recording: Influencers or Brand Advocates: Who Carries the Real Clout?
Companies today are investing in Influencer outreach strategies in hopes that a known name can deliver their message to a vast audience. 40,000 blog subscribers may look tempting, but many brands are sitting right on top of an untapped digital gold mine: their own Brand Advocates. These highly satisfied customers are eager and willing to share their positive brand experiences, defend companies from negative Word of Mouth, and deliver new customers. As marketers are developing both influencer outreach and brand advocacy strategies, it’s important to understand the characteristics, motivations, and objectives behind engaging these two segments.
Key Takeaways:
Don’t confuse reach with influence. True influence drives action.
The motivations for influencers and Advocates are different. Influencers typically need some sort of perk, discount, or free trial to endorse a product. Advocates recommend because they’ve had great experiences and want to help others.
Jay Baer is a hype-free content strategist, speaker, and author. He founded the social and content accelerator firm Convince & Convert in 2008. It is the fifth marketing services firm he’s started or managed. Jay is a renowned and popular social media keynote speaker, delivering as many as 100 insightful, memorable, interesting and hilarious presentations each year to groups as large as 5,000. He’s also co-author of The NOW Revolution, 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social (Wiley, 2011) a leading book on social business, and an Amazon category best-seller.
Michael Brito currently works for Edelman Digital as a Senior Vice President of Social Business. He is responsible for helping his clients socialize their organization and at the same time operationalize their social media initiatives internally. He is the author of Smart Business, Social Business: A Playbook For Social Media In The Organization.
Rob Fuggetta is the world’s leading expert on brand advocacy. Fuggetta is the author of the ground-breaking new book, “Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force” (John H. Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2012) Fuggetta is the Founder & CEO of Zuberance, a social media marketing company that powers Brand Advocate programs for top consumer and business brands. Prior to founding Zuberance in 2008, Fuggetta was the Chief Marketing Officer at Genuity, a Verizon spin-out. He also was formerly a partner at Regis McKenna, Inc., the legendary high tech marketing and communications firm in Palo Alto, where he co-led the global Apple account.
Below is the recording from our latest social media webinar, “Top 10 Things Advocates Will Do For Your Brand” co-hosted by the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.
1. Give you referral leads and help you sell products and services, serving as a virtual salesforce.
Anytime Fitness Advocates have shared 16,167 offers on Facebook, Twitter, and via email. Anytime Fitness is seeing a 20% conversion rate from Advocate offer shares (5X higher than average).
2. Write highly positive reviews of your products or services, boosting your online ratings.
Anytime Fitness Advocates have written over 7,250 glowing reviews and stories which are displayed on Anytime’s Facebook page. Advocates have also published their reviews on Yelp which has increased positive reviews by 30% in the past five months.
3. Create glowing testimonials about their experiences with your company or products.
Outright Advocates have written 1,463 stories, some of which are showcased on Outright’s website. Of the Advocates who shared their story, 53% chose to share on Facebook.
2,440 Advocates for the VoIP provider, Ooma, have opted in to answer prospects’ questions. Each question is getting an average of 2.3 answers. Ooma is seeing a 50% click-through-rate among prospects who get questions answered by Advocates.
5. Share your content and offers with their social networks, driving referral leads, clicks, and sales.
Outright Advocates love to share educational content such as a video about their Tax Resource Center. 43% of people in Advocates’ networks clicked through to watch the video.
6. Help you launch new products.
Outright energized their Advocates to help launch their new iPhone app. Advocate sharing drove the app to the Top 25 in the app store.
7. Create better ads than your high-priced ad agency and more compelling copy than your most skilled wordsmith.
One Anytime Fitness Advocate described the club as “the Cheers of fitness clubs.” Another Advocate wrote, “This club provides the keys to your future success…guaranteed!”
8. Defend your cherished company and brand reputation from detractors.
Auto-windshield repair company, Safelite, boosted ratings on SuperPages.com from 2.35 to 4 stars by energizing their Advocates to write reviews. Advocates gave Safelite an average of 4.9 out of 5 stars!
9. Alert you to competitive threats and market opportunities.
Outright Advocates alert the company when people post incorrect information about their software on the web.
10. Give you profitable ideas and produce feedback.
Outright created a Facebook group exclusively for their Advocates to provide feedback such as input on a new tagline.
Below is the recording of our recent webinar, “Top 5 Myths of Brand Advocacy REVEALED.” Enjoy!
You can also view the recording on our webinar channel here.
Featured Speakers:
Nick Cifuentes, Global Social Media Director, Ancestry.com (@NickCifuentes)
Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO, Zuberance (@robfuggetta)
Key Takeaways:
Advocacy is like a marathon (an ongoing strategy), not a sprint (one time campaign).
Brand Advocates are highly satisfied customers and others who pro-actively recommend brands or products without being paid.
Compared to Fans, Followers, and Loyal Customers, Advocates are the most trusted sources of information. They are highly influential with a massive reach via social media.
Myth 1: Brands need to pay or incentivize Advocates to get them to recommend their company/products.
Advocates recommend because they’ve had good experiences with a product or service and to help others. Only 1% said they recommend for incentives or rewards. (Read research study, Three Surprising Facts About Brand Advocateshere).
Myth 2: Few Customers are Brand Advocates.
Truth: On average, 50% of customers are Brand Advocates (Both B2B and B2C).
64% of Ancestry.com customers surveyed indicated they were Advocates.
Myth 3: Only “sexy” brands have Advocates.
Truth: Brand Advocates are active recommenders across several categories.
Some Advocacy categories that might surprise you are windshield repair, virtualization software, data storage, and web conferencing!
Myth 4: Influencers have more power than Advocates.
Truth: Brand Advocates are more influential than Influencers.
Studies show that Advocates are 5x more trusted than Influencers and 60x more influential than brands themselves.
Myth 5: Advocacy Programs are difficult to measure.
Truth: Advocacy programs are very measurable.
Welcome to the science of Advocacy. The Zuberance platform lets you track, measure, and analyze Advocacy data like in-bound clicks, reviews, and shared stories.
Advocates don’t have to go unnoticed; a simple thank you never goes out of style. Advocates can be rewarded without being incentivized by giving them sneak peaks to new product features, inviting them to focus groups, giving them exclusive content, and more.
To learn more, download Chapter 1 of Rob Fuggetta’s new book, Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force by clicking here.
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.)
Brand Advocates are a different breed; They are 50% more likely to influence purchase decisions than other customers, 2X more active content creators, and 75% more likely to share great product experiences.
Facebook Timeline features give brands more real estate to boost advocacy such as pinning Advocate-generated content, showcasing Advocate reviews, and highlighting Advocate identification.
Even though these new Timeline features are valuable, 88% of Facebook fans never return to a brand page after “liking” it. Also, due to EdgeRank, only 16% of your fanbase see branded posts in their newsfeeds.
Brands can work around EdgeRank by giving Advocates content to share on Facebook (such as educational content, videos, offers, etc) and encouraging Advocates to create content themselves and then posting it to Facebook (such as reviews, testimonials, etc.) Though EdgeRank still applies to Facebook users, your Advocates will be reaching people in their networks that most likely aren’t fans of your brand on Facebook.
By leveraging their Advocates on Facebook, brands are increasing reach, building their brand armies, boosting click through rates.
Check out the recording of our recent webinar where we revealed new research, “Three Surprising Facts About Brand Advocates” featuring Founder/CEO of Zuberance, Rob Fuggetta.
1. Brand Advocates are more active than previously thought
Advocates recommend 9 brands on average
32% recommend 10 or more brands
16% recommend more than 15 brands
Advocates recommend on average 26X per year
30% recommend once weekly or more
Brand Advocates are active in many industries. The categories most recommended are Technology (25%), Restaurants/Dining (15%), and Entertainment/Leisure (14%).
2. Brand Advocates have larger social networks than earlier estimated
Brand Advocates have 200-450 people in their social networks.
Online Brand Advocates have 300-600 people in their social networks.
3. Brand Advocates recommend both consumer and business products
67% advocate both business and consumer products.
Other Findings
“Power Advocates” make up about 15% of Brand Advocates. They recommend dozens of products, do so several times a week, and have 500+ people in their social networks.
83% of Advocates say their recommendations impact purchase decisions of their friends- 61% say their friends consider buying the recommended product and 22% say their friends actually purchase the recommended product.
Email (at 57%) and Facebook (at 35%) are the most used online tools for recommending.
Altruism, not rewards, spur Advocates. 50% say they recommend because they’ve had good experiences with a product/service. 37% say they recommend because they want to help others.
3 Implications for Marketers
Find and energize Brand Advocates now to drive advocacy and sales.
B2B Marketers need to engage and energize Brand Advocates.
Don’t pay or provide financial incentives to Brand Advocates.
The recording below is from our recent webinar, “3 B2B Case Studies in 30 Minutes: How Box, AVG, and Parallels are Leveraging Customer Advocates to Drive Sales Now” featuring innovative marketers from leading B2B companies.
Box has identified a brand army of 51,000 Advocates via email, in-product notifications, Facebook, and their newsletter. 46% of their customers highly recommend Box.
Box Advocates have created over 13,800 glowing stories which have generated over 17,000 in-bound clicks from Advocates’ networks.
For new press announcements and product launches, Box looks to their Advocates to add the halo effect and to get the social world chatting.
Success Story #2: AVG Technologies (program live for 4 months)
AVG has identified 26,000 Advocates mostly via Facebook. 66% of customers highly recommend AVG products.
AVG Advocates have created 7,200 positive reviews and rated the product on average 4.5/5 stars which were then posted to CNET, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter.
4,000 offers were shared by AVG Advocates to their social networks which yielded a 50% response rate.
Success Story #3: Parallels (program live for 4 weeks)
Parallels has identified 30,000 Advocates via email and in-product notifications. 66% of their customers highly recommend Parallels products.
Parallels has energized Advocates to create and publish reviews on Amazon which boosted ratings from 3.5 to 4.5 stars in two weeks- average of 4.7 star rating.
Parallels Advocates shared 4,200 offers with their social networks that yielded a 21% sales conversion rate.
Karin Silk, VP of Marketing at Rubio’s Restaurants, Inc., is a proven marketing leader with expertise in building brands, creating andimplementing strategic growth plans, and innovation/new product development. Karin has 15 years ofexperience in traditional CPG brand marketing, restaurant marketing, and general management consulting.
Jay Baer (
Michael Brito (
Rob Fuggetta (
