If someone told you there was a shoebox full of hand-written highly qualified referral leads buried next to a tree in South Dakota, would you grab a shovel and venture to retrive them? Judging by the stats below, I’m sure every marketer and salesperson would be on the next flight to South Dakota cracking a bottle of champagne!

Facts about Lead Generation

• Sixty percent of B2B marketers say generating leads is their top goal for 2012, followed closely by 57 percent who said “converting leads into paying customers” is their top priority (MarketingSherpa, “2011 B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey”).
• The average cost per lead using traditional outbound marketing tactics (direct mail, trade shows, direct marketing) is $346, according to HubSpot’s 2012 State of Inbound Marketing.
• In a recent survey by HubSpot, about 25 percent of marketers said referral leads were worth $1,000 per lead to their company and about 10 percent said referrals were worth more than $10,000.

Today, we’ve announced a new lead generation solution to help marketers and salespeople generate thousands of “free” referral leads from their own Brand Advocates and their social networks. 

Zuberance’s new “Advocate Referrals” solution is not a tell-a-friend tool or pay for referrals tactic. It’s a complete referral marketing solution that enables companies to systematically:

•     Identify Advocates from among customers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, website visitors, and more;
•     Leverage Advocates to generate referral leads by making it easy for Advocates to create and/or share compelling content and offers with their social and business networks;
•     Track and optimize results in real-time.

How it works:

The Zuberance Advocate Platform automatically tracks which Advocates are sharing content and offers with their social networks; how many referrals have been generated; and the conversion rate for these referrals. A/B testing enables marketers to compare and analyze what offers or content being shared by Advocates are generating the most referrals. The Zuberance Advocate Platform also enables marketers to automatically re-engage Advocates to spur more sharing and referrals.

“Referral leads are the Gold Standard of leads, the Glengarry leads. These are the leads that marketers need and salespeople crave,” said Rob Fuggetta, Zuberance Founder & CEO. “Zuberance’s Advocate Referrals delivers thousands of qualified referral leads into the sales funnel, boosting sales fast,” he stated.

To learn more, read the full press release here.

Exciting news! Today we launched a new solution that empowers employees to act as Brand Advocates (click here to read full press release). The employee advocacy solution enables companies to systematically identify enthusiastic employees (“Employee Advocates”) via customer engagement and social media listening tools and energize them to spread positive brand messaging via word of mouth and boost sales via Zuberance’s hosted advocacy applications. The solution also allows brands to track employee advocacy results and ROI in real-time.

Zuberance's analytics enable companies to track results of employee advocacy solutions in real-time.

Employees: A Powerful, Untapped Marketing Force

Employees are a powerful, untapped marketing force. Employee Advocates are employees who are willing to recommend their company and its products or services to others without the company paying or providing incentives for their recommendations. Employee Advocates are uniquely qualified to serve as Brand Advocates because they are highly credible, trusted sources for information about companies and their products or services.

Empowered by social media, Employee Advocates can collectively reach thousands to millions of people on the social web. Companies may have hundreds of thousands of potential Employee Advocates, depending on the size of the business. Large corporations such as Walmart (2.2 million employees), IBM (436,000 employees) and UPS (400,000 employees) may have massive “Employee Advocate armies.”

Employee Advocate Testimonial

Measurable Benefits

Zuberance’s employee advocacy solution makes it easy for companies to unleash the power of their Employee Advocates to recommend their company as a place to work, helping firms attract qualified employees and lowering hiring costs. Employee Advocates can also evangelize the company’s products and services, helping spread positive messaging and generating referral leads and sales. They can also defend their companies from negative messaging and social media ambushes.

Target Companies

Zuberance’s new employee advocacy solution is ideal for mid-size to large companies across multiple industries and verticals including retail, technology, healthcare, automotive, transportation, travel and hospitality and more. There are more than more than 10,000 firms in the U.S. alone with more than 1,000 employees, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The employee advocacy solution is a perfect complement to Zuberance’s award-winning brand advocate solution, which leverages Customer Advocates as a marketing force.

Overview of Zuberance Advocacy Solution (both Brand Advocacy and Employee Advocacy)

Pricing & Availability

The Zuberance employee advocacy solution is available now! Click here to contact us for pricing and other details.

Are you a business owner? How important is Word of Mouth in promoting your products / services? Most likely your answer is VERY IMPORTANT!

And you are not alone. Three years of working with Enterprise Customers have given Zuberance enough experience and data to unequivocally state that the most satisfied customers a Business has, their Brand Advocates, are extremely important for their success; Data from a recent study tells us that:

• 30% of Brand Advocates recommend once a week or more
• Brand Advocates recommend across many categories; the most popular are Technology (25%), Restaurants (15%) Household Items (10%), Travel (7%)
• Brand Advocates have Social Networks that are larger than average (300-600)
• Brand Advocates recommend consumer (67%) and business (31%) products
• When a Brand Advocate recommends he/she prompts the recipient to consider (61%) and buy (22%)

We deeply believe in the power of Brand Advocacy and the benefits it can bring to your business. In order to make these benefits available more broadly we are releasing Zuberance Self Service (Beta).

In a nutshell: Zuberance Self Service allows any business to identify their most satisfied customers, their Brand Advocates, and then energize these Advocates to generate online reviews and share offers with their social networks. All of the activities are tracked so impact is clearly understood and messaging / offers can be optimized. Zuberance Self Service compiles best practices Zuberance has gathered through three years of catering to Enterprise Brands.

Zuberance Self Service is completely free during the Beta, after the Beta period is over Zuberance Self Service will be free for any company up to 200 Advocates identified; and then charged in a tiered subscription model based on the number of Advocates in the program.

Through the next few months we will be adding more features and capabilities, we look forward to receiving your comments and feedback (please use our online community.)

-Filiberto Selvas, VP of Product, Zuberance

Twitter currently has 200 million registered users. 42% of these users tweet multiple times a day and 23% tweet daily (source: Tough Marketing, Lab42)

Social media channels like Facebook and Twitter have provided consumers with a megaphone to let their opinions about brands and products be heard. Marketers are struggling to harness the power of those channels and leverage their Brand Advocates to amplify their message across the social web.

Although many brands have been successful in building their fans and followers, marketers can’t assume that those that are actively recommending them are connected to them on Facebook, Twitter, or other social channels. In fact only 24% of current customers follow that brand on Twitter (source: Tough Marketing.) Other brands continue to focus on building their social presence and can leverage their current Advocates to develop and grow their fan base.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce we are partnering with social monitoring and analytics platform, Viralheat, to provide our customers with the ability to identify and reach this large segment of undiscovered Advocates on one of today’s most powerful social channels: Twitter.

Zuberance will be integrating Viralheat’s sentiment analysis API to locate authentic Advocates and energize them to drive recommendations through Zuberance’s social marketing platform. This provides us with the ability to deliver additional value to our growing roster of marquee brands.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

We’re excited to share with our readers that Zuberance has been selected by AlwaysOn as one of the Global 250 Top Private Companies!

Now, in its ninth year, the AlwaysOn Global 250 represents the top emerging companies in the Global Silicon Valley that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in digital media, mobile, social media, cloud, and SaaS computing. Some other companies that were also honored with this award include Box.net, Blurb, Klout, Zynga, and Groupon.

“This year’s AlwaysOn Global 250 are companies driven by the biggest mega-trends, including the accelerating growth of mobile users, cloud computing, and SaaS offerings, globalization, and the socialization of commerce, and basically everything online,” says Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn. “This year’s winners clearly represent some of the highest-growth opportunities we’ve seen in the private company marketplace in the history of the global Silicon Valley.”

You can read the full Zuberance AlwaysOn press release here.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

The new Forrester Research Inc report, “Emerging Technology Applications For Marketing,” stresses the importance of businesses understanding up-and-coming marketing technology in order to effectively communicate to customers.  These technologies are a great support to the marketing mix.  Forrester advises CIO’s and CMO’s to work together for ideal business success. In order to stay relevant and reliable, CIO’s should be aware of new technologies that could be incorporated into the marketing strategy, especially in B2B companies.

Some key takeaways from this report are as follows:

• When you address customer needs effectively, sales follow.  Marketing should focus on putting the customer in the driver’s seat, which ultimately benefits the bottom line.

• 58% of Marketing Professionals think IT and Marketing speak different languages.  56% think IT doesn’t understand our business.  In reality, the two departments are very closely related – both have a clear set of processes that help the organization relate to the customer, enhance the brand experience, collect data and help secure revenue.

• One of the four emerging technologies to watch in 2011 is: Brand Advocate platforms to energize Word of Mouth (WOM).  Zuberance was given a notable mention as a supplier of this technology!

• Consumers are increasingly more proactive in their advocacy of brands through recommendations across social media channels, which is extremely helpful for B2C companies.  But, B2B marketers can use Brand Advocate platforms to encourage WOM by loyal customers in order to generate sales leads, references, and share your thought leadership.

• Brand Advocate platforms are quantifiable! These platforms facilitate sharing through digital and social mediums that have built in analytics tracking WOM results – easily translated to sales impact.

• Encourage your marketing team to get customer feedback on how to improve.  With thoughtful responses you can deliver better customer service and collaborate with IT to find new technologies and vendors to address concerns or opportunities.

In conclusion, IT and Marketing can easily work together to employ new marketing initiatives that deliver more value and are sustainable in our highly social world.

-Lucy Arnold, Marketing Coordinator, Zuberance

Eileen Gittins, Founder & CEO of Blurb, a print-on-demand publishing service, discusses the tremendous impact that working with Zuberance has had on Blurb’s marketing efforts.

Here are some key highlights that Blurb has seen within the first 90 days through leveraging the Zuberance Advocate Platform:

• Blurb was able to cut customer acquisition costs in half compared to other marketing channels.
• 42% of Blurb Advocates that were identified shared offers on Facebook, Twitter, and Email.
• On average, one outbound share by Blurb Advocates generated one inbound click.
• Each energized Advocate (Advocates that shared offers) brought in 1.6 new customers.
• Redemptions of offers shared by Advocates had a 2X shopping cart total above average.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

Watch this video to get the gist on what Zuberance technology can do for your brand. Zuberance is the first social marketing platform delivering measurable ROI by energizing Brand Advocates on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, email, websites, and more. Enjoy!

The video is only a short intro to what Zuberance can do for your brand. If you want to talk to a person directly at Zuberance, the number is Phone us to 415.264.1821 or fill out this form and we will contact you right away.

Zuberance Product Demo from Antonio Altamirano on Vimeo.