You’re already sold on the power of Brand Advocates. You’re identifying and energizing your Advocates now to recommend your brand and products. What’s next? How can you get the greatest possible bang from your advocacy buck? How can you fully harness the power of Advocates to build your brand and business?

Watch the webinar below to learn about “Advanced Techniques for Energizing Your Brand Advocates.” (Click here to watch on Slideshare.)

10 Advanced Brand Advocacy Tips

1. Grow your Advocate Army. New customers, returning customers, and passives are three segments that brands can look to in order to identify and energize Advocates.

2. Leverage multiple touch points to identify and engage with Advocates: email, website, social channels, mobile, in-product, physical stores, customer service.

3. Use the full array of Advocate applications: reviews, stories, answers, offers.

4. Take Advantage of Advocate Apps. Various Advocacy apps can directly address marketing challenges and/or opportunities. For example, certain properties of a hotel chain are receiving poor online ratings and reviews. Using Advocate reviews, this hotel can focus their enthusiastic and highly satisfied Advocates on rating and reviewing these properties on third party review sites like TripAdvisor.

5. Energize Advocates by Segment. Not all Advocates are alike, so building a segment-driven Advocacy program is key to any brand advocacy strategy. Vary your messaging to target different Advocate segments and create distinct goals for approaching each segment.

6. Mobilize Advocates. Use Advocate applications to mobilize your Advocates around specific situations or opportunities. For example, Advocate stories can aid in brand repositioning, Advocate offers can drive lead generation, and Advocate reviews and stories can help to combat negative Word of Mouth.

7. Leverage Advocates for launches. Energize your most passionate customers pre-launch to build buzz and awareness about your new product.

8. Leverage Advocate content smartly. Advocate-generated content is digital gold. Place Advocate content on multiple pages on your website, on a dedicated tab on your Facebook page, in your paid search ads, etc.

9. Set it and forget it! Setup email marketing campaigns that ask new customers if they would recommend your product and write a review two weeks after the purchase.

10. Promote causes. Rally your Advocate Army to promote a charity and spread awareness to their social networks.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

The recording below is from our recent webinar, “3 Case Studies in 30 Minutes: How Three Travel and Hospitality Companies are Increasing Sales and Ratings by Leveraging Their Brand Advocates” featuring social marketing success stories from Rubio’s, Tryp by Wyndham, and Qatar Airways. The speaker was Founder/CEO of Zuberance, Rob Fuggetta (@robfuggetta).

Key Takeaways:

• Brand Advocate definition: Highly-satisfied customers and others who pro-actively recommend brands or products without being paid.
• Brand Advocates are a different breed- They are 2X more active content creators and 4X more likely to share great product experiences.
• On average, 50% of a company’s customers are Brand Advocates.
• Identify your brand’s Advocates by asking The Ultimate Question: On a scale from 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our brand or products to your friends? (9′s and 10′s are Advocates.)
• Advocate marketing has a sales conversion rate of 5% or higher compared to traditional marketing at less than 1%.
• Rubio’s Advocates have created over 3,800 Yelp reviews and shared 60,000 offers with their social networks.
• 41% of Tryp’s Advocates recommended the hotel by creating reviews. The average start rating was 4.7 stars out of 5.
• 43% of Qatar Airway’s Advocates actively recommend the airline. Qatar Airways is seeing an 80% click-through rate on Advocate stories that were shared with their social networks.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

The recording below is from our recent webinar, “5 Case Studies in 30 Minutes: How Five Software Companies are Increasing Sales and Positive Word of Mouth by Mobilizing Their Brand Advocates” featuring social marketing success stories from Intuit, Microsoft, NetApp, Webroot, and Symantec. The speaker was Founder/CEO of Zuberance, Rob Fuggetta (@robfuggetta).

Key Takeaways:

• Brand Advocate definition: Highly-satisfied customers and others who pro-actively recommend brands or products without being paid.
• Brand Advocates are a different breed- They are 2X more active content creators and 4X more likely to share great product experiences.
• On average, 50% of a company’s customers are Brand Advocates.
• Identify your brand’s Advocates by asking The Ultimate Question: On a scale from 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our brand or products to your friends? (9′s and 10′s are Advocates.)
• Advocate marketing has a sales conversion rate of 5% or higher compared to traditional marketing at less than 1%.
• Webroot Advocates have created 5,500 reviews and rated their security software an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars.
• NetApp is seeing an 80% in-bound click rate from offers shared by their Advocates to their social networks.
• Intuit has identified a brand army of 30,000 Advocates. 11,000 Intuit Advocates. have recommended Intuit through reviews and offer sharing.
• For a particular campaign, 96% of Microsoft SMB’s Advocates shared an offer with their Facebook friends.
• Norton’s sales jumped $25 million and their ratings doubled on Amazon after energizing Norton Advocates.

To learn more about the benefits of energizing Brand Advocates, download our whitepaper, “The ROI of Energizing Brand Advocates.”

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

Below is the recording from our recent webinar on “Secrets of B2B Social Media & Word of Mouth Marketing” during which top marketers with a breadth of experience running B2B marketing shared social media success stories from brands like Intuit, Adobe, Microsoft, and CDW.

We also conducted a poll during the webinar and asked the audience, “How much of your business comes from Word of Mouth?” ANSWER: 48% say that 50% or more of their business comes from WOM. (See results below.)

Make sure to download our “Top 5 Myths of B2B Word of Mouth” whitepaper.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

Last week I moderated a great webinar for Zuberance on the subject of paid vs. earned media. We had four presentations, and you can listen and watch the entire one hour webinar as a slidecast below. If you’re interested in a specific presentation, you can just jump to a particular slide as noted.

Here are the presentations:

Results of Owned, Paid, and Earned Media Survey: Jump to slide 4

For more than 300 registrants to the webinar, Zuberance asked everyone questions about spending and impact across all three forms of media. Here’s what you said.

Paid, Owned, and Earned Media Landscape: Jump to slide 12

• Presented by Sean Corcoran, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc. (@seancor)

Integrating Paid and Earned Media: Jump to slide 35

• Presented by David Armano, Senior VP, Edelman Digital (@armano)

Leveraging Earned Media: Jump to slide 61

• Presented by Rob Fuggetta, CEO of Zuberance (@robfuggetta)

Make sure to download Zuberance’s latest whitepaper, “Top 5 Reasons Why Brands Need to Focus on Earned Media.”

A Marketing Imperative: Balancing Paid vs. Earned Media [ 55:52 ] Play Now | Play in Popup

Our latest webinar, produced with HSMAI, covered the difference between loyalty and advocacy, and how to leverage both to boost bookings and positive Word of Mouth.

How to Achieve Social Media ROI in the Hotel Industry: Turning Loyal Customers into Salespeople

Speakers:

• Robin Korman, SVP, Global Loyalty and Strategic Partnership, Wyndham Hotel Group
• John Moser, Chief Marketing & Brand Officer, Denihan Hospitality Group
• Rob Fuggetta, Founder & CEO, Zuberance

Key Takeaways:

• Always be thinking about the next horizon. Customers now own the conversation. You must play amongst them to influence that conversation.
• As marketers, we used to own the message. Now, we facilitate the message.
• Loyalty and advocacy are not the same, though creating memorable experiences is the foundation of both.

Make sure to download a free copy of the whitepaper, “How Hotels Can Turn Word of Mouth & Social Media into Sales.”

Rob Fuggetta (@zuberance), Founder and CEO of Zuberance, and Joe Jaffe (@jaffejuice), author of “Flip the Funnel” and creator of Jaffe Juice TV, held a debate via live Podcast this past Monday to discuss whether or not marketers need to incentivize Word of Mouth to yield results. (This debate was a result of “Flip the Funnel- No Incentives Necessary,” a recent blog post written by Fuggetta.)

Listen to the Podcast:

IN FAVOR ARGUMENT – NEED TO INCETIVIZE WOM

In his recent book “Flip the Funnel,” Jaffe says companies should start by focusing their efforts on the customer purchase rather than ending with it. He points to successful examples like Zappos and USAA who are focusing on customer retention, customer experience, relationship building, and the networked effects of customer-originated Word of Mouth. Jaffe contends that Word of Mouth marketing works for passion brands like Apple. But, he states that for nearly all other brands, marketers have to provide incentives to yield results.

AGAINST ARGUMENT – INCENTIVIZING WOM NOT NEEDED

Zuberance argues that it is not necessary to provide incentives to get Brand Advocates to recommend you (even for brands in categories like telecom, software and financial services).  The key to energizing Word of Mouth marketing at scale is to have a systematic approach to brand advocacy that automates the process of identifying and mobilizing a company’s authentic Brand Advocates, generating a measurable 10X ROI.

What are your thoughts? Does energizing Word of Mouth require incentives? Leave your comments here!

In the first installment of the Social Media ROI Webinar Series, host David Spark (@dspark) leads a high-level discussion about leveraging the power of social media to achieve B2B marketing objectives.

• First, Paul Dunay (@pauldunay), Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing for Avaya, outlines how the enterprise communications giant streamlined and fortified its approach to social media — and how it has been able to quantify the ROI.
• Next, CDW’s Sr. Segment Marketing Manager, Lauren McCadney (@LMcCadney), shares the online retailer’s strategic approach to tapping social media networks to drive sales, build its brand, provide responsive customer service, and authentically engage with important customers.
• Finally, Rob Fuggetta (@RobFugetta), Founder and CEO of Zuberance (@zuberance), offers three essential tips for B2B marketers looking to use social media to identify and activate their brand advocates.

The show also features questions from the Social Media ROI Webinar Series live audience.

Show is just under an hour. You can listen and watch the synced Slidecast below, stream the audio, or download the show to listen later. To make sure you don’t miss a single episode of the Social Media ROI Series in the future, please subscribe to our podcast.

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You can also just listen/download the audio alone here.

Social Media ROI Series - Making Social Media Work in B2B [ 59:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup

Presented live on July 28, 2010

Presenters: Esteban Contreras, Samsung Electronics

Kety Esquivel, Ogilvy

Rob Fuggetta, Zuberance

Frank Eliason, (formerly) Comcast

Unfortunately, there were some technical difficulties involving the audio of the webinar. However, this is the deck that was presented. Please feel free to share it with your friends and colleagues.

To learn more about the value of Brand Advocates, download our latest whitepaper, which states that Brand Advocates are worth at least 5X more than average customers.