Brand Advocates – consumers and business buyers who frequently recommend brands and products without being paid – are highly trusted and influential. Their recommendations drive trillions of dollars of purchase decisions for everything from cars to computers, fish tacos to fitness memberships, software to smart phones. Now, a new study sponsored by Zuberance has revealed three surprising findings about Brand Advocates.

This study provides further evidence about the power and influence of Brand Advocates.The message in the data is clear for B2C and B2B marketers: find and activate your Advocates now to generate more recommendations, referrals, and revenues.

Download the full report here.

Don’t miss our March 21 webinar: Founder/CEO of Zuberance, Rob Fuggetta, will present the findings from “Three Surprising Facts About Brand Advocates” and share the implications for marketers. Click here to register.

(Click here to view the Infographic in your browser.)

4 out of 5 consumers don’t buy after reading a negative review online. (source: Cone Online Influence Trend Tracker.)

That means just one Negative Nancy or Sour Sally can prevent prospects from purchasing your products.

Read more about the study here.

Find out how much negative reviews are costing your business now and what you can do to fight back!

Brands have been intensely focusing on racking up the “likes” on their Facebook page through various marketing tactics such as offering incentives, investing in Facebook ads, and more. But even with hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans, the road to kick ass Facebook engagement is a rather bumpy one.

Take a look at these stats working against you when it comes to Facebook marketing:

88% of Facebook users never return to a fan page once they “like” it (Brandglue.com.)

Due to EdgeRank, each time a brand posts to their Facebook page, only about 16-18% of fans actually see the post in their newsfeeds (source: comScore, Facebook.)

According to a recent Ehrenberg-Bass study, now you can add this stat: Only 1% of Facebook fans engage with brands.

So how do you overcome these obstacles and increase brand engagement? Focus not just on your fans, but on your fanatics (AKA your Brand Advocates) to share your content with their friends.

Why focus on your Brand Advocates?

• Brand Advocates are a different breed: They are 50% more likely to influence purchase decisions and 75% more likely to share great product experiences.
• By mobilizing your Advocates to share content on your behalf, you expand your reach beyond your current fan base to your Advocates’ networks.
• Brand Advocates will spread the love across channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, third party review sites, etc.), not just Facebook.
• Your customers don’t trust you anyway. 90% of consumers trust Word of Mouth; only 24% trust online ads (source: Nielsen.)

To learn more about leveraging your brand fanatics, download our whitepaper, Turning Fans and Followers into Brand Advocates.

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

Word of Mouth recommendations are extremely influential when it comes to Healthcare. People turn to peers, patients, and others who have had similar experiences and procedures to seek information as a trustworthy source.

In this video, Social Media Specialist, Reed Smith, discusses how St. David’s HealthCare is identifying patient Advocates and connecting with them to share their St David’s story.

Click here to watch on YouTube.

Some key highlights from the St. David’s HealthCare Advocacy Program:

• 74% of patients identified as St David’s HealthCare Advocates.
• For every testimonial created, each Advocate is sharing it to their social networks twice.
• There is an average of .78 clicks through to each testimonial shared on an Advocate’s social network (Facebook, Twitter, and email.)

What’s Next?

St David’s HealthCare plans to leverage Advocate testimonial content using iframes on each individual hospital location website.

To learn more about the power of Word of Mouth, download the whitepaper, “Top 5 Reasons Why Brands Should Focus on Earned Media.”

Diane Beaudet, VP of Global Marketing Programs for Webroot, an online protection software company, discusses the power of Brand Advocates.

Some highlights from Webroot’s Advocacy Program:

• Webroot has created a brand army of 11,000 Webroot Advocates (and growing.)
• Webroot Advocates have written about 6,000 reviews.
• Over 500 positive reviews have been published to third party review sites such as Amazon, BestBuy, and CNET.
• Advocates give Webroot products an average rating of 4.5/5 stars.
• In one quarter, sales increased by 200% due to Advocate-generated reviews that were published on Amazon.

What’s next for Webroot’s Advocate Program?

Webroot plans to leverage their Advocates to drive sign-ups and participation in a new online community to be launched in 2012.

Read more about how Webroot is turning their enthusiastic customers into a powerful marketing force here.

Hubspot recently published a killer infographic on “How Word of Mouth, Customer Reviews are Changing the Marketing World.”

The infographic highlights the growing distrust of traditional advertising as consumers are turning to their friends, ratings, and reviews to gain insight on purchase decisions. Take a look at some of the key stats below.

Outbound is Out

• Only 8% of consumers prefer online ads as the best source of product information.
• 65% mute the TV, change the channel or skip ads.
• 75% of people don’t accept advertisements as the truth.

Inbound is In

• 63% of social media users feel consumer ratings are #1.
• 90% of consumers discuss specific bands casually 90 times per week.
• 90% of people trust brand recommendations from friends.
• 70% trust consumer opinions.
• Products that have received 50+ reviews create greater returns (which is 65% higher than products that have less than 5 reviews.)
• 61% of consumers use search engines to read about products before a purchase.
• 71% are more likely to purchase when referred by social media.

Success Story Stats

• American Eagle added the “Like” button to every product on their site, and Facebook shoppers spent 57% more money.
• Every Eventbrite link shared on Facebook generates $2.52 in ticket sales.
• Each Ticketmaster event post by customers on Facebook results in $5.30 in direct ticket sales.
• When Levi’s added the “Like” button, they saw a 40X increase in referral traffic.

Traditional marketing is so 90′s. Modern marketing is all about recommendations.

Read how companies in various industries are energizing their Brand Advocates to create online recommendations by downloading, “Turning Your Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force.”

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

The following is an excerpt from Rob Fuggetta’s forthcoming book about Brand Advocates.

One negative review can cost you 30 customers, a study by Convergys found. Using the Convergys research as the baseline, you can see how much one negative review costs a small resort hotel in Orlando, Fla.

If your average revenues per customer are higher, negative reviews cost you more. One negative review costs a high-end fitness club $72,000, as the chart below shows.

Social Media Whup-Ass

This is a conservative estimate of the amount of money you can lose from negative reviews. It only focuses on lost sales. It doesn’t take into consideration the lasting financial impact of negative reviews on your company or brand’s reputation.

Also, it doesn’t take into consideration other ways Detractors spread negative Word of Mouth, like email, social channels, and offline.

In the old days, PR people would tell their clients who wanted to battle newspaper editors, “Don’t pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.”

Today that man is the social consumer, and he’s got a barrel of social media whup-ass for you.

Read more excerpts from Rob’s forthcoming book here.

-Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO, 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

Club One, an award-winning health club management company based in San Francisco, is boosting its referral leads and sales by activating its Zuberance-powered Brand Advocates.

In this new 60-second video, Club One Director of Marketing & PR Kari Bedgood shares how Club One is getting more memberships and amplifying positive Word of Mouth.

Check it out:

Some key results from Club One’s advocacy program:

• 61% of members surveyed identified themselves as Club One Advocates.
• 50% of Club One Advocates shared offers (a 14-day pass) with their friends and colleagues via email, Facebook, and Twitter.
• Club One received a 9X ROI from the program based on membership revenues.

Download the Club One Case Study now.