Boost sales now with "People-Powered eCommerce"

This time of year, many companies are launching a barrage of sales promotions, discounts, and ads.

All of this is aimed at making their cash registers ring on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and throughout the holidays.

A Smart Approach to Driving Sales: “People-Powered eCommerce”

Smart companies are also getting their Customer Advocates (AKA “Brand Advocates” or “Brand Ambassadors”) to spread positive Word of Mouth about their brand and products.

This is enabling these companies to reach more buyers, drive more traffic, and increase sales — all at a fraction of the cost of paid media — during the critical holiday shopping season and throughout the year.

We call this “People-Powered eCommerce.” And it’s all about people (Advocates) telling other people (friends, family, and followers) about brands, products, and services, enabled by brands.

People-Powered eCommerce is:

• Authentic

• Very effective

• Inexpensive

Examples of People-Powered eCommerce

Check out these examples:

Ecovacs, which makes robot vacuums, is boosting sales by getting customer Advocates to post Ecovacs promotional offers on Advocates’ Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Cheekbone Beauty, a niche cosmetics brand serving Indigenous woman, is encouraging its Advocates to share an offer on social media for a limited-edition boxed collection.

Here’s an B2B People-Powered eCommerce: Ooma, the leading VoIP solution for consumers and small businesses, is driving sales by getting its Advocates to refer peers.

Here’s another example from Ecovacs:The company is driving sales and boosting ratings by getting Advocates to leave reviews on Costco.com

How You Can Tap into People-Powered eCommerce

It’s as simple as 1-2-3.

1. Create a customer advocacy program. Invite your highly-satisfied customers to join the advocacy program.

2. Make it easy and fun for Advocates to spread the word online about your brand and products. This includes things like:

   1. Sharing your promotional offers with friends, family, and followers.

   2. Posting reviews, photos, videos, stories on shopping sites, social networks, your website, and elsewhere.

   3. Referring friends and peers to try, download, and/or buy your products.

3. Thank your Advocates. Show your appreciation with eGift cards; brand swag; free or discounted products; plus other perks.

Immediate Results & ROI

The benefits of People-Powered eCommerce for your brand are compelling and immediate:

• Increased traffic and sales

• Higher average order size

• Reach more buyers

The results and ROI you get will, of course, depend on the size of your “Advocate Army”; how compelling your offers and rewards are; and other factors.

But thing is for sure: if you’re not tapping into People-Powered eCommerce, you’re missing an opportunity staring at you right in the face.

So I’ll end with one question:

Why are you waiting?

What are you doing with your Promoters?

Is your company running Net Promoter® surveys?

If so, you may be identifying hundreds to thousands of Promoters (customers who answer 9 or 10 in response to the question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our brand to others?”)

So here’s the question:

What are you doing with your Promoters?

If you said “nothing,” you’re missing a major marketing and customer engagement opportunity!

Your Promoters have “raised their hands.” They’re telling you they’re highly likely to recommend your brand to others. They want to engage more with your brand.

Why not take them up on their offer?

Start a “Promoter Mobilization Program”

Here are three simple steps:

Step 1: Invite Promoters to Join Your Customer Advocacy Program

Send Promoters an email inviting them to join your customer advocacy program. They’ll get access to an exclusive “hub” where they can participate in “challenges” and earn rewards like eGift cards. (more on this below.)

Data point: About 5% to 20% of Promoters will accept your invitation to join the customer advocacy program. If you invite 10,000 Promoters, between 500 to 2,000 Promoters will join your program. That’s the start of what we call an “Advocate Army.”

Step 2: Mobilize Promoters

Issue Promoters “challenges” (actions you would like them to complete.) Here are a few examples:

1. Post a review of our products on third-party sites and elsewhere. This is likely to boost your online ratings and rankings, which is proven to drive sales.

2. Create a story or testimonial about how our product is helping you and/or your company. This can be a written story, video, or photo

3. Refer friends or peers to buy our products, get a demo, or download our products

4. Test or try our products or product features. This boosts engagement, retention, or loyalty plus gives you valuable insights.

Data point: Between 20% to 40% of Promoters will complete challenges. Compare this to less than 2% of customers and prospects who complete requested actions. Promoters are indeed your most loyal, engaged customers.

Step 3: Reward Promoters

Say “thank you” to your Promoters for completing challenges via:

1. eGift cards

2. Brand merchandise like branded t-shirts, coffee mugs, hoodies

3. Product discounts or free products

4. Donations to charitable causes

What are the Key Metrics?

How do you measure success for a “Promoter Mobilization Program?” The answer depends on what your goals are.

However, here are three ways our customers measure success:

1. Amount of user-generated content (UGC) (reviews, stories, testimonials, videos, photos, etc.) created by Promoters. UGC is the most trusted, influential type of content. Studies show consumers trust UGC about 2X-3X more than content produced by brands. We use industry standards to place a value on UGC created by Promoters.

2. Reach/impressions. When your Promoters share the content they create — or links to your content or offers — this creates reach and impressions. We use industry standards to measure and value that reach.

3. Sales. As mentioned above, one of the challenges you can issue to Promoters is to ask them to refer friends to buy your products. You can also ask them to post your promotional offers on their social media accounts. We give Promoters unique codes so that when referred friends or peers buy, we can track this directly back to Promoters.

Need Some Inspiration?

Fred Reichheld, the Net Promoter guru, once said:

“The only path to profitable growth may lie in a company’s ability to get its loyal customers (i.e. “Promoters”) to become, in effect, its marketing department.”

So we ask again:

What are you doing with your Promoters?

®Net Promoter is a registered trademark of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Customer Loyalty: More Important than Ever

In this unprecedented situation, it’s more important than ever to retain existing customers. Here’s how the Zuberance Platform can help:

1. Reward Advocates for Loyalty

Via the Zuberance platform and our built-in rewards points system, you can give rewards to Advocates for:

• Making purchases

• Renewing subscriptions

• Buying additional products (encourage more purchases)

• Downloading your app

• Using your product or service

• Attending online meetings and events like webinars

Loyalty programs work. Check out this HubSpot post on the topic.

2. Issue Challenges that Help Foster Loyalty

Here are three examples of UGC (user-generated content) challenges that achieve this:

• How is our product or service helping you save money?

• How is our product or service helping you make money?

• What’s the primary benefit you’re getting from our product or service?

When Advocates create content like this it serves as a powerful reminder of the compelling benefits they’re getting from your products or services.

Of course, you want to encourage and reward Advocates to share the content they create on their social media.

3. Increase Engagement with Advocates

Use these features of the Zuberance Platform to boost Advocate engagement:

• Discussions

• Surveys

• Polls

• Posts

• Likes

• Comments

All of these features can be used to communicate with your Advocates and let them know you care.

5 Marketing Benefits you get from Brand Advocates Today!

Here are five key benefits you can get immediately from a Brand Advocate program (AKA “Brand Ambassador” or “Super Fan” program):

1. Increase awareness and positive WOM

Advocates help you increase awareness and positive Word of Mouth by doing things like posting five-star reviews, stories, photos, videos, shout-outs, and more on their social media, shopping sites, review sites, etc. On average, a group of 1,000 Advocates can reach 5 million prospects with glowing recommendations like these:

2. Get a ton more User-Generated Content (UGC)

UGC is content created by users like:

• Reviews

• Stories

• Testmonials

• Photos

• Videos

• Product Endorsement Quotes

• Blog posts

• …and more

UGC is about three times more trusted than brand content, studies show. And 85% of users find UGC more influential than brand photos or videos (Adweek)

With a Brand Advocate program, you’ll get thousands of pieces of valuable UGC. You can re-purpose this content on your social, in your marketing emails, website, and elsewhere.

3. Increase engagement and loyalty

Customer churn is a big problem in nearly every industry and category. Study after study has shown that engaged customers are more loyal and less likely to leave.

Brand Advocate programs give you an opportunity to engage with your customers on a daily basis via two-way dialogue, feedback, and compelling Word of Mouth challenges like voting for your brand or products.

4. Increase sales

Here’s how an Advocate marketing program will help you increase sales. Get Advocates to:

• Post your promotional offers on their social media

• Refer friends and family members

• Post 5-star reviews on shopping sites, which is proven to increase sales

Did you know?

• People are about 4X more likely to purchase a product or service when referred by a friend. (source: Nielsen)

• Customer referrals can drive stunning profits. A study published in the Harvard Business Review showed that referred customers are 18% more loyal, 16% more profitable, and that companies earned 60% on referral rewards. (source: “Why Customer Referrals Can Drive Stunning Profits,” Harvard Business Review.)

• Companies can acquire customers for about 50% less via referral programs compared to traditional marketing programs. (sources: multiple)

5. Get valuable consumer insights from your most engaged customers

Last, but certainly not least, a Brand Advocate program is like having an “always-on, real-time focus group” you can tap into anytime for:

• Ideas for new products and services

• Feedback on existing products and services

• Feedback on sales and marketing ideas before you launch

• Ideas for new ways to leverage Advocates

Why You Need a Referral Marketing Program, Now More than Ever

Growth is now the number one mission for nearly every company.

A majority (64%) of CMOs believe that one of their primary roles is delivering business growth.

Not only is delivering growth a priority for CMOs, but it is also the top challenge (of 10 identified) for more than one-third (37.9%) of the more than 320 marketing professionals surveyed.

Referrals: An Untapped Growth Engine

Since growth is such a high priority, referral marketing should a top priority for your 2020 marketing plan.

We define referral marketing as:

“An ongoing program that encourages and rewards customers and others to refer friends and peers to try and/or buy your products.”

3 Major Benefits of Referral Marketing

Referral marketing programs are proven to deliver compelling marketing benefits:

1. Get new customers

Dropbox is one of the most famous examples of how referral marketing programs can help you acquire lots of new customers. DropBox grew from 100,000 registered users to four million users in about one year, thanks largely to a referral program. DropBox gave free storage space in the cloud to Advocates (customers who referred) and their referred friends. This is called a “double-sided reward” and is one of the best practices of referral marketing.

Did you know?

Referrals bring in very warm leads. So it’s no wonder that referrals convert at about a 3X higher rate than any other B2B marketing channel and 22X higher than email. B2B marketers said the average conversion rate (lead to opportunity) was 11% for referrals, followed by partner-generated leads (4.5%), inbound leads (3.8%) and paid marketing (about 3%.) The lowest-converting channel was email (.55%.) (Source: Marketo.)

2. Cut customer acquisition costs

Marketing costs of acquiring customers via referral marketing is dramatically lower than traditional marketing programs. This is because there are no ads to buy with referral marketing programs. Instead, you’re tapping into the most cost-effective customer acquisition channel: word of mouth.

Did you know?

B2B marketers rated “referral/advocate marketing” as the third lowest-cost lead gen tactic, behind only social media and email marketing (house list.) (source: “Cost-per-Lead by Channel, according to B2B Marketers”, Software Advice.)

3. Increase customer loyalty

Referred customers stay longer, spend more, and are much more likely to become Advocates themselves!

Did you know?

Referred customers have a 37% higher retention rate and are 4 times more likely to refer more customers to your brand. (source: Deloitte)

Referral Marketing FOMO

If you don’t have a referral marketing program, you should get started now! You’re missing one of the most powerful ways to drive growth for your company.

What's the Value of UGC?

How do you value user-generated content (UGC) created by Advocates like five-star reviews, glowing testimonials, videos, photos, etc.?

Wait…Before You Answer

Before you answer the question of how much you value UGC, consider these facts:

1. Consumers say UGC is 2.4X more authentic than content created by brands or paid influencers (source: Stackla)

2. 79% consumers say UGC highly impacts their purchase decisions (source: Stackla)

3. 70% consumers say UGC is more influential than brand-created content (source: Reevo)

4. Millennials say recommendations from friends and family are more than 2X more influential in their purchase decisions than influencer posts on social media. (See chart below, source: YouGov)

5. 89% of B2B marketers consider customer testimonials and case studies as the most effective kinds of content in converting buyers.  (Content Marketing Institute)

“Saved our Organization Millions of Dollars”

How much would you value a customer testimonial like this one, created by an actual customer of a security software company?

What do you think this testimonial is worth? $100 $500 $1,000

Still unsure? Let’s take a look at another example:

“Amazing!” 5-Stars

This is an actual product review written by a customer advocate for Marseille, a start-up that makes a cool little device called mClassic that gamers plug into consoles to make images and graphics look dramatically better.

Now, keep in mind, that studies have shown that positive reviews by users like these carry a ton of clout with buyers. Here’s the five-star review written by an actual user:

“I LOVE AND WOULD RECOMMEND THIS WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM TO EVERYONE”

Here’s one final UGC example. This testimonial was written by an actual member of Jenny Craig, the weight loss program. By the way, Jenny Craig knows the power of customer testimonials. They use them all the time in their ads.

Don’t Confuse Reach with Value

Some marketers downplay the value of UGC because they point out that consumers who create this content lack the reach of paid social media influencers.

It’s true that paid social media influencers have more followers than average consumers. However:

1. Smart brands often showcase UGC on their social media and elsewhere in their marketing, amplifying the voice of these consumers and driving sales.

2. Just because more people see a post by a paid influencer does not mean that the post is more trusted or influential than a five-star review or glowing testimonial by an actual customer. (See the stats at the top of this post.)

What’s a Customer Advocacy Program, and Why do You Need One?

Forrester, a highly-respected market research company, stated recently:

“Customer advocacy must be a part of your marketing strategy.”

This blog post addresses the top five questions about customer advocacy programs.

1. What’s a Customer Advocacy Program?

A customer advocacy program (AKA “Advocate marketing program”) is a marketing program that encourages and enables your highly-satisfied customers to pro-actively recommend your company and its products/services to friends, peers, and others.

Here are a couple other names that companies use instead of customer advocacy programs:

• Brand Advocate program

• Brand Ambassador program

2. How many companies have customer advocacy programs?

Does your company have a customer advocacy program?

If you answered “no,” the data below may trigger for you a severe case of “FOMO” (Fear of Missing Out).

According to a 2017 study by IDC, 67% of B2B IT vendors have customer advocacy programs, a 570% increase over 2016.

Many experts say that over 80% of B2C companies also have customer advocacy programs, although they may refer to them as “Brand Ambassador programs” or “Brand Advocate programs.”

3. What’s Driving Adoption of Customer Advocacy Programs?

Companies are embracing customer advocacy programs because of two key facts:

1. Buyers trust Word of Mouth more than anything. Ninety-two percent of people trust WOM over any form of paid media including ads. (source: Nielsen.) Online adults are 5X more likely to trust a brand or product recommendation from friends or family than an online ad, and they are twice as likely to trust them over information found on a brand’s website. (source: Forrester.) In the age of empowered buyers, you must have a systematic marketing program to amplify positive WOM on review sites, social networks, apps, and elsewhere.

2. Customer advocate marketing programs are very cost-effective.

On average, companies get a minimum of $10 return for each $1 they invest in customer advocacy programs as measured by:

1. Media value: trusted user-generated content like stories, testimonials, reviews, and more.

2. Sales value: driving prospect traffic, qualified leads, and even sales.

3. Loyalty/engagement value: increasing customer engagement and retention.

Our customers are seeing 10X-50X ROIs from their customer advocacy programs. In a study by Forrester, most B2B marketers said they can tie revenue results directly to advocate participation.

Customer advocacy programs typically cost a fraction of paid media programs like advertising.

For example, a single, full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal (one time, one insertion) is $248,000. For that amount or even much less, a company can fund a customer advocacy program involving thousands of Advocates for an entire year.

4. How do Customer Advocacy Programs Work?

Customer advocacy programs have four key steps, as shown below:

1. Invite. The first step is to invite customers to join your customer advocacy program. This can be done by sending emails to customers plus promoting the program on other communications channels like your social media; website; customer portals; on-boarding emails; shopping cart check-outs; or even within your product. Do you have an email list of customers who have replied with a positive answer to a customer satisfaction or Net Promoter survey? Or perhaps you have a list of customers who have posted positive reviews on your website? Great! Invite them to join your advocacy program.

2. Mobilize. Once customers join your advocacy program, you want to immediately enable and encourage them to participate. Here are three major ways to mobilize your Advocates. Get Advocates to:

   1. Create and post positive content like five-star reviews, glowing stories, testimonials, case studies, endorsement quotes, videos, photos, and more. A client of ours got a 400% increase in positive reviews and increased its ratings from 3.7 to 4.2 (out of 5) by mobilizing its Advocates to post reviews on a leading reviews site.

   2. Share your content. By this we mean getting Advocates to take your content — your case studies, blog posts, social posts, white papers, videos, etc. — and posting this on their social accounts: their LinkedIn, Twitter, or in the case of consumer brands, their Instagram and Facebook. By doing this, you can dramatically extend your reach. Most people today have a total of about 500-1,000 social contacts and connections. If you can mobilize 1,000 customer advocates to share your content, you can reach 1 million prospects.

   3. Refer peers/friends and share out your sales/promotional offers. Customer Advocates can serve as a virtual sales force by delivering highly-qualified referral leads for you plus posting your promotional offers on their social media. People are 4X more likely to purchase when referred by friends and referral leads are known to have a 5X-10X higher conversion rate than other leads. Plus, referred customers are 37% more loyal than non-referred customers (source: Deloitte.)

   Other ways of mobilizing Advocates:

   You can also enable and encourage Advocates to:

   1. Participate in product beta programs

   2. Take surveys and polls

   3. Speak on online events like virtual conferences, webinars, podcasts, etc.

   4. Participate in reference calls with prospects

   5. Participate in formal case studies; and more.

3. Reward. When Advocates participate in the activities above, you should show your appreciation by giving them rewards like gift cards, discounts, brand swag, and other perks. At Zuberance, we have a robust rewards system that includes all of these items plus enables Advocates to earn status within the Advocate community; get on a Leader Board; earn badges; and more.

4. Re-engage. Customer advocacy programs are not one-time marketing campaigns or promotions. They’re ongoing marketing programs. Most of our clients issue a new “challenge” to Advocates — a “challenge” is an activity they’d like Advocates to participate in — about once a week or once every two weeks. This enables you to get more value/ROI from customer advocacy programs than a one-time campaign plus enables you to build meaningful relationships with your Advocates.

5. what are the Top Benefits of Customer Advocacy Programs?

Here are the four top benefits your organization can get from a customer advocacy program:

1. Increased awareness/positive WOM. Getting Advocates to share positive information about you on social media boosts awareness and drives interest. As Forrester says: “WOM and peer testimony are powerful B2B marketing tools.” The same applies to B2C.

2. Dramatic, rapid increase in UGC. A client of ours needed customer endorsement quotes for its revised website. In the past, getting customer quotes was like pulling teeth. This time, the company tapped its customer advocates for quotes. They got almost two dozen quotes in 24 hours!

3. Increased engagement/loyalty. Customer churn is a big problem in nearly every industry and category. Study after study has shown that engaged customers are more loyal and less likely to leave. Customer advocacy programs help in two ways: 1) by boosting engagement of customer advocates themselves and 2) by leveraging customer advocates to remind other customers of the benefits your products/services offer.

4. Positive impact on sales. B2C companies can see an immediate sales lift from an advocacy program. This benefit often takes longer in B2B companies especially firms with long, complex purchase processes. Nevertheless, research proves that a pro-active program to showcase and amplify your happy customers positively impacts the sales funnel — from awareness to interest through consideration, trial, and eventually, sales.

Get Started Now

If you don’t have a customer advocacy program — or if you have “pieces” of a customer advocacy program like a referral program only — you’re missing a major opportunity to drive awareness, UGC, engagement, loyalty, and sales.

Footnote: What about other Advocates?

Customers aren’t the only ones who can serve as effective Advocates. Here are others who you can create advocacy programs for:

1. Employees

2. Partners like sellers, value-added resellers, distributors

3. Micro-influencers

In most cases, it’s best to have separate advocacy programs for these groups because a) Different groups of Advocates have different profiles, characteristics, and needs and b) while there may be some overlap, you usually will have different activities and rewards for different Advocate groups.

Got Advocate Marketing?

Most people would agree with this statement:

“Word of Mouth is the best form of advertising.”

You may see or hear hundreds or thousands of ads for a brand or product. Most of these ads never even register with you.

But if a friend recommends a brand or product, people listen, remember, and buy.

• 92% of people trust Word of Mouth (WOM) over any form of advertising (source: Nielsen.)

• People are 4X more likely to buy a product when a friend recommends it to them (source: Nielsen)

What is Advocate Marketing?

Advocate marketing (“Word of Mouth marketing”) is a marketing approach that gets your highly-satisfied customers (“Advocates”) plus others to spread positive WOM about your brand and products. B2B companies often refer to this approach as “Customer Advocacy Programs.”

Four Ways to Leverage Advocates

You get much more impact and value when you enable and encourage Advocates to spread positive WOM in multiple ways like these:

1. Create original content (AKA “UGC”) like positive reviews, stories, testimonials, videos, etc. and post this UGC on their social accounts (their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)

2. Share brand content like your videos, photos, testimonials, etc. on Advocates’ social accounts, extending your reach plus driving more impressions and engagement

3. Tell friends about your promotional offers like Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals; holiday offers like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day; plus many other promo offers. Doing this drives qualified traffic, leads, and sales.

4. Refer friends to purchase your products, get a free trial, subscribe, download or take other actions that help you build your sales funnel and drive revenues

#1 Advocate Marketing BEST practice

The best way to do Advocate marketing is via an ongoing Advocate marketing program, not a one-off campaign.

An ongoing Advocate marketing program enables you to leverage Advocates in all of the ways above (see 1-4) vs. limiting yourself to one activity.

Plus, you can learn who your Advocates are and build relationships with these VIP customers.

CREATE AN Advocate Hub

The best way to do an ongoing Advocate marketing program is via an Advocate hub.

An Advocate Hub is a private, by-invitation-only website for Advocates. (No haters, competitors, or evil doers allowed.)

On the Advocate Hub, Advocates learn about and participate in “challenges” — actions you’d like Advocates to complete.

This includes all of the activities above (again, see 1-4) plus other things like answer surveys, provide product feedback and ideas, etc.

Rewarding Advocates

When Advocates complete challenges, they earn points that can be redeemed for rewards.

Plus, they can earn badges, get on a Leader Board, and achieve status within the Advocate group.

This helps boost challenge participation and ongoing engagement.

Advocate marketing Benefits

Here are the three biggest marketing benefits:

1. Increased awareness. Getting Advocates to spread positive WOM is a very effective, inexpensive way to boost awareness of your brand and products. The average social media user has a total of over 1,000 friends and followers on their social channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) If you have 1,000 Advocates sharing on their social, you can reach 1 million people.

2. Lots of valuable UGC. A key part of Advocate marketing programs is user-generated content: stories, reviews, videos, photos, and more. Most brands struggle with creating compelling content. Your Advocates will help solve this problem for you. They’ll create fabulous content at a tiny fraction of the price you’d pay to social influencers or for professional video shoots.

3. Increased sales activity. An Advocate marketing program can help you generate highly-qualified referral leads, prospect traffic to your website and landing pages, and actual purchases.

   Many factors determine how much sales you get from an Advocate marketing programs. These factors include how large your Advocate group is; how compelling your products and promotional offers are; how compelling the rewards are that you offer Advocates for helping bring in new customers.

   Like almost any marketing program, it takes time, patience, and testing to get sales from an advocacy program.

SCALE, OPERATIONALIZE EXISTING PROGRAMS

Many of our customers report that they’re getting other important benefits from having a systematic advocacy program and automated platform. These include:

1. Dramatic savings of time and effort for a customer advocacy program

2. Ability to scale and grow their customer advocacy program, without increasing time and effort.

3. Greater ability to customer advocacy program results and ROI.

Summary: Get Started Now

More than ever, your success depends not so much on what you say about your brand and products, but rather what your customers say.

If you don’t have an ongoing Advocate marketing program, you’re missing a major opportunity to build your brand and business through your best marketers and salespeople: your authentic Advocates!

How this Company Got a 400% Increase in Positive Reviews

Online reviews can make or break your company:

• 92% of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews (source: BrightLocal, 2015)

• 90% of people say online reviews influence their purchase decisions (source: Dimensional Research, 2013)

• 88% of people trust online reviews from strangers as much as personal recommendations (source: BrightLocal, 2014)

Negative reviews can kill your sales:

• 92% of people will hesitate to do business with companies with less than four out of five stars (source: BrightLocal, 2014

Company Gets 400% Increase in Positive Reviews

Zuberance created and powered a program for this company to identify and mobilize their customer Advocates.

A key part of this program is encouraging and enabling customer reviews.

Here are the results after only a few weeks.

Notes:

• Customers were not paid to create reviews.

• The reviews were not edited or altered in any way, nor were the reviews subject to prior approval.

• Customers were encouraged to post honest reviews based on their actual experience with the product.

3 BIG Marketing Advantages of having an "Advocate Army"

An “Advocate Army” is a group of Advocates that go out of their way to spread positive WOM about your brand or products on social networks, e-commerce sites, and elsewhere.

Depending on the size of your customer base, your Advocate Army can be hundreds or even thousands strong.

We work with a software company that has an Advocate Army of over 100,000 enthusiastic Advocates!

How an Advocate Army can Help You

Here are three BIG marketing advantages of having an Advocate Army:

1. More UGC

User-generated content — stories, reviews, testimonials, posts, and more — is 2X more trusted than brand-generated content and is proven to have significant influence over purchases.

By mobilizing your Advocates, you can enable a ton of UGC. On average, a brand with with 1,000 Advocates can get over 3,000 unique pieces of UGC in one year.

That’s a powerful content marketing engine! You can leverage this content on your social; on your website; on your landing pages and elsewhere to drive conversions and sales.

2. More Reach & Impressions

Awareness still matters. That’s why many brands continue pouring money into advertising and other forms of paid media.

Amplify your Advocates! Make it easy for Advocates to share their content and yours on their social channels; shopping sites and review sites; plus elsewhere online.

On average, each Advocate has 1,045 friends and followers. (The average Twitter user has 707 followers and the average Facebook user has 338 friends. Source: Brandwatch)

This is a conservative estimate that doesn’t include the number of social contacts Advocates have on other social networks like LinkedIn and Instagram plus the number of people who view Advocate’s five-star reviews on Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and other sites.

This means you can reach 1,045,000 people via 1,000 Advocates each time they share on their social channels.

This brand got its Advocates to re-tweet a tweet of theirs. Look what happened: a 10X increase in the number re-tweets.

3. More Referrals & Sales

People are about 4X more likely to purchase a product when referred by a friend, according to Nielsen.

And referred-in customers have a 37% higher retention rate than other customers.

Depending on much customers pay for your products or services, and how long they typically stay, referral programs can generate millions in dollars in revenues for your company. (source: Deloitte)

Start mobilizing your Advocate Army now to get these three big marketing advantages - and more.