Ambassador Blog

Marketing by Word-of-Mouth: What Works (and Doesn't)

amity@getambassador.com (Amity Kapadia) — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 15:55:00 GMT

Marketing by word-of-mouth has influenced purchasing decisions on everything from buying a new car, to choosing a restaurant for dinner, and even selecting software vendors.

It’s no coincidence that you and your online network share a few of the same favorite things. Who doesn’t love hearing about a great product or service from a trustworthy source?

Now more than ever, word-of-mouth marketing strategies are focused on building long-term partnerships with customers, fans, and prospects. In fact, most digital marketing teams have at least one KPI dedicated to developing and nurturing relationships.

The shift toward a more personal marketing approach has been driven by the increased demand of consumers who want to know that the brands they work with not only offer quality products or services, but truly care about them. People want to know there are real faces behind logos, that brands are listening to their concerns and that your company is willing to go above and beyond to satisfy consumer needs.

Enter word-of-mouth marketing.

Marketing by Word-of-Mouth: Strategies That Are Proven To Work (and Not Work)

Whether it’s making a purchase via a referral link, or passing leads from a verified partner, there’s no disputing the magnetic pull of word-of-mouth marketing with the modern consumer.

As marketers, it's important to activate a word-of-mouth marketing strategy than enables your customers and fans to share your product, service, and experience.

So, what works well - and what doesn't? Let's dive in:

What Works: Giving Your Customers, Fans, Affiliates, Partners, and Influencers Tools to Promote Your Brand

For word-of-mouth marketing to work, you can’t expect people to invest their own time and energy into developing tools and assets to support your brand. Instead, you need to make the process as simple as possible. This might mean creating a hashtag that customers can share on Twitter, or developing email templates that ensure ambassadors use the right language to share the right landing page URL.

In fact, a study found that while 83% of satisfied customers are willing to refer a brand, only 29% actually did so. While there are many variables on why this gap exists, a surefire way to close the chasm is to give your fans the tools they need.

Decreasing the effort required to deliver a referred customer or a new lead is a critical piece of the word-of-mouth marketing equation.

What Doesn't Work: A Program That's Too Complicated or Tough To Find

Whichever word-of-mouth strategy you are using - be it referral marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, or partner marketing - if your program isn’t public facing or it’s difficult to use and share with the click of a button, then you’ll severely limit your ability to drive word-of-mouth.

For example, if you’re requiring customers to manually input a potential referral’s information with a lengthy form, chances are you'll see a higher abandonment rate than simply asking for an email address. Multiple steps to share your brand can create a barrier that significantly hinders referral activity, so keep the process simple for anyone (customers, fans, admirers, influencers advocates, etc.) to share your brand with everyone who might be interested in it.

What Works: Incorporating Word-of-Mouth Into Your Overall Marketing Strategy

For word-of-mouth marketing to really scale, it must be embedded into every aspect of the user experience. For example, your referral program should be a call to action included in newsletters and blog posts. Or employee email signatures should feature a link to join your partner program.

Most importantly, every word-of-mouth program should be fully integrated with other critical systems (customer-relationship management, marketing automation, eCommerce technology, point-of-sale systems, optimization tools, etc.).

What Doesn't Work: Set It & Forget It Mentality

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: Don't fall into the trap of setting your program up, and then forgetting about it.

Like all strategic marketing initiatives, word-of-mouth programs thrive in an environment of perpetual optimization.

This is where having one marketing software to manage your referral, affiliate, influencer, and partner programs can be enormously helpful. With the right tools, you can create a structured process around monitoring, tracking, testing and incentivizing program members and their activity.

Why is this valuable?

Over time, the data gathered will provide clear trends into the activities, channels, and customer personas that are driving the best results. Arming yourself with that insight will make it much easier to successfully scale your word-of-mouth marketing program(s).

For word-of-mouth to consistently deliver bottom-line results, this strategy must be part of how your business operates. Without structure and commitment, you’re largely at the mercy of chance. But with the right approach, process and technology, you can turn marketing by word-of-mouth into a predictable, scalable channel of high-quality revenue.

How to Optimize Your Referral Program

Chelsey Chubb — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 19:30:32 GMT

Zaps. The word itself ignites a spark, especially if it's referencing a way to simplify your marketing workload. If you're a busy marketer looking for a way to optimize your referral marketing workflow, keep reading for how to automate tasks so you can focus your time and energy on what matters most.

Zapier + Ambassador: A Powerful Way to Optimize Your Referral Program

Zapier connects the apps you use everyday to automate your work. Basically, you can use Zapier to connect Ambassador with your favorite third-party applications. From newsletter software to billing applications and Salesforce and HubSpot, these integrations keep your referral program running smoothly while seamlessly syncing data between your platforms.

So what are the best, most useful zaps to keep your referral program humming? Here are my top five zaps to optimize your referral marketing program. You might actually be able to grow your program, engage brand ambassadors, AND have enough time to grab a coffee!

1. Referral Program + Email Marketing

This zap lets you easily add referral program members to a segmented list in your email marketing system. Keeping the program top of mind is key to keeping your referral program’s engagement high. As an added bonus, bring each of your ambassador’s unique share links into a field to be dynamically populated into your engagement emails. This shortcut will allow you to provide an immediate way for your ambassadors to share your brand.

2. New Brand Ambassadors + Website Subscribers

Use a form powered by your marketing automation system to create new subscribers.
By customizing and automating a landing page form on your site, you can keep traffic on your site, while providing a seamless experience for new members signing up for your program. Manually adding ambassadors into the system is not scalable. By automating the process, you allow your team to focus on the things that matter, like engaging and measuring the progress of your referral program.

3. Member Activity + Referral Program Management

Help the entire team be more efficient by posting a Slack channel message whenever ambassadors take specific actions within your referral program. Why? Keep a pulse on your program and internally celebrate the milestones of your program, while also giving the team running your ambassador program an immediate way to see who is making an impact on your program and reach out to those ambassadors to keep the engagement up.

4. Data + Referral Campaign Analytics

With this recipe, you can capture event related data in a spreadsheet to create your own custom reporting machine. By using our webhooks to track specific metrics in a spreadsheet tailored exactly to what you want to see, you can quickly filter, share, and optimize based on your unique needs. Additionally, using this zap allows you to run limited time campaigns alongside your main campaigns, as well as reward for events that you may not want to reward for long term. These could be things like ‘most shares’, or driving signups for the Ambassador program itself. This can help to boost engagement during key sales cycles, promotional events, and new product launches.

5. Automate Referral Payouts + Custom Workflows

This zap puts you in control to trigger commissions within Ambassador with custom workflows. We understand and work with many companies that have very complex use cases, and sometimes, that means an out-of-the-box solution is not the answer. By using Zapier with Ambassador, you can trigger commissions for custom workflows, allowing you to send a bonus commission in circumstances beyond our single and recurring-event commission structure, without requiring additional campaigns.

Zaps for Referral Program Success

No matter what other apps you use, chances are Ambassador integrates with them via Zapier. Here are a list of popular Zapier integrations that users utilize to be more productive.

Have other great zaps to share? Tweet me at @ambassador and I'll share them with our readers!

Marketing a Webinar: How to Create an Endless Supply of Content

amity@getambassador.com (Amity Kapadia) — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 17:07:12 GMT

Webinars are a key part of acquiring and retaining customers. But many marketing teams are still unclear on how to leverage the content webinars create and use these evergreen assets in future campaigns.

As a B2B marketer myself, I get it - planning and executing a successful webinar takes A LOT of time, resources and coordination. And it’s usually worth it.

From high-level education videos to success story webinars to pre-recorded demos - interactive visual content can help connect brands to their prospects in a more human way than email or white papers ever can. In fact, 73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders say that webinars are the number one channel to generate high-quality leads.

So, the last thing you want to do is waste your efforts. How can you transform your webinars into an endless supply of content? We actually just discussed best practices and tips with Content Marketing Institute, watch the on-demand webinar here or read on!

What to do Before and After Your Live Webinar

Let’s start from the top - how do you create an evergreen webinar? Having an angle or topic that is virtually timeless is the key to repurposing webinar content.

For example, if you're going to run a webinar this coming January about Marketing Trends for 2020; the title will be important in order for you to continue using this asset. Try using a title like The Future of Marketing. Or try a different angle like The Guide to Marketing Forecasting and dive into how exactly how you came to select the trends. You don't want a potential lead to come across your webinar in November of next year and wonder why you're promoting an asset titled Marketing Trends of 2020.

Another way to develop evergreen topics for webinars is to let your best performing marketing assets inform your webinars. For example, do you have a blog post that performs really well year over year? Update and refresh the content into a webinar. You can easily repurpose the most important information and actionable advice from the blog post and even produce additional marketing assets, like nurture emails.

Here’s the thing — webinars require a significant amount of prep work. So much so, that it’s easy to forget about the after-life of a webinar. But, it’s a mistake to run a webinar and then let it collect virtual dust in an unvisited section of your website.

In fact, webinars are a gold mine of marketing assets with so many nuggets of content that can be pulled out and used based on your needs.

For example, we recently led a webinar with a media partner that offered more of a storytelling aspect than some of our other webinars. After the live event, we pitched a few articles with different angles using the content from the webinar; we created infographic-style images using data shared during the webinar; we created a few different style CTAs that could be used across our own marketing workflow; and we promoted the gated on-demand version to different segments of our database.

We easily (and quickly) developed over five new assets from ONE webinar. This beats slapping the webinar recording on your website and then forgetting about it.

Repurposing webinars is a great way to provide valuable information to your audience without having to create net new content from scratch. So let's break it down - here's what our team usually does after a webinar.

First and foremost, we send out the recorded version to all registrants and publish it on our Resources section of our website. We also transcribe the presentation and use that content to create blog posts, guest contributions to other sites, and sometimes even use the messaging across other Sales and Marketing initiatives. Another great way to use the transcription is to actually post the full text along with your webinar recording. Not only does this provide a huge SEO boost, but it's also offering your readers another way to consume this type of content.

Unfortunately, people don't have the time - or attention span - to sit through an entire webinar but a lengthy visual presentation can easily be reworked into a handful of short, digestible video clips. Slice up the webinar recording into shorter video clips that can accompany blog posts or be shared on social and email.

You'll want to pin this for later - here's a post-webinar checklist of content assets that can be created from your live-event.

This is all to say: Take time to plan for post-event. Don't just send the webinar recording in an email, post it on your website, and call it a day. Take a strategic approach to each webinar and pull as much content as possible from it.

After all, a well-produced webinar has already been researched and organized. So, you don’t have to track down an expert or commit to extensive planning time. At the end of the day, repurposing webinar content is both valuable and relatively simple to create or build on.

B2B Referral Marketing: 3 Ways To Unlock Its Full Potential

amity@getambassador.com (Amity Kapadia) — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:21:00 GMT

While B2B referral marketing and consumer refer-a-friend campaigns often have different objectives when trying to reach their target audience, the objective is still the same.For example, a B2B marketer spends substantially more time on crafting thought leadership content, while a B2C marketer is aiming to connect to their consumers on a brand level that is entertaining and “top of mind, tip of tongue.”

But regardless of audience, the ultimate goal for both types of marketers is to drive revenue. And whether your company provides enterprise solutions or toys for children, the use of referral marketing can dramatically increase existing customer engagement and new customer acquisition.

3 Ways to Achieve B2B Referral Marketing Success

If your marketing goals include getting in front of as many responsive prospects as possible and increasing leads, then there’s no reason that referral marketing shouldn’t be a priority. Here's how to get started:

1. ASK! Everytime. Everyone. Everywhere.

One of the keys to running a successful referral program in the B2B world is pretty simple: talk about it. Mention your referral program to every client you have and let it be known on every sales demo you host that your business rewards any referral.

Here are some simple tips to start using today:

- Display your referral program prominently on your site’s homepage

- Dedicate a landing page that explains how your referral program works and optimize for SEO

- Include referral call-to-actions in all your email marketing efforts and include links to your referral landing page

2. Drive referral leads to your BEST piece of content

According to LinkedIn Marketing, B2B buyers will consume 10 pieces of content before even considering a purchase. Make sure your resource page is packed with case studies, white papers, guides, blogs and e-books that referrals can consume once they’ve landed on your site.

Direct referral links to your highest performing piece of content to ensure a great first impression and higher conversion rates. If you utilize progressive profiling, this can also be a great tool to learn more about your prospects.

3. Make it worth their while

Rewarding an executive with a $10 gift card won’t generate the engagement your B2B referral program needs. Take Hubspot for example, they reward their brand ambassadors with a chance to win a ticket and airfare to Inbound, their annual marketing convention!

So what’s the right type of incentive to offer? From our experience: Cash is king. Whether it comes in the form of actual cash (PayPal or Dwolla) or gift cards, time over time, we see the best performance when cash is the reward.

While points, loyalty credits, and discounts might work for B2C referral programs, B2B referrers aren’t interested in those incentives. Instead, they respond to cold, hard cash.

Make sure the reward you are offering is incentivizing enough to make your customers share.

Generating Revenue With Referrals

To be successful with referral marketing, it's important for B2B marketers to use a mix of channels, platforms, and persona-specific messaging to ensure relevancy and awareness across multiple touch-points.

In other words, you have to view your B2B referral marketing program as a key piece of the entire customer journey, not just a bolt-on campaign to drive a few leads.

Creating a Referral Marketing Campaign: 6 Steps to Getting Started

amity@getambassador.com (Amity Kapadia) — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 14:32:00 GMT

Are you trying to get a referral marketing campaign off the ground? Or perhaps your brand is already running a referral program, but it's getting tough to manage the process with spreadsheets and post-it notes. With word-of-mouth marketing driving billions of dollars in spend annually, it's no shock that more and more marketers are looking to put a referral marketing program in place.

What’s surprising is just how many thriving brands are sticking to a pen-and-paper approach for managing customer recommendations even though the consumer economy is getting more digital by the day.

Referral marketing automation is key for brands that are looking to scale this customer acquisition channel.

Manual referral programs, in the B2B sector or eCommerce industry, simply can’t scale. Here’s a generalized scenario similar to numerous cases we’ve seen: A marketing team looking to ramp up referral customers launches a brand ambassador program to reward their loyal customers who are referring the brand to their networks. The brand sends coupons, swag, even cash rewards in exchange for purchases made via referrals. The marketing team promotes the program on their website, tracks ambassador activity on a spreadsheet, prints out coupons, mails out swag, and sends out payment to those who qualify.

At first, there are only 50 brand ambassadors, so it is a relatively easy task. As the program grows, there are quickly 500-1000 brand ambassadors joining monthly. Now the time commitment for the marketing team is increasing and other core marketing functions are suffering.

The team is spending time manually segmenting their database, confirming contact information, mapping share links to purchases, then manually creating and distributing rewards. Not only is this an inefficient use of time and resources, but this approach offers no real way to monitor and optimize success.

If you’re nodding your head along to this scenario, you’re probably ready to take the leap from a manual to an automated referral marketing program.

6 Steps to Creating a Successful Referral Marketing Campaign

1. Plan Your Incentive Structure

At this stage, it’s important to develop an incentive structure that reflects your company's goals. In order to create the right incentive structure, you’ll have to select the correct form and flow of your rewards. There are a few ways to do this:

Monetary vs. Non-monetary Rewards

Monetary rewards have a direct cash value, so it’s the most straightforward form of rewarding. Non-monetary rewards are a more unique form of rewarding since there is no direct monetary value. These rewards are often delivered via early access, loyalty points, and swag.

Single vs. Double Incentive

Companies that follow a single incentive structure only reward the referring party. With double incentive structures, both the referrer and the referred customer are rewarded.

Companies must fine tune their referral program to find a valuable, compelling and easy-to-maintain incentive structure. And for good reason, strong incentives are proven to drive more sharing through your ambassador network.

2. Customize Your Referral Campaign

Infuse your referral campaign with recognizable elements of your brand. From targeted emails and registration forms to login pages and refer-a-friend widgets, keep the look and feel of your referral program consistent with your brand. Members of your program should never feel as though they are leaving your brand experience.

Ambassador’s visual editor empowers marketers to make real-time referral campaign updates.

3. Enable Tracking and Rewards

Now that you’ve built a branded campaign, it’s time to start tracking referrals and issuing rewards. By selecting a platform that syncs with your existing marketing technologies, maintaining a simple payout system, and allowing for efficient communication with advocates, your program becomes easily scalable and provides data for optimization.

4. Test and Test Again

Like with any marketing campaign, a simple misstep can disrupt your entire seamless process. Before going live, be sure to test the fundamental parts of your campaign. Pay special attention to components like emails and shareable URLs that are crucial to your ambassadors’ success. Set up a generic profile to experience your referral email as a customer would. Are there any typos? Are referral instructions and next steps clearly expressed? Does the URL direct ambassadors to the correct page?

5. Invite Ambassadors

Now that you’ve built and designed a unique referral campaign, you’ll want to tell everyone about it. There are a few strategic ways to extend an initial referral campaign invitation.

You can import contacts from your existing database and auto-enroll them in your referral campaign. You can paste a link to your portal on social media pages. You can add the refer-a-friend widget to your website homepage. You can email or text a custom link to select contacts and invite them to join.

No matter the method, ensure that your referral campaign is an easily accessible and intuitive component of the buyer’s journey.

6. Continuous Improvement

You're almost there! But referral success doesn't stop at building and promoting your referral marketing program. The only way to truly perfect your referral marketing strategy is to optimize your program.

Referral marketing isn't a standalone strategy, it is intended to blend into the rest of your marketing experience. One of the major benefits of optimization is being able to make real-time edits in response to sharing behavior and company goals.

Whether that means targeting a new segment or starting from scratch with a new campaign, referral success is rooted in proactively seeking the most inviting and compelling methods for your users.

Congratulations! You’re on your way to launching a successful referral marketing program. Your referral marketing program does more than give your customers a place to talk about your brand, it’s an innovative way to blaze a new trail for new revenue and quality leads. With continuous optimization and targeted outreach, you’ll start seeing referrals flood in in no time.

3 WOMM (Word-of-Mouth Marketing) Tips for B2B Marketers

amity@getambassador.com (Amity Kapadia) — Sun, 04 Aug 2019 18:15:00 GMT

With WOMM (word-of-mouth marketing) driving billions of dollars in sales every year, it’s no surprise that it’s one of the most coveted sources of marketing. Positive word-of-mouth interactions can exponentially drive sales when leveraged through channels like referral marketing, affiliate programs, influencer marketing, and partnerships.

What exactly is WOMM?

Word-of-mouth marketing is a naturally occurring conversation, typically face-to-face, that results in a recommendation of a product/service. Transitioning this naturally occurring conversation into a marketing strategy, word-of-mouth marketing actively influences and encourages consumers to share their recommendations.

But thanks to technology, word-of-mouth marketing is no longer limited to face-to-face conversations.

As marketers, we know that countless online conversations about our brands are happening every day. In fact, curious customers have learned all that they need to know about your brand long before your company can formally introduce its own products or services via marketing campaigns. So where are customers learning about your product?

Online, of course!

Forrester reports that by 2020, 80% of the buying process is expected to occur without any direct human-to-human interaction.

Sure, you could leave your brand reputation and offerings in the hands of anonymous commenters and third-party websites. You can even hold out for a life-changing viral hit if you’d like. Or you can intentionally drive word-of-mouth by proactively putting strategies in place.

Now you might be thinking, "WOMM strategies sound like they would work for eCommerce brands, but what about for B2B companies?"

Well, we discovered that B2B WOMM programs, like referral marketing, not only stack up, but surpass the eCommerce and financial services industry. In fact, dove into the data to find that B2B software and services clients had average revenue three times higher than eCommerce.

3 WOMM Tips for B2B Marketers

Forging authentic, long-lasting bonds with your customers takes time, but we’ve gathered three simple steps to get you started.

Tip #1: Build Trust

According to Nielsen’s, 84% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family and friends about products. That means customer-to-customer recommendations are the highest ranked source of trustworthiness.

While it may seem like a long road ahead to convert curious website visitors to loyal customers and then to active brand ambassadors, trust is the shortest path to reach this goal.

Tip #2: Appeal to Existing Customers

WOMM strategies, like a referral program, empower companies to track the sharing behavior of their most valuable business asset — existing customers. Just think about it, one good brand experience can inspire your customers to make repeat purchases and open the floodgates for new leads. This could potentially lay the foundation for future business and revenue.

In fact, according to the Journal of Marketing, recommended customers are 18% more likely to stay with a business than other customers. More so, referred customers tend to spend more and stay longer. Which is why you want to ensure that sharing your brand is easy and the reward for doing so is appropriate.

Tip #3: Automate Manual Processes

There are a lot of uncontrollable variables involved in building trust with your customer base and attracting new customers. Thanks to marketing automation, your WOMM programs don’t have to exist beyond your control. Technology ensures that ambassadors are easily enrolled in referral programs, influencers are effectively reached, and affiliates are rewarded in a timely manner.

They get rewards and you get cost-effective, high-quality leads and sales. That's a win-win for ambassadors and marketers alike.

Making The Push for WOMM

If your B2B marketing goals include getting in front of as many responsive prospects as possible and increasing leads, then there’s no reason that WOMM shouldn’t be a priority. You’ll be surprised at how many of your existing clients are willing to be your ambassadors, and how many potential clients are waiting to find your product.

How to Build a Channel Partner Program

amity@getambassador.com (Amity Kapadia) — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 15:51:31 GMT

With more and more companies leveraging partner marketing, it’s never been more important for marketers to learn how to build a channel partner program. In fact, in today’s multi-channel, always-on, digital landscape, it has become nearly impossible to generate awareness, trust, and acquire customers in one certain way, at one specific place without enlisting in the help of partners to increase success. More so, 63.5% of companies say partners contribute to their annual revenue¹. Prioritizing partner enablement can put your business in the best position to succeed.

Partners can be effective in adding to your total value proposition, better addressing your customer’s needs, further differentiating your product from the competition, and helping acquire more customers, faster. They can even help fill holes in your offerings or delivery, all while extending the strength of your brand to potential customers. Intelligently managing partners also helps marketers understand what can be attributed to each marketing factor and channel to explain the influence on sales. Most importantly, partners should help deliver one shared experience to your end consumer.

Get Started: How to Build a Channel Partner Program

Before we dive right in, let’s make a few assumptions. First, your buyers are researching your brand before actually engaging with you. Roughly 80% of the B2B buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer reaches out to sales². Which is why it’s crucial to build relationships with customers using the help of partners.

Second, let’s assume we’re working off the same definition of partner marketing.

What is partner marketing?

Partner marketing leverages the synchronicities of two companies - each with its own brand equity, core expertise, unique value proposition, and its own distribution strength - to create strategic alliances to gain market share both companies otherwise may have a long and arduous process of acquiring.

For example, a US-based software company is looking to expand into EMEA. Instead of relocating employees, hiring and providing extensive training on culture and processes and GTM strategy, as well as footing the bill for the expensive overhead that comes with more offices, the company decides to develop strategic partnerships in EMEA. These partners are experts in the region, have their own networks and existing customer bases of the target profile, and can be quickly brought up to speed on the product offerings. This will decrease the timeline and cost to acquire and service customers in EMEA. Additionally, this partnership provides greater marketing exposure which, ultimately, drives new customers.

In this instance, the company is able to dramatically decrease the speed to market while increasing the quantity and quality of feedback from their target market, via local, experienced partners.

Another assumption we can make is that you are part of a B2B organization and are looking for ways to create strong, relevant, and effective partner programs.

So, with these assumptions in place, where do marketers start when it comes to developing a partner marketing plan?

Step 1: Grow Your Audience: Increasing the number of partners in your program

Similar to running a referral program, partner marketing is in part a numbers game. Instead of limiting your program to a small niche group, you’re likely to see better results with expanded outreach. When companies open up their programs to different types of partners, activity spikes and the top of the funnel begins to expand.

Here are 3 ways to cast a wider net when it comes to reaching more potential partners:

Promote Your Program: Don’t rely on partners to come to you or hope that the right partners will find your program. Announce your program launch through dedicated emails to those already in your network, such as industry associations, to start seeing results quickly. And keep the momentum rolling by sharing a media statement on LinkedIn or distributing a press release for every new partnership developed. This exposure is good for both sides and shares a unified front to the public.
Add a Program Overview Landing Page: Provide partners with a comprehensive overview of the program by having a dedicated page to educate them. This also makes it easy to share URLs and point back to this page whenever promoting your partner program.
Utilize a Self-Serve Registration Page: Having a registration page allows potential partners to “opt-in” and for you to collect additional information, such as their company profile and other useful details. Once they submit an application via the registration form, you can choose to immediately deliver access to your program, or do additional manual screening. Either way, applications or registration pages substantially reduce the front-end administrative time with prospective partners that may not be a good fit. Don't forget, for relationships you’ve established with existing partners, include them into your program to make participation turnkey.

While quality usually trumps quantity, it’s important to choose the right partners that make sense for your business and to the end consumer. There should be a synergy and balance in the relationship between two different organizations with unique, but complimentary offerings.

Typically, when companies have the right messaging and relevant incentives for partners that are adding to the top of the funnel, passing along leads, and even helping to close deals - a ripple effect is created.

In order for partner marketing to work, it must be beneficial for all parties.

Step 2: Focus on Attribution: Track all of the leads your partners are driving, as well as pipeline attribution and new deals

Most marketers today are interested in - okay, obsessed with - metrics, data, and analytics. And conversion tracking is just as important to partners. By giving partners visibility into your sales process, partners are empowered to see the prospect go through the entire lifecycle, not just hand over a lead.

Top of funnel: It’s critical that you recognize your partner’s efforts when a lead they generated converts on your website or is submitted by the partner. If your partner program leverages automation, you can easily notify partners via triggered email notifications.

Bottom of funnel: When a partner’s lead ultimately becomes a paying customer, brands need to share the details with the partner. Often times, the sales cycle can be long, so reaching out to acknowledge the attribution is a great opportunity to validate their efforts and engage with them to continue their promotion of your products and services.

Pay Day! Whether you are paying a one-time fee, recurring commissions, or have a revenue-share percentage agreement, partners want clear communication on when they’re being paid and how much to expect. Again, automated email notifications tend to work best.

Step 3: Understand What Matters Most to Your Partners: Ensure you are offering the right incentive at the right time

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to developing an incentive structure, it's important to build a program that best suits your company and partners. Determining the mechanics of your commissions or revenue share is the first step in developing an effective program that will generate the most leads for your business. The most successful incentive structures are easy to explain, implement, and payout.

Here are 3 types of incentive types to consider:

Utilize a Revenue Share: Most partner programs offer a commission that is a percentage of the total purchase. You can easily fulfill cash payouts all over the world via PayPal or Payment Rails, and these are best-in-class options. Tip: If you’re a SaaS company, recurring commissions are a popular way to ensure alignment with partners and their referrals.
Offer a Dual Incentive: Rewarding both the partner and the referee, shared end customer, can provide a substantial lift. And, helps the partner further establish a relationship with their referral prospects.
Tiered Model: Partner leads close a much higher rate than other channels, but not every lead immediately turns into new business. These valuable leads are likely worth some small incentive - think $20-$100 - as a way to recognize and encourage more partner engagement and activity. Then, when a partner lead closes and becomes a paying customer, you should provide them a larger commission.

Having a partner program in place that can reach new audiences, increase your pipeline, and motivate partners to continue referring new business is the cornerstone of every growing B2B organization’s marketing plan.

Learn more about building a channel partner program in our Definitive Guide, available below.

8 Word-of-Mouth Marketing Examples (and How to Start Using These Ideas Today)

amity@getambassador.com (Amity Kapadia) — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 17:19:00 GMT

While word-of-mouth marketing impacts a tremendous amount of revenue for most brands, fewer than 1% of all companies have an actual word of mouth strategy in place. We all know word-of-mouth works, but for it to deliver results, we need to have a strategic plan for it.

So we rounded up 8 word-of-mouth marketing examples to inspire and integrate into your current strategy:

1. Create a Call-to-Action Promoting Sign-Ups

Simply asking people to join your word-of-mouth programs can be a surprisingly effective method. Include a brief call-to-action in your email asking subscribers to opt-in or use an image CTA in your blog posts. It’s a great way to not only loop in new website visitors who may not have known about your current programs, but also re-engage former ones who may have fallen off the map.

2. Share Your Program Everywhere

Whether it’s using a chat tool or integrating a widget within your customer newsletter, there are numerous ways to incorporate your word-of-mouth marketing programs across all marketing channels. The key is to be noticeable and easy to click on in order to take visitors directly to your program landing pages.

3. Include Social Commentary or Customer Reviews

If you have a flattering customer review, shout it from the rooftops - better yet, share it on your program landing page! Including positive messages from partners, customers, affiliates, and influencers will help build a stronger community for new members to participate and make them more engaged in your word-of-mouth marketing program.

4. Promote Email Signups Directly on Your Website

Here’s an easy one: create an integrated form on your website to make it easy for fans to sign up. This goes back to friction: It shouldn’t be difficult for potential leads to subscribe to your program. Make sure you’re effectively leveraging multiple acquisition channels to make the greatest impact.

5. Provide an Incentive to Share

There’s no better way to re-engage brand ambassadors than simply reminding them of your program and offering new incentives. For example, you can offer new subscribers a special discount in the form of a coupon that only they can see. Or allow them to sign up for your referral program right on the spot. In other words, you want to offer a reward for sharing that will give customers a nudge in the right direction.

6. Offer Exclusive Perks to Engaged Members

It’s all about the perks! So why not give your fans what they want? Showcase your brand to the most engaged fans by offering priority access to new product launches or membership to exclusive communities. Your ambassadors will feel special, your brand will generate clout, and new customers will receive cool, exciting benefits. It’s a win-win-win.

7. Use Charity to Drive Word-of-Mouth Referrals

Incentivize your fans to share your brand with their friends by offering to donate a given amount of money to their favorite charity whenever they do. Or select a charity to sponsor and then rally your fans to contribute to your chosen cause. Then every time customers participate, prompt them to share about it with their networks. By giving fans the ability to push out their activity to different networks, you’ll generate social proof and active engagement. Whatever method you choose, you’ll be looping in potential customers who may not have heard about your products but are passionate about a particular cause.

8. Share a Welcome Email to New Brand Ambassadors

Kick off membership to your word-of-mouth program by sending out a welcome email to new brand ambassadors. Whether it’s a customer referral program or an affiliate campaign, energizing new members is a sign of good things to come.

Share Your Word-of-Mouth Marketing Examples With Us!

Inspiration is all around us - especially online! Tweet us @ambassador with your favorite word-of-mouth marketing examples and we'll share it.

Building a community via word-of-mouth is an often an overlooked component of successful marketing programs. But with such easy wins, you can quickly integrate word-of-mouth marketing into a broader brand strategy.

How to Create Word-of-Mouth Buzz

amity@getambassador.com (Amity Kapadia) — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 13:21:00 GMT

In digital marketing where the landscape is changing at the drop of dime, it's important for marketers to lean on proven strategies - like how to create word-of-mouth marketing buzz - rather than staying on top of the latest trend that might negatively impact your bottom line, and eat up many of your resources.

When everything is available to us at our fingertips, it’s easy for businesses to get caught up in the many marketing avenues the web has to offer. Successful marketers know that chasing the trend du jour only serves as a distraction of time, money, and not to mention, resources. While things like social media advertising and email marketing are still great tools, the single most powerful way to reach more people and turn those prospects into paying customers is through word-of-mouth marketing.

A good word-of-mouth marketing strategy has the opportunity to deliver something that resonates with your brand and customers, is evergreen, and grows more valuable over time.

The Playbook on How to Create Word-of-Mouth Buzz

So how can brands harness the power of word-of-mouth to gain new leads, valuable traffic, and new leads?

1. Find the right word-of-mouth strategy for your brand

Digital marketing, and especially social marketing, is actually a form of word-of-mouth marketing. Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook are all just different forms of the same foolproof tool. But how do you stay “on trend” while sticking to your budget?

Constantly iterate and strategically invest.

Find a word-of-mouth marketing strategy - such as, a referral program - that works for your brand and truly adopt it to match your overall business goals.

Let’s say you recruit 100 passionate brand ambassadors and each of those 100 people has their own network of 1,000 people. Every time one of those ambassadors shares information about your brand, it reaches everyone within their network, ultimately extending your reach to an additional 100,000 people. All of this without having to pay for additional advertising. Plus, given the statistics on how much more likely people are to purchase based on recommendations, this increased reach will be much more lucrative in terms of sales potential.

Take Ria Financial, for example. Over the course of 25+ years, one of the biggest drivers of growth for the company was good, old fashioned word-of-mouth. So when Ria began to build out its digital business, incorporating referral marketing technology was a no-brainer. At scale, the company expected referrals to become the engine driving its new customer acquisition efforts, ideally at a low CPA and with minimal customer service issues. To reach that goal, Ria made the strategic decision to invest in a referral marketing platform. Three months later, Ria acquired thousands of new customers and generated a large stream of referrals.

Clearly, word-of-mouth marketing works. But that isn’t always enough. Just kicking off a program and walking away will rarely deliver scalable results of that caliber. As with most marketing initiatives, nurturing is a must.

2. Connect personally with your audience

When people see ads on TV, on billboards, in magazines or online, they know those ads are being manufactured by the company behind them. A recommendation, on the other hand, even from a person who isn’t a friend or family member, is perceived to be unbiased, making it more believable and trustworthy.

In fact, a study² by Jay Baer showed that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know directly, and even anonymous reviewers have a 70% trust rate when they post online about a brand.

Use your brand’s social channels to join the conversation your customers and potential customers are already having about you. The more people trust the opinions of others, the more your sales should increase.

According to Hubspot, 71% of consumers said they would be much more likely to make a purchase based on a recommendation, compared to just 7% that would purchase without such a recommendation. That means if you’ve got a crowd of fans who are passionate about your brand and willing to share that passion with others, your sales will statistically go up just based on that word-of-mouth push.

3. Don’t post-and-pray or set-it-and-forget-it

Word-of-mouth marketing needs to be treated like every other marketing strategy - which means, you need to set goals and measure success. Whether that’s brand awareness from social, revenue generated from referrals, engagement from influencers, or conversions from affiliates - setting clear expectations and analyzing the program is crucial to word-of-mouth success.

Which brings us to partnering with the right technology. Many vendors fall short when it comes to providing the metrics necessary to determine word-of-mouth success.

Inflated statistics and misleading numbers can pull the wool over a brand’s eyes, but access and visibility to real data and metrics are a must-have when reviewing platforms. By trusting a technology partner that provides insights that includes shares, clicks, referrals, and most importantly, revenue generated, brands that are able to see the true value in word-of-mouth platforms will ultimately gain the best results.

Happy customers that love your product or service enough and are willing to spread the word about your brand are much more likely to be repeat customers. It goes beyond that, though. The buyers that brand ambassadors influence also tend to be more loyal, long-term customers. In turn, as these customers strap in for the long haul, many of them will also take up the cause and become an advocate for your company.

So, the cycle is self-perpetuating.

While there are certainly plenty of options available to you when developing an online marketing strategy, none of these options are as powerful and effective as word-of-mouth. The more buzz you can generate about your brand, the more success and growth you will continue to realize and that buzz begins with passionate brand ambassadors.

Sources:
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/pauljankowski/2013/02/27/quick-what-are-they-saying-about-your-brand/#6c44f68b209a
[2] http://www.slideshare.net/jaybaer/5-social-media-audiences-brands-cannot-ignore

The Referral Marketing Best Practices Handbook

amity@getambassador.com (Amity Kapadia) — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 13:36:00 GMT

Launching a successful referral marketing campaign or scaling your program with referral software isn’t just about using your existing customers to gain new leads. With 74% of consumers identifying word-of-mouth as a key influencer in purchasing decisions and 92% of people ages 18 to 34 saying that they seek recommendations from friends and family before making a purchase, referral marketing is an integral component of today’s marketplace - and one that can yield impressive results if the right tactics are employed.

With a well-built referral program (coupled with referral marketing software), you can actually increase brand loyalty among existing customers while simultaneously growing your customer base through referral traffic.

That’s a win-win. So, let's talk about how to strategically get more referrals.

Referral Marketing Best Practices

If you want to take your referral program to the next level, here are 5 best practices to help you get there:

1. Your Referral Program Should Be Easy To Find

Don’t make your customers root around your website searching for a referral link. Or even worse, dig through their email to find out how to log into your portal and see their reward status. The harsh reality is people aren’t going to sign up for your referral program if they don’t know about it, so make sure you’re making it visible and prominent. Remember, the entire purpose of the program is to get people to spread the word about your brand, products and/or services. If signing up to do so is difficult and frustrating, you won’t get the results you’re hoping for.

2. Always Be Transparent

Now, more than ever, consumers are highly cautious about sharing their information – especially online. Make your customer referral program more attractive by being upfront and honest about the entire process. Let program members know how their information will be used, how they can keep track of the process and exactly what they’ll get in return. The more information you share about your program, the more at ease your customers will feel and the more likely they’ll be to sign on. And on the flip-side, collecting and analyzing data from customer referrals is critical for optimizing future rollouts and campaign iterations. You’re planning to enable your customers to share your brand with others, and in return, they’re going to enable you to better understand consumer behavior surrounding your products and services. The more you understand about your customer base and the leads they generate, the more efficiently you can hone marketing strategies, gain customer insight, and grow revenue. Don’t let this data slip away without tapping into its full potential. Before you launch a program, decide how you will collect, store, and examine the intel and data points you retrieve.

3. Know What Your Customers Want

If you want to entice people to share your brand with their own networks, you have to provide them with something of value in exchange. Knowing how to generate referrals from existing clients isn’t enough; do you know what they truly value? If your incentive isn’t worthwhile, your customer referral program will never even get off the ground. A good incentive will provide some type of desirable reward for your existing customers while also equipping them to share an incentive with others. Consider what motivates people to buy your brand in the first place, and design a program that speaks to what customers really want. Sometimes recognition, such as being featured on the website or in an ad or blog post, can be equally as attractive as other types of incentives.

4. Ask At The Right Time

Your customers aren’t going to want to refer a friend if it’s the first thing you ask them to do. In fact, if you start an interaction by asking for a referral, you may lose the sale altogether. You have to wait until the right time. This is also where it can be very beneficial to have insight into how your prospects funnel through to become customers and the journey thereafter. Studies have shown that the moments following a shopping transaction - commonly referred to as a "shopper's high" - are a highly effective time to ask for a referral, since the rush of the purchase is still lingering. Or, you might wait until after the customer has received the product or services and are satisfied. And not every incentive has to be directly linked to referrals. For example, are there ways that you can reward customers who make X or more purchases within a given timeframe? Offering free shipping, doubling rewards points, or providing additional discounts for your most loyal and enthusiastic customers is a great way to energize true word-of-mouth referrals.

5. Invest The Time And Resources Necessary

A successful customer referral program can become the lifeblood of your business, but it won’t do anything if it’s not backed by the proper resources. The program should be strategically planned out, regularly measured, and managed on an ongoing basis. When you invest in referral marketing automation for your program, you can see unimaginable growth through this marketing channel (just look at the ROI of referral marketing by different industries). You can’t achieve success if you’re treating your referral program as an afterthought. Successful programs need structure and commitment from within your company. For this reason, many brands choose automated and streamlined platforms to ensure ease and satisfaction from both a consumer and company perspective.

By implementing these best practices into your referral marketing strategy, you’ll be much more prepared to develop a program that will net the results you want without incurring too many roadblocks along the way.

Speaking of challenges, what about not-so-best practices?

While we routinely share referral marketing best practices, there are a handful of missteps we’ve come across that actually might be hurting your program more than you realize.

We wanted to shine a light on a few mistakes that almost always lead to poor results:

Mistake #1: Right incentive for you, wrong one for your customer

If your customers transact with you on a weekly or monthly basis, then it makes sense to incentivize referrals with account credits or discounts towards future purchases. However, if your customers purchase from you less than a few times per year, that reward won’t carry the same weight. In fact, it might send signals that you don’t really understand your customers.

For example, a free ride for referring a friend to Uber makes sense. But if Samsung gave their customers a $10 credit towards the purchase of their next TV, chances are their customers wouldn’t care to refer them.

So, what’s the right approach? If your customers transact only a few times during their lifecycle, you need to reward them with something of immediate value. Providing access to yet-to-be-released products can work, but cash and gift cards are virtually foolproof. In fact, a Nielsen Harris Poll found that 77% of Americans prefer to be rewarded for referrals with money.

Ultimately, for referral marketing to work, brands must be selfless. Focus on what’s right for your customers and give them a relevant reason to send you referrals today. If your referral incentives fail to provide immediate, tangible value, your program will fail, too.

Helpful tip: Dual incentives, where the customer and friend both receive a reward for a referral, are a proven way to accelerate sharing and drive purchasing behaviors. For a full breakdown of this incentive structure, check out The Definitive Guide to Building a World-Class Referral Program.

Mistake #2: A referral program that’s too complicated

Here’s an existential question to answer: If you have a referral marketing program in place and no one knows about it, does it really even exist?

If your referral program isn’t public facing or it’s difficult to use and share with the click of a button, then you’ll severely limit your ability to drive word-of-mouth and referrals. Also, if you’re requiring customers to manually input a potential referral’s information, good luck. For customers, this annoyance creates a barrier that significantly hinders referral activity.

How can you avoid that? Start by answering these questions:

- Where and when is it most likely that customers will want to share your brand/products?

- Are you requiring those customers to do the heavy lifting to find friends who might be interested in your company?

- Are you limiting your referral program to only current customers?

Here’s the bottom line: Make it simple for anyone (customers, fans, admirers, influencers advocates, etc.) to share your brand with everyone who might be interested in it.

Helpful tip: Like we mentioned before, ask for referrals at the point of purchase and after the first user experience. At this point, customer excitement (and the likelihood of referrals) is at its highest.

Mistake #3: Starting small with a half-hearted pilot

Over the last year, we’ve seen massive companies with millions of customers attempt to launch a referral program by testing it with just a few dozen or few thousand targeted customers. That “pilot” approach usually fails.

Here’s why: Just like converting web traffic into actual customers (and converting those customers into repeat buyers), referral marketing is a numbers game. It requires a funnel and, if you don’t put enough names into the top of that funnel, nothing will come out the bottom.

Another problem with this approach is that you don’t really know who your biggest fans and ambassadors are until you execute a referral marketing program at scale. When brands open up the program to everyone, amazing things happen. In some circumstances, people you wouldn’t expect to generate referrals end up being your best ambassadors.

Helpful tip: While it might seem to make sense to test first and scale later, that approach typically results in “test and fail.” A better strategy is to keep it simple by starting with two programs — one that’s public facing and incentivizes new shoppers to make their first purchase, and a second one that’s tailored specifically to existing customers.

The secret is to approach referral marketing just as you would any other high-value customer acquisition channel — investing in process and technology, and incorporating it into every aspect of your marketing strategy.

When you do that, the payoff can be huge.