In almost every industry, referrals are the gold standard of customer acquisition. Research has repeatedly shown that referred leads close faster, buy more, and stay longer — all with significantly less effort and at a much lower CPA than non-referred prospects. A University of Pennsylvania study[1] found that referred customers are more loyal and profitable — by a 16% margin — than their non-referred counterparts.

In a perfect social media world, your clients, followers, readers, and subscribers would hunt you down for new information, comment incessantly, and become loyal fans in the matter of minutes it takes to devour a new piece of content. Your queue would also fill up with perfectly edited and backlinked new content in sweet conjunction with the editorial calendar, creating a consistent pulse of branded content. Sounds nice, right? Well, come back down to earth.

Where were you the night you discovered Netflix’s most significant show ever, Making a Murderer? Perhaps a friend texted you about a wonderfully weird series that you should start watching right. now. at. this. very. moment. Maybe you encountered a cluster of wide-eyed co-workers gazing at a shared monitor, swapping conspiracy theories. You might have even overheard a group of strangers passionately arguing about misplaced car keys and innocence.

With word-of-mouth (WOM) driving billions of dollars in sales every year, it's more important than ever for companies to focus on WOM and referral marketing efforts. Here are 8 stats about word-of-mouth marketing that you need to know right now.

Word-of-mouth interactions have been impacting businesses for as long as commerce has been around. In today’s digital world, word-of-mouth opportunities are always at our fingertips, so much so, that we pulled some stats to show the value of this age-old phenomenon. The Value of Word-of-Mouth Marketing infographic below shows exactly what can happen when modern businesses use robust, scalable, and automated referral marketing software to take advantage of this high value, low cost marketing ...

Social media is all about creating a community around the brand you’ve worked so hard to build. It’s where your greatest advocates reside and where you can find many of your most loyal customers. Referral marketing is all about tapping into those consumers that are willing to recommend your company. Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram or your email list, having a strong social media presence will give you a sense of where to find brand ambassadors that are willing to ...

All businesses, small or large, use certain tools that give their marketing, sales, engineering and operations teams a boost. From Hubspot to Slack to Salesforce to Pivotal Tracker, these tools can improve the day-to-day efficiency of your teams. Here are four business tools that you should be using right now: