This post was originally published on iMediaConnection.

Are you leveraging your highly-satisfied customers (AKA “Brand Advocates”) to generate product reviews, videos, testimonials, and more? If not, you’re missing a major content marketing opportunity.

Content created by Advocates is highly trusted and influential. According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 53% trust content that you create and post on your website.

Here are five ways to turn your Advocates into a powerful content marketing engine:

1. Identify your Advocates. Ask your customers the “Ultimate Question” for loyalty: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company or product to your friends?” Customers who respond 9 or 10 are Advocates.
2. Encourage Advocates to rate and review your products. Seventy percent of consumers trust online reviews, Nielsen says. And 67% of consumers don’t buy after reading only one to three negative reviews, according to Lightspeed Research. Make it easy for Advocates to create online reviews by giving them review applications.
3. Enable Advocates to create stories about their experiences with your company or products. Ask them to tell you about their “Kodak moment.” Stories bring your brand promise to life in a very authentic way. Here’s an example of a story created by an Advocate of Rubio’s Restaurants, a California-based fast casual eatery famous for its fantastic fish tacos.
4. Make it easy for Advocates to answer prospects’ questions. Advocate Answers application enables prospects to ask Advocates questions about why they purchased your products or services. A VOIP company has generated over 3,000 leads via Advocate Answers. These are highly-qualified leads – these are prospects who are taking time to ask questions, indicating strong purchase interest and intent.
5. Amplify Advocates. Enable Advocates to publish and/or share the content they’ve created on shopping sites, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and elsewhere by including social sharing widgets in content creation forms.

Creating content can be costly and time-consuming. Don’t overlook the most powerful weapon in your content marketing arsenal: your Brand Advocates!

Originally written & published on Forbes.com

Content is a vital part of marketing, but “feeding the content beast” is expensive and time consuming.  According to Curata’s “B2B Marketing Trends Survey 2012 Report,” the top three challenges of content marketing are: creating original content; having time to create it; and finding high-quality content. With 28% to 33% of marketing budgets dedicated to content marketing, this is obvious priority can become a herculean challenge.

Enter the consumer. Highly-satisfied customers are a secret marketing weapon for companies, whether they are retailers, manufacturers or in the service industry. Play it right and these brand advocates will create high-quality content for you in a variety of ways, without being paid.

Intrigued? Here’s how to turn your brand advocates into a powerful content creation force.

Find your advocates. A simple and effective way to identify your advocates is to ask them the ultimate question for customer loyalty: (On a scale of 0-10), “How likely are you to recommend us to your friends or colleagues?” Customers who answer 9 or 10 are considered advocates. You should be asking this question across customer touch points; via social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, online communities; digital channels like your website, corporate blogs, email, customer management portals, support channels; and even via mobile devices.

Turn advocates into content creating machines. Forget incentives or perks. Brand advocates recommend their favorite products because they’ve had a fantastic experience and want to help others. The key is to make it easy for advocates to generate content by giving them online tools to create the following:

• Highly positive reviews that will increase ratings, combat negative word of mouth, and improve SEO
• Glowing stories and testimonials that will boost awareness and brand reputation
• Answers to prospects’ questions that will increase sales conversion rates
• Tweets, Facebook posts, and comments that will drive positive word of mouth for your brand
• Videos, photos, and other multimedia content to boost engagement

Amplify advocates. Once advocates have created a piece of authentic and compelling content for your brand, give them the tools to share the love via social sharing widgets for channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and email. To help boost ratings, enable them to publish their reviews on relevant third party review sites such as Yelp, Amazon, or TripAdvisor.

Leverage content. Advocate-generated content is digital gold. Don’t keep this treasure buried in your backyard. Display how you’ve created raving advocates by posting their recommendations on media channels like your website, Facebook and Twitter. Another powerful way to leverage this content is to put positive reviews or testimonials at each step in the consumer purchase path to increase conversion rates and reduce shopping cart abandonment.

Track results. Tracking allows you to measure and improve results. Here are a few things you should track:

• Profiles of advocates who are creating content. Who are these content creators? What are their names and email addresses? What companies do they work for? What are their job titles? The more you know about these valuable customers, the better.
• Activities of advocate content creators. You should be able to track how much content advocates are creating; the type of content (for example, reviews, stories, and answers); and when and where they’re sharing it.
• Results of advocate content sharing. It’s important to track how many people in advocates’ social networks are viewing advocate-created content and how many are taking the next step, whether that’s signing up for a webinar, clicking through to learn more about the recommended product, or buying.

Keep advocacy authentic. This is critical to success. “Recommendations” that are spurred by perks or rewards compromise your credibility and brand reputation. In fact, studies show prospects are actually less likely to buy the recommended product if they learn that the recommender was given an incentive. If you need to pay someone to write a review, you should fix your product or service, rather than pimping out your customers.

(This article was originally posted on Fast Company.)

You don’t need advertising, you need Advocates- the people who tell everyone they know about how awesome your product is. But first you need to know who they are and how to get them.

Zappos, Trader Joe’s, Amazon.com, Method, Red Bull, The Body Shop, Google, and SodaStream all built their brands without advertising. Their brand advocates are their marketing department. “We’ve built this entire business, and an entire category in fact, on the power of our brand advocates,” says Kristin Harp, U.S. marketing manager at SodaStream, which turns tap water into sparkling water and soda.

In fact, the three most powerful social media companies–Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn–never spent a dime on advertising or paid people to recommend them. They didn’t need to. Advocates used social media to recommend them to their friends.

You may spend millions of dollars on elaborate marketing campaigns. But there is nothing more powerful than a trusted recommendation from a brand advocate.

Advocates are your best marketers and salespeople, and your most loyal, engaged, enthusiastic, and valuable customers. In today’s world, it’s advocates–not advertising’s “Mad Men”–who have the power.

The Trust Factor

The biggest reason brand advocates are so powerful is a single, five-letter word: Trust.

Nine of 10 online consumers say recommendations from friends and family members are the most trusted form of advertising worldwide. Only about 2 of 10 trust online ads.

Advocates’ recommendations are the number-one influencer of purchase decisions and brand perceptions in nearly every product category from smartphones to software, hotels to housewares, cars to computers, financial services to fitness memberships.

In a recent Zuberance survey, 89 percent of advocates said their friends buy or consider purchasing the products and services they recommend. Many consumers and business buyers ignore, skip, and TiVo out ads, but when advocates recommend something, consumers will go out of their way to buy it.

Social Media Amplify Advocates

In the old days (pre–social media), advocates’ reach was limited to their immediate circle of family and friends. Recommendations were made over the water cooler at work or over dinner with friends. Now, empowered by social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, Foursquare, online reviews, and more), advocates collectively reach millions of buyers with trusted recommendations.

According to one market research firm, each time a consumer posts something on the social web it reaches a minimum of 150 people. There are about 500 billion word of mouth impressions on the social web each year in the United States, rivaling the reach of ads, the company says.

Different from Fans and Followers

Many people use the terms “fan,” “follower,” and “brand advocate” interchangeably. But these are different types of people.

Fans and followers may like you but not all of them recommend you. In fact, until recently, Facebook required that you “Like” a brand in order to write on their wall, even if you wanted to complain about the brand.

Fans and followers have different motivations than brand advocates.

The top reason people like a brand on Facebook is “to receive discounts and promotions” (40 percent), followed by “to show my support for the company to others” (39 percent); “to get a freebie” (free samples, coupons); “to stay informed about the activities of a company” (34 percent); and “to get updates on future products” (33 percent) (ExactTarget, April 2010).

Brand advocates, on the other hand, are motivated by good experiences and a desire to help others. Over the last three years, Zuberance has powered over 30 million advocate actions. We’ve never paid or provided an incentive to a single advocate for their recommendation. And no advocate has ever been given a freebie if their friends buy something.

Generating advocates

Advocates already exist. Your opportunity is to turn them into a powerful marketing force.

But how do companies create more brand advocates? Here’s what it takes:

1. Provide an “insanely great product.”: This was one of Steve Jobs’s famous statements. Very few people go out of their way to advocate mediocre products or services. Advocacy starts with having a product or service people are eager to recommend.
2. Deliver memorable service: In an era when so many products and services are similar, service is the great differentiator. Nordstrom, Zappo’s, and Four Seasons hotels are examples of companies that created legions of advocates by providing extraordinary service.
3. Focus on good profits: As loyalty guru Fred Reichheld has stated, there’s a difference between good profits and bad profits. Bad profits include earnings from price gouging, cutbacks on customer service, and hidden charges.
4. Do the right thing, even when it costs you money: It’s easy for companies to do the right thing when it doesn’t cost extra. But when doing the right thing costs companies money, many firms take the low road. For example, if allowing a customer to return a lemon costs you money, do it anyway. Much better to do this than create a Detractor. If your company has screwed up, admit your mistake and fix it as fast as possible. In the social media age, a handful of disgruntled customers can harm your company or brand’s cherished reputation.
5. Have a social conscience or get one fast: People are more likely to recommend companies and brands that have a social conscience. When it was revealed that Nike was paying low wages to workers, its advocates abandoned the brand. Take a social stand on issues or give back to your communities. Brands like The Body Shop earn advocacy in these ways.

Advocates For Life

When you create and engage an advocate, you’ve identified a renewable marketing asset you can leverage for years.

Advocates’ love for you isn’t fleeting. This isn’t a summer romance or a brand fling. I know advocates who’ve evangelized Apple since the days of the Apple IIE. Same thing with advocates of brands like Harley Davidson, Sony, and Starbucks.

Even when your company goes off track or does something dumb, advocates have your back. I have experienced this many times with Apple; its advocates forgave the company’s missteps like its failed early experiments with PDAs (anyone remember the Newton?) or its ill-advised foray into enterprise computing.

But don’t take advocates for granted. Target, the discount retailer, incurred the wrath of many of its advocates when they learned that the company donated money to an anti-gay candidate in Minnesota. Target is known in Minnesota for donating to public school programs, food pantries and the annual Twin Cities Gay Pride Festival. Still, its support for the candidate angered advocates.

For a FREE sneak peek of Brand Advocates by Rob Fuggetta, click here to download Chapter 1.

Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. from Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers Into a Powerful Marketing Force by Rob Fuggetta. Copyright (c) 2012 by Zuberance, Inc. This book is available at all bookstores and online booksellers.

The video below is part of a recent Silicon Valley American Marketing Association (SVAMA) panel where author of Brand Advocates, Rob Fuggetta discusses the challenges faced by businesses when exploring how to use social media to identify and activate Brand Advocates.