 Hello and welcome to today's webcast. Transforming your customers into your most effective marketing channel. My name is Sarah Gonzalez. I'm an employee of RedBat conferencing and I'll be your host for today's session. Before we get into it I just want to give you guys some understanding of how to interact with the platform that you're viewing on today. If you wish to ask a question simply click on the ask a question icon which is located at the bottom of your screen. You've also got some resources there and we encourage you to complete the survey at the end of the session or before you have to leave by clicking on the survey tab and just to note that today's recording of the session will be sent out within 48 hours of today. So today we're joined by Mark Halper. Mark is the founder of Rec Amazing which does sound amazing. How are you today Mark? Very well thank you Sarah thanks for having me. Great so today we're going to be talking about transforming your customers, the marketing channels available and also advocacy which is huge in what you do at the moment. So can you tell us a little bit about your background? Absolutely. So I've been really fortunate to work in some really innovative places. I've really tried to work in infancy stages of businesses. So everything from creating Australia's largest student databases to helping create some of Australia's first digital agencies. So I've been really fortunate enough to work on the rollout of mobile marketing, the first social pages, a lot of firsts which has seen me just be able to understand from global clients what really they need are and where the market's going. And you've been doing this for over 13 years so you've obviously seen a lot of different marketing strategies and angles and advocacy. Why do you find that the most important? It's been interesting. I think over the last decade we've seen a real shift from brands really looking at their own opinions as being the most important of their own messages being the most important to kind of going actually what the customer tells other people is what's most important and is true reflection. So what we've seen as a result of that and on the slide now I've just got a few comments around that just to showcase how much brands are really taking notice of it. So Net Promoter Score which for anyone that doesn't know is essentially brands all around the world use it as a measuring tool. So it's a question that goes out to the customers saying how likely are you to recommend us based on your experience today? People rate from zero to ten and you'll notice that everywhere now that I've said that. And people who give eight to ten as seen as promoters and the research says these people are really valuable they buy more, buy more often, a higher average way to purchase and CEOs basically use this as a metric to check on the performance of the business and marketing teams go incentivize. So the likelihood of someone to recommend is now one of the most important metrics equal to revenue in a business. We also see social proof so people are saying okay we have our own advertising we have our own media channels and the traditional lines of TV ready on print but really we know what converts better is social proof when you see that your friend has actually been involved or commented or it says that they like a business you know the average add-on Facebook where it's just an ad compared to where you'll see your friends like it has a much higher click through and that that's because of social proof. We know that if there's already human relationship there it converts better. The other thing we see is a move towards advocacy around influences. So we know these people have great change when we used to use influences our own marketing for clients. We throw a much higher click through and conversion when then our traditional ads or PR. But the interesting bit is that my clients used to always say okay we know we have advocates out there we know they're recommending us to friends we can track they've said they've come in through a friend referral but we have no way of knowing when that happened or who it happened by or how influential that person was and who else they told so I found that really interesting space. Yeah definitely. So what is an advocate with all that in mind and if I do stumble on the word advocate don't be a lie it's one of those words that I always stumble with and I have to say it at least 20 times in today's session. So what is an advocate how would you describe one and why are they so valuable to business more now than ever. Sure well an important distinction which is up on the slide now is instead of loyalists people often think an advocate is loyalists as someone who frequently perches from my business and that that might be if you're a charity might be someone who frequently donates and you might be able to track that if they're buying your product online I can see this person buys my product every week fantastic they're a loyalist the difference between an advocate and a loyalist is yes they purchase often and yes they're often more often not advocates are loyalists but an advocate is actually out there recommending your brand to others they are literally your most effective marketing channel they're the most trusted of any marketing message you have and they're out there without incentive trying to convert others to your brand so that's an advocate. Okay and how does the business actually know when they've created an advocate we talk about word of mouth and how hard it is to actually understand what people are saying so that's hard how hard must it be to even know who the advocates are. Yeah it's it's really interesting we there's a lot of overarching research done on advocates and from people who we when we when people are asked do you advocate a brand you recommend a brand you kind of get that research and some some brands do well but more often than not and the majority of businesses find it incredibly difficult to track so the research shows that advocates account for around five to 10% of all our customers and also what shows from their value point of view is that they're five times more valuable than the average customer themselves so where someone is seen to be an advocate and puts their hands up an advocate where the lifetime analysis of their value has been seen they're actually five times more value so they purchase more from your business but not only that they're actually out there recommending others to your business and those referred customers a study was done across 10,000 bank accounts which saw how much value a referred customer brings into the business and as a result they saw referred customers have a 16% higher customer lifetime value themselves so not only are advocates buying more buying more often from you but the people are actually coming in that they referred are actually more valuable as well because they come in with a guard down they go well if my friend has actually recommend you I trust you I won't kick your tires I'm happy to go and purchase things from you and purchase more of your portfolio and what we see as a result is from a marketing sense that it drives if you if you can use marketing and customer experience to drive advocacy it actually converts and value is twice the amount of paid advertising and social media has really changed the game here as well so we know that 81% of consumers are influenced by a friend social media posts so the more you connect advocates with your social media the better great so as a marketer I know how frustrating it is when it comes to trying to attribute things to things and channels and everything like that and like you said it's just getting harder and harder you've got leads coming from everywhere these days and I know the power of word of mouth as well so how how does it all work if I how do I actually find out what people are saying about my brand you know what what steps that can I take to actually make these advocates but also understand what's being said and how can I even track all that information that's coming through yeah it's it's incredibly difficult so as you said it you you have a sense and you probably meet customers and I've told my friends about how do you measure it but how's it how's it actually happen so we know that businesses like yourself understand that word of mouth is really powerful and drives more conversion than any message but the tracking of it and the measuring of it is is incredibly difficult and you know we have that exact challenge that was in our briefs that we used to get from clients we weren't able to do it yeah so what's happened as well is that when typically we thought we were going to be able to use social to do it so you know when we started some of us first facial page was like okay fantastic great we've got this group of people who are who love our brand of our advocates who we can nurture and engage and get all these insights to and really learn and and build and grow and what ended up happening of course is that we kind of muddy the water ourselves we use it as a lead channel we brought other people in we did like us to win apps and promotions which brought which I'm sure a lot of people have done before which brought all these different people in from different areas and to be honest they may not have had any intention ever of even using your business or being a customer so it became something which we all hoped was for advocates but then obviously Facebook has to make money they change their kind of algorithm it's become a pay-to-play station and it's very difficult now to be able to track or engage or understand that value so what ends up happening is the only way to know how to create advocates is around a customer experience okay so what about referral campaigns then yeah how does that play into all this because I know that I've worked in businesses before where there's a referral campaign and it's like okay if you refer this many people you get this as a gift or if you refer this many people you get this off your next bill or something like that what's aren't they advocates yeah yes and no so it is a different it is a different kind of marketing yeah so absolutely referral marketing exists and it's very widely common it's a widely practiced so as exactly as said refer this and receive what's really interesting though is the stats where the research has been done where you've asked they've gone out and asked people do you recommend a brand and the universe of the answer is yes so of all the people who say yes there are advocates they then ask okay why do you recommend the brand well what are those reasons why you recommended a brand and interestingly because I think it it's very different to what you do expect it's very different to referral marketing is that the customer experience so I know if I'm going to recommend a brand to a friend I really need to trust that that business is going to deliver a good experience for that friend and if I don't well I'm not gonna I'm not going to refer you so what we see is certainly the incentive side you're probably going to get a little bit of a spike but what we always say and best practice is always if you if you have to incentivize a referral it's a really short term tactic you are far better focusing on the customer experience and delivering a great customer experience to generate true advocacy because in the long term your business will be far more cost efficient for it you won't have to rely on incentives and interestingly when advocates are asked how incentives actually work for for them referrals only 1% said that's why they recommend so speaking to this graph now why do what are the other reasons that people recommend and what drives that so how can I how can I as an organization try and make this beneficial for me yeah so the customer experience is by far number one and what we've seen is a real shift in that space to so brands really and that's why they measure likely to recommend they look at okay how do we deliver a good enough customer experience to drive that advocacy and that's the real truth point you know it's not out it's not our messages it's not kind of trying to say things that maybe we don't deliver on it's it is only true when the advocate has that good experience and recommends to their friend it's a really good measure so the focus should be on being being human being empathetic really understanding your customers understanding what they want and delivering that for them and if you do make a mistake you know make up for it be human in that and apologize and and use that as a good service turnaround point the other reason why people recommend is is helping others so what was really interesting we did focus groups around why people use review sites compared to when they were to mouth in friends we said okay who's used a review site and everyone put up a hand usually a trip advisor and we said okay who's left a review every all the hands went down alright okay that's really interesting you know the value of the review site but you're not really participating yourself and we followed on and said okay who has actually went on and actually told their friends about the experience and all the hands went back up and said okay why is that I will I want to help my friends yeah there is an inherent need for us to want to help our friends you know we know that we live with them you know they they help us and that's the relationship we have so being able to ask the recommendations and that's what our platform kind of focuses on is the ability to store it for your friends to enjoy as well and then there's the social kudos as well that people get and I have a feeling that whilst this is measured as 3% it's probably a lot higher I think people like to feel they're knowledgeable people don't want to admit it exactly people like to go I knew about this business before you and are not great and this is but it's important you know it's a part of people's own brand persona that they feel you know I'm involved in tech so I know about all the tech businesses I'm gonna let you you know and you know how great am I and I think that's that's a big factor people have that social kudos and I think you know for me as well I only leave feedback when it's really really good or really really bad so as I've moved through my career in marketing I'm starting to look at you know annual customer satisfaction surveys and think well is that really a true representation because yeah if I've had three experiences with a company on an annual basis I'm going to look back to either really really bad experience or really really good experience it's not really timely is it so it's the fact that we're doing things much quicker and you know we need to know now and if I know if one of my friends asked for something on Facebook everyone's like bang bang bang straight away that also playing a role in what we're talking about yeah massively so what we see is the timing is everything and that's where brands are becoming a lot more sophisticated so instead of that annual survey that they send out and say try to remember that and exactly as you said you only remember the memorable one but you're gonna be really bad or really good and that in the in between you can't like oh I don't really remember so that's what kind of gets input but people are getting a lot more sophisticated with the CRMs the ability to actually target at that point there's a lot of literature written on this and I've consumed as much of it as possible and it basically says you know to to increase advocacy at its highest point you need to be timely it's essentially the point where the consumer would normally say thank you to you as a business so if you've just delivered an experience you've just delivered your service you've delivered it well that's where you should ask for that feedback and to ensure that it's going to be positive advocacy or even if it's not you know you get that immediate feedback to understand what you're doing wrong to then optimize rather than a year later when it's it's far too late and you've probably lost that customer and also while we're going through this I just like to hear feedback from people online right now just type into the chat box what sort of feedback loop or channels do you use within your organization and how is it working I know there might be a lot of charities and not for profits out there using Facebook because it is quite quite a good channel for them but you know do you do your annual satisfaction surveys do you do MPS or something like that as well just some feedback in the answer question box would be great before we move on so let's talk about warm yep word of mouth yes got it so word of mouth as I said it's you know it's a common theme across here that it's challenging it brands know that it's it's incredibly important as you said yourself you know it's your most powerful but there is a lack of tracking what we saw we used to do the customer and barometer the global customer brawner for MX each year and it would tell us that on average people tell eight people about a good positive experience and mostly offline and for friends but people are connected to on average 846 across all their social channels these days some duplication in that but you know the amount of contacts so we can't look at that as this bridge between okay well if there's this positive word of mouth going on people tell a but they're connected to 846 this is this is really big opportunity here for brands yeah but how do we how do we get that happening how do we track it how do we know when it's happened yeah that that seemed to be the missing piece for people I've just done that as well thanks for your comments that are coming through so Adam says their organization uses Facebook that's their main form of feedback at the moment however a lot of it is negative if it does come through on that channel but they do respond to it immediately which I've heard also always a good thing as well and then we've also got Natasha saying that they use satisfaction surveys that are just three little questions after each experience right after an experience with the organization yeah very different forms there yeah it's a lot of our clients to do the same and actually utilize both and what we're seeing through whether it's CSAT or customer satisfaction surveys or NPS hopefully you're tracking you know how likely they are to recommend because it's a really nice truth point of from a customer of really on your performance if you are and they're giving you a good a good score you know there's plenty not not just recognizing there's plenty of ways to actually drive that advocacy and in a positive form in social so you might use Facebook you might use social any other social channel to connect that positivity friends or review sites from a Facebook messaging yeah I don't think you're getting around that and I think that's you know one of the things that makes this accountable as marketers and shifting towards understanding well it's about the customer's voice not ours is they now have a voice since very loud on social it is often you know as you said you either go for the extremes positive and negative and that's probably why people are going to your Facebook to provide these negative comments we have you know we'll touch on it later but ours is a place we're focusing on the positive yep but certainly you know best practice is I'm glad to hear that you're applying to all of those as well and a lot of people here as well saying Amanda and Jarrods talking about I'm using Survey Monkey as the tool that actually goes out to people and actually create the survey you know in the days after the events or paper-based customer satisfaction surveys on the day of the event and I go to many conferences where before I hop on a seat after lifted up yeah and I'm much more inclined to fill it out then as well but at the same time I'm on Twitter and I'm on Facebook and it's like it's like an integrated approach now isn't it you can't escape it absolutely and you know it needs to be as I say we always talk about right time right person right message for to get that positivity but for all feedback of course you know you want to be timely you want to be there and then to get the most you know that's when you get those little nuggets of feedback that you wouldn't have got otherwise because your memory fades great and just on while we're still talking about the Facebook side of things from Lisa so she uses Facebook but gets a higher response rate from feel-good stories that aren't directly related to the organization rather than posts that are directly related to businesses or about their service so do you think that's still helpful in creating advocates the fact that you're bringing them in another way as opposed to look it's an interesting one I think people with Facebook it's changed people just need to be aware of what actually provides engagement we know you know we used to run a whole bunch of community social communities we know that the selling message never performs well no it is it is around creating those stories all those posts that people connect with what Facebook is now the algorithm and they make you know no hidden smoke mirrors around this it is around creating shared content so it's not about you actually don't get anywhere near as much traction if you create something that gets liked or commented on what Facebook's algorithm puts the priority to is where people share it because they've said well others others don't necessarily care about whether my friend is liking or posting on a brand's page what they do care about and what they put priority to is if you share it because you think it's so worthwhile content that you want your friends to know about it so that's when the content gets shared a lot higher so really before you post anything it's all around okay how shareable is this content is this what people are going to connect with and it's something which is polarized brands and you know we worked on for record Benchesa with one of the biggest advertisers globally and just before I left there they cut 70% of their social spent because they went well we want to deliver paid sales messages and this isn't necessarily the right channel for us so they really had to look at it and go what's the ROI yeah so just on that so we know how we can create advocates on our brand now we know when it's all about shareable content it's also all about you know giving people giving back to people and that sort of thing what sort of platforms and we let's talk about recamazing a little bit just so we can sort of distinguish between Facebook and recamazing and the other platforms available out there and put some context to what we're talking about yeah so what is it essentially yeah sure so recamazing is a fairly new approach in the sense of what our product provides but it's not a new approaches in marketing as we've all been talking about word mouth and how powerful it is so it's it's not a new sentiment but essentially the easiest way to explain it is we call us often ourselves the digital barbecue conversation so if we're if we're it's more an internal term if we are at a barbecue and you go I really need a good mortgage broker or I'm looking to get a physio or I'm looking to get involved in a charity want to know which one now I get it essentially you know you're you're seeing they're talking to friends and so you'll say you know it's anyone got a great mortgage broker I would go yeah sure Sarah go speak to mine they're awesome here's their details yeah so we essentially store where a shared location for friends to store all their favorite business recommendations so you can go at any point and see what your friends have recommended or you can ask your friend and it stores in one location against all the different categories so essentially you have your most trusted businesses in one place shared between your friends and that's how it works for users and obviously because that happens on our site yeah we got a lot of interesting data we get a lot of interesting metrics all those things we've talked about that are impossible to find about who's recommending us how does it happen when does it happen why are people recommending us all those things all of a sudden they're created and you can track them as a business to really understand well what is it that we're doing why are people out there recommending us what are they saying to friends when they're recommending us is it our online services our friendly staff is a specific staff member so at that point for businesses essentially we're really simple customer experience tool to help you with your advocate marketing okay we allow you to really simply ask for recommendations and track when they're given so TripAdvisor comes to mind I think of TripAdvisor a corporate TripAdvisor for businesses and understand that it's similar to that and if you could just explain the differences but why is it so positive I would think you know why can't people leave negative feedback how does that all play into it yeah sure so where we distinct ourselves because that's the most often the first question of how are you different to a review site so what we saw with review sites is that because it's not your friends you need that volume so you go on a review site and there might be 400 reviews but you don't know who those people are you know Bob from Sacramento you don't know him from a bar of soap when he says he's like this hotel you have to really dig in and see if that's something that resonates with you is this person like you do I actually yeah so but look it's incredibly effective and don't get me wrong you know I'm not saying it's a channel you shouldn't use it it is you know they've done studies on an extra star on Yelp equates to 9% increase in revenue for instance so incredibly important however what we've seen is the missing pieces is that friend and that that word of mouth recommendation between friends which the studies all tell us that it's far more effective if I can get I've got 400 views from randoms or I've got one good friend actually saying you should use this business I'm gonna go I'm gonna go at least consider that you know at least that's in my consideration set so very different as far as the normal need to look at volume compared to just one all I need one friend recommendation to shorten my consideration set the other thing that's different and you touched on before it's it's the positive yeah it's not the negative and the reason why we do that is because our whole mission is to mirror how word of mouth naturally happens already so that barbecue conversation we're talking about you say does anyone know a good mortgage breaker or what you see on Facebook where friends say and it happens almost every day on my feed hey can anyone recommend a good accountant a good whatever it might be they don't also say and can you tell me all the bad ones yeah because I need that you don't need that information because it's between friends and so if they just say no I trust this one do it great that's all I need that makes my whole journey a lot shorter so we are literally about storing those great businesses for friends so how do we get involved in this is it a page that people go to for businesses and just for people I'm so I'm guessing it's two separate yeah absolutely so as a user if I want to just go on and start storing my favorite businesses with friends you go to recamazing.com your login via Facebook you know we're not about creating a new social network there's plenty of others out there don't do that too many passwords exactly so you log in via Facebook we pull in all your friends in one place and you can start storing your favorite businesses you can invite your friends to join you can ask your friends to provide their favorite businesses in the categories you need if you need a record and so it all works very simply and hopefully it's quite intuitive please let me know if it's not and but from a business side you go to recamazing.com slash business or you'll see the prompt on there for business owners and essentially you register a profile really simple it's like a business card so it's just read back here's our here's our web address and here's how to get in contact that's all you need because it's the same as that barbecue conversation of here you go go speak read back and so it takes two minutes to register we're then not about creating content and ongoing content creation we know that's incredibly time-consuming and costly so you literally register your profile you then ask your own customers to recommend you to their social contacts ah so it's like a campaign then say hey guys we've got this um channel set up it'd be great if you can recommend us absolutely wow so you essentially it allows you to extract everything we've talked about of those advocates out there who are out there recommending you you you essentially ask them to recommend you and you ask them to say hey if you've had a great experience with us please let your friends know about us install that recommendation recamazing for your facebook friends to find when they need a good business okay so instead of it disappearing up the news feed and when you're asking for a recommendation it might post to facebook and disappear we store it permanently and recamazing and then we also have the ability to share it on facebook and twitter as well so you get the best so much sharing happening yeah exactly well you know sharing's caring but yeah the big difference for us is that it's permanently there so even a year later if you've gone and recommended a great designer or design agency I can go oh great I can go on here search design agency and see that you've recommended that fantastic I don't have to go out there and spend days looking for it I can put that in my consideration set and make my journey a lot quicker finding a good business so it's your goal and be mindful I'm very mindful the fact that you you started this business 18 months ago you said in your second bedroom so congratulations but is your goal eventually to have everyone have that everyone will have a recamazing profile yeah look that you know it's a very lofty goal maybe not everyone just 90 percent but yeah look our our goal and you know whilst this has been bubbling away for 18 months we launched to consumers in September so that's how long a platform like this takes to pull together we're really fortunate in that we've had you know category leading brands on board driving advocacy so we work with virgin we work the open colleges we work with Peter Warren automotive we work with a whole bunch of charity clients we receive funding in December from investment backing so it's a big milestone for us to actually you know drive even more value for our clients and for our users but our goal yeah absolutely right now the focus is on helping businesses grow and businesses who find word of mouth drives their business already and generally creating good customer experience they're the ones who are going to find the most value out of it and from a user perspective we know you know we know they're looking for recommendations we know at this moment the stats are 50% of all sales are influenced by word of mouth so we know it's happening we see it on Facebook all the time we're just providing a better solution for it to be stored so yes our goal is everyone to use it probably right now it's you know to get those people who are socially savvy the ones who really believe in advocacy and they're the brands that we've partnered with so how much does this cost if someone wants to hop online and do it now and I believe not for profits and charities there's a deal or yeah absolutely so look our big brand partners Light Virgin who you know have the agencies have the analytics kind of analysts looking at data and and understand their leads and advocates that's three grand a month in six month subscriptions but we do have a small medium-sized business profile which you don't get all the analytics and kind of forever but you do get access to some and you do get to drive recommendations still and that's 65 bucks per month and right now is actually a free trial but then as you said the the charities and if you're a registered charity and not for profit you actually get access to the platinum ones so the ones that they'll big brands use which is typically 36 grand a year it's free so there you go that's part of our giving back culture that we have it recognizing we kind of very proud of that yeah and so we don't want to make money off charities so if you're a charity go and utilize it because it's very valuable I just yeah I just was my I don't usually like bringing up anything sort of salesy in these events but I do know that we've got a lot of not for profits and charities online at the moment so I'm just wanted to make sure that you guys know that you do have access to these sorts of platforms for free and you know if you do have people wanting to use these platforms or even driving advocacy in general what are your recommendations because I'm thinking it's a lot more than just sending out a blast email saying I recommend us how do you do it how do you do it effectively yeah so it comes back to that that really mantra that we have around right person right time right message and we talked about before it sounds like some of watches are actually already doing customer satisfaction surveys so the web clients do it if they've given you a positive rating it's fantastic to hear you've had a great experience with us and you drop down the next question is please recommend us to your friends so they can find us when they're having looking for a good business so that's a perfect example of yep you've already established who your advocate is and then you ask the recommendation other clients you know open colleges look at it as okay you've just graduated from your online education and the teacher sends out