Make Referral Marketing Your Priority
Don’t let shyness stop you from meeting some of your best clients.
It’s a cold, hard fact in business: while marketing and branding are essential to build name recognition, your best clients will come to you through referrals.
When people decide they need a advice, they don’t call up a complete stranger. They ask their friends and associates to recommend someone. They want to meet an advisor through referral. As that’s their preference, referral marketing should be your priority.
Clients Are Fine … Advocates Are Better
You want friends that will extol your services to their friends, and give you ongoing referrals. So how do you turn your clients into advocates? Well, when you’ve earned their trust, ask them to alert others to your value.
But … isn’t that dangerous? Won’t it tarnish the relationship? If you ask for names and addresses, won’t it seem pushy or tasteless? NO.
Referrals Are Endorsements
The clients who regard you as their trusted advisor will endorse you. Maybe they already have: maybe they’ve mentioned your value to a friend or associate. Your referral request can prompt them to recommend you this time.
When a client recommends you to a friend, that friend is emotionally and intellectually predisposed to doing business with you. There’s a higher level of trust in the room from the start, and fewer objections to overcome.
So why would you object to asking for referrals? It’s not distasteful. Your clients should know that you value their help. And often, the clients you gained through referral are the ones most likely predisposed to give you referrals.
Ask in Confidence and With Confidence
You can gently ask your client for referrals at the end of a relaxed meeting. You might mention that you’d like to bring a friend of theirs the same kind of financial clarity and purpose. Tell them that your business is being built through referrals, not sales … through lasting relationships, not transactions. Let them know what kind of person you work with best – age, occupation, outlook. Ask them whom they know that would be most inclined to meet you based on their personal recommendation.
All it takes is a few words, and those few words are considerably less expensive than the few thousand dollars you might spend on advertising or print marketing.
For more Small Business Hints and Tips, check these articles:
10 Ways to Green Your Home Office
The Keys to Small Business Success
Small Business Email Marketing Software | Small Business Trends
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Mark Montoya has been working in personal branding for more than a decade for hundreds of online and offline companies, small businesses and individual service professionals. His focus has been toward improving the way jobseekers find employment on the Internet. He has synthesized his expertise by helping job seekers obtain their ideal choice of employment over the Internet on his sites MyOnlineCareerSpace.com and MyOnlineCareerCoach.com, and through his books 101 Tips Every Job Seeker Should Know and The Ultimate Online Job Search eBook. Learn more at MarkMontoya.com, on Twitter, Digg, or StumbleUpon.
Online marketing is not just for the effective product, producing a website or for letting customers buy items ongoing. Online marketing can also include how a business proprietor can engage a work squad. The amount of people who are studying computers, web design, and learning to host websites proves just how successful online marketing can make the employer, the employees, and the independent contractors. And with a comfortable Internet savvy team, your business profits can increase too.
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I totally agree, referrals and positive word-of-mouth are the most effective ways to build a business. While you can’t directly control how referrals are made, you can create an environment in which they can be made easily. If you want to learn more about how to get greater referrals check out this free ebook (http://www.inspirecard.net/100-tips-to-business-networking/)
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