Referral Marketing: How to Cultivate Customers to Get You More Referrals

So you may think, “Ah we get lots of referrals.” But no matter how many referrals you get right now, no matter what type of business you have–whether it’s an online business, offline business, brick and mortar or anything in between you can benefit by increasing your referral culture. That’s our focus of this episode of Fordify. Watch the video or read the transcript below.

So let’s take a look at some of the obvious advantages of referral marketing.

  1. higher conversion rates, because your people are gonna already come to you predisposed to do business with you.
  2. It’s gonna shorten the sales cycle, because they’re referred to you, they already trust you and they’re just looking for how you can help them.
  3. It’s gonna lower your marketing cost because of course you’re gonna turn your customers and clients into advocates for you and they’re doing word the mouth advertising so you can spend less money on other methods of advertising.
  4. Price is less of an issue. Just think about it. If someone recommend you should do business somewhere you’re motivated to do that.

So the first question you should really ask yourself is are you referable? And a great way to find out if you’re referable is to use the net promoter score. Now you might know what this is if you’ve ever bought anything on Amazon or Best Buy or a major airline you know you get those emails and on the email it says, “On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being best, how likely is it that you would refer us to a friend or colleague?” Once you ask that question and you get the results back you need to know how to score it. So here’s the scoring:

If you get results back from zero to six most likely those people aren’t referring you or they might be actually actively working against you on social media.

If you get sevens or eights, they might refer you if someone asks them about a certain product or service.

But if they’re nines and tens that means they’re advocates. That means they’re gonna go out of their way to let people know about the amazing experience they had by doing business with you.

Now, of course, we all want nines and tens, but how do we get customers there? Well, they start out as a suspect and then they move to a prospect and then they move to a qualified lead and those leads hopefully turn into sales which turn into clients or customers and then of course if you’ve done a great job serving them as a client or customer then they turn into advocates and your job is to move them through the entire funnel to advocates.

What’s stopping people from getting referrals is that they make it too hard. They have fear about it. I mean, think about it. You can train people, “Oh you should ask for referrals.” But most people are uncomfortable asking for referrals. However, if you follow a few simple tactics it makes it a lot easier to get referrals.

So let’s take a look at some of those simple tactics that you can use. Now a lot of these are shared from my good friend and colleague Bill Cates, who’s an expert on referral marketing and who wrote the book, Get More Referrals Now!

The first tactic is to use the phrase, “Don’t keep me a secret.” Now you might say, “Well, how does that help?” Well, when you use the phrase, “Don’t keep me a secret.” it begs the question, “What do you mean by that?” And then you’re able to say, “I’m never too busy to see if I can help one of your friends or colleagues with their _______ needs.”

Now another tactic you can use is to use the phrase, “If you were referred to us please let us know who we need to thank.” I recently called my dental office and on their voice mail (I was so proud of them), they said, “If you were referred to us please let us know who we need to thank.” What it does is cultivate a culture of referrals, because now anybody who calls up that dentist office knows that they work on referrals.

Now you can use these tactics on your phone on your email signatures, on your website, even on your social media.

Now another tactic would be to make a list of your key influencers. Who else reaches the same target market that you wanna reach? Who else could send you business? So here’s an example let’s say you’re a florist. Who else could send you business? Well it could be a wedding planner, there could be a venue, it could be a photographer just think about who else does business with the same people you’re trying to reach? It shouldn’t be too hard. You also wanna carry referral marketing over to digital marketing and your website and social media. So think about testimonials.

So think about testimonials. Those are a form of referrals. So are reviews on business sites, especially Google business. You wanna make sure you can encourage as many reviews as you can for your business on Google, because the more Google reviews you get the higher ratings you get and of course the more referral traffic that you’re gonna get from that. Now those are just a few simple tactics that you guys can implement immediately.

I’d like to hear your referral tactic. Please enter it in the comments below and if you have any questions, please share them.

And don’t forget to Subscribe to Fordify to get notified about new episodes each week!

May 17, 2017

Author: Ford Saeks, Business Growth Specialist, Keynote Speaker, Author and Consultant. Helping you find, attract, and keep your customers. Find out more about Ford

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