The Care and Feeding of Referral Sources
Peter Brissette • Jan 15, 2019
Hello there. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. Welcome to this month’s marketing message and here this month we’re continuing our three tip series. I’ve got three tips for all kinds of things. This month we’re talking about the care and feeding of referral sources.
Believe it or not even though I’m the Digital Marketing Dude, I believe it’s really important to nurture your referral sources and that that can be an ongoing source of new business for you that may be the best aspect of all of your marketing. And here’s why. Often we are focused on the marketing to a cold audience. Meaning people out there who’ve never heard of us, who don’t even know who we are, who have zero relationship with us and we spend a lot of money, energy and effort trying to reach those.
And depending on our business, oftentimes those who already know us and like us and have done business with us, those often are actually the best sources of new business for us. And if we spent some time and effort and possibly even money on working with those we may actually get a better lead source and a more consistent lead source than doing the cold marketing and cold advertising. I think there should be a combination of that in any business working your cold market and your warm market.
Three tips for you here that I’m going to share today. First of all is that not all referrals are the same. You should have some way set up in a spreadsheet or a database, CRM system, something that specifies this is number one, a referral source and then number two that this referral source is a one a two or a three. Meaning one means this is a really really great referral source. I need to have more touches with this particular referral source. A number two might mean well, I need some touches with them but not as much. And then level three is, they’re a referral source and they might send me something if I ask them.
How can you do that? It might mean that a level one referral source is something that you touch base with every singe month, 12 months out of the year. And maybe you send them a birthday card and an anniversary card. You go the extra mile for that particular referral source, because one, they have access to your clients, type of clients that you’re looking for or they’re really a big fan of yours and they love to send you referrals.
The level two might mean, you need to reach out once a quarter and touch base with this person. And maybe it’s a card, maybe it’s a note, maybe it’s a phone call, maybe it’s a cup of coffee. And then finally, the level three might mean they’re just on my monthly email list and I reach out and I touch them on a monthly basis and that’s what we do.
Look at your referral sources. Look who has sent you referrals in the past. And then begin to track that. That’s tip number two. How do you track your referral sources? Are you actually measuring that and tracking who they are? Even if it’s just in a simple spreadsheet you can track how many referrals have they sent me in the last 12 months? How many could they send me in the next 12 months? And then what do I need to do to nurture the relationship with this individual?
And then third, if you really want to take it to the top level, find a way to serve them. If you can find a way … Even though you might not be referring business back to them but they’re referring business to you, there’s probably some way you can serve them or help them. And it could be so many different ways that you can do this. It could be gift cards, it could be thank you notes, it could be inspiring messages. Think of a creative way that you can build and nurture and serve this particular relationship in an authentic way, in a caring way. Not just because you’re trying to get business.
That’s important. We’re all here to try to make profitable businesses but at the end of the day we want to feel really good and find great meaning in what we’re doing. And so this is a great way to do that in nurturing and building those relationships.
Those are my three tips for you this month in The Care and Feeding of your Referral Sources. Another aspect to your marketing that you can spend some time thinking about. If you’d like to strategize some ideas, feel free to reach out and schedule a quick 15 minutes call with me. I would love to do that. And once again it’s Peter Brissettee, The Digital Marketing Dude, with your Monthly Marketing Message. Have a great month.
The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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