Instead of struggling to apply commodity-based approaches to our marketing, we can shift our focus to the relationship component.
Success in business, especially service businesses, depends to a large degree upon building and maintaining mutually beneficial inter-personal relationships.
Marketing helps us connect with potentially ideal clients and supportive contacts. That’s the primary business purpose of Generating Referrals, Networking and Contacting Strangers, three of the four best marketing strategies.
And once the connection has been established, by Keeping In Touch effectively, which is the fourth strategy, we can maintain and enhance these relationships.
Generate More Referrals
Regardless of source, referrals offer rich benefits.
People who have been referred to us are pre-qualified leads.
In effect, referrals are also third-party recommendations and as such are believable endorsements. Potential clients tend to accept them as more objective and trustworthy than they do paid advertising and promotional material.
Given their importance in generating new clients for a service provider, referrals represent the ideal starting point for this and future courses about marketing services.
There is one other important thing to keep in mind.
Generating referrals is not a quick-fix solution to be applied when the flow of new business starts to slow.
It’s an ongoing process, like eating and breathing. Eventually it will become an automatic process that you don’t even have to think about any more.