If you can grow your business using referrals, then it’s a sign that you are a smart and savvy business owner. If your referral business is not growing, then it’s a sign that your daily habits need work.
Habits are the muscles of your business. Good habits build strong businesses, while bad habits tear down businesses. That’s why you don’t want to just skim this post and move on to the next thing.
When it comes to a successful word-of-mouth advertising campaign, one of the key ingredients is expertise. If you are not viewed as an expert in what you do, nobody will trust to recommend you to their friends and family. I spent some time talking about expertise as well as 4 other ingredients in a previous post titled 5 warning signs that your word-of-mouth strategy will never go viral.
How well is your word-of-mouth strategy doing these days? How many new customers, unique visitors, retweets, likes, or comments did you get last week as a result of a conversation between two or more people? Did you get more word-of-mouth referrals this month or last month? Will you be able to meet your revenue growth goals using word-of-mouth advertising alone?
Let me take a guess, you have no clue.
Alert: This is a post from my Daddy blog series
This weekend was a typical weekend for the Mance family. My boys waking me up at the crack dawn requesting cereal, an hour of Phineas and Ferb on Disney, finger painting at the arts center, then a ride on the birthday party bus. And just like the wheels on the bus, the list of parties to attend goes round and round predictably year after year. What’s not so predictable is what’s going to happen at the establishment that host the 10 to 20 little boys and girls as they devour pizza and cake.
As an entrepreneur bootstrapping your business, you know the easiest way to get to the promise land is by having your business go viral through word-of-mouth advertising. The problem is that most entrepreneurs believe that the chances of this happening amounts to winning the lottery. While this is true to a certain extent, the lottery ticket aspect of going viral is only one side of the coin.
One of the first things you learn when you start on your entrepreneurial journey is that goal setting is critical. The first goals for many of us is to clean out our cubical and hand in our resignation. Achieving this goal is truly akin to getting a 1000 pound gorilla off your back. I know because I am coming up on the one year anniversary of doing this exact thing. But once you have done this, what’s next? What’s the next big goal you should work towards?
I read a great article yesterday on the topic of companies paying to incentivize getting their customers to provide word-of-mouth referrals. The article was titled “The Real Truth About Referral Incentives” and the author Jeff Riddle puts into context a lot of what I have been blogging about over the last week. In my last post, I suggested that putting your best customers at the center of your advertising strategy was the first thing you should do to work towards achieving the coveted viral loop. In this post I want to share a few of Jeff’s ideas in the context of your desire to create a viral referral loop for your business.
Every bootstrapping entrepreneur knows that they need to spend more time on their advertising strategy, but for one reason or another don’t. I belive the reason for this is that it is often expensive and time consuming to figure out the ins and outs of all the various ways you can advertise your business to drive new customer traffic in the door. Everything from pay per click (PPC) ads, banner ads, social media marketing, yellow pages, radio and television is offered up by pushy sales reps trying to convince you that their solution will provide a ROI. I say ignore all of this and focus on this: YOUR BEST CURRENT CUSTOMERS!!!
