How to Turn One Love into Many

Valentine’s day is on the horizon and we are preparing to cherish our loved ones. But, as business owner’s, we must also think about cherishing our clients. Polygamy is frowned upon in American society but not in business. We’re all looking for ways to grow our business, aren’t we?

I can only assume you’d like to find more, better, and faster ways to get more customers. There is one way that is overlooked, misunderstood, and often neglected which can have a dramatic impact on your ability to grow your business -- it is the ability to turn one customer into many more customers. We call it “referral marketing.”

Either you get them or you don’t

Let’s get serious. The real question is: do you get referrals?

Do you have consistent, qualified, ready-to-buy, new customers coming to you as a direct result of your customers sending them to you, introducing them to you, or connecting them to you in some way?

If you say yes, then I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt but let me ask a follow up question: how did you do that?

Chances are, you can’t give me a clear answer. My biggest marketing pet peeve is when I ask a new member or any group of business people, “how do you get new customers?” and they respond with “well, my most effective marketing strategy is word-of-mouth.” From that answer, I can immediately determine three things about them:

1. They probably don’t actually know the best way of getting customers for their business
2. They are marketing novices
3. They are not spending any time reading marketing literature or talking to more experienced entrepreneurs in the field

Obviously, this is a problem. Work of mouth is not a strategy. It implies that you believe your customers will, of their own free volition, go out of their way to interrupt their lives without reason or incentive and buy from you. Word-of-mouth more often means that people do not have a real strategy. It shows that you are giving up control and responsibility for one of the the two most critical aspects to every new business -- new customer acquisition. Customer acquisition and retention are two sides of a business coin. You either have them or you don’t.

But there is a solution. I am not saying that word-of-mouth is bad. It is a valid strategy BUT it only makes sense when it is created deliberately through strategic methods to stimulate a source of conversation among prospects.

Simple Steps to Making Word-of-Mouth work

In order for word-of-mouth to really work, you have to give your potential clients:

1. Something to talk about
2. A reason to talk about it
3. Teach them how to talk about it
4. Give them everything they need to make it happen without them exerting any effort

Doing these four steps makes word-of-mouth a wondrous new tool that will actually bring new customers.

The bottom line is this. Word-of-mouth can be your referral system but it must be a system rather than a bunch of sitting around and praying.