Conclusion—Day 31—Powering Your Business with Referral Fusion 3.0
March 30, 2010
Thirty-one days is not enough time to cover everything there is to cover on referral marketing. We have barely scratched the surface of all that needs uncovered. The Referral Fusion 3.0 System encompasses four basic areas—your purpose and message, the available tools for communication with your constituents, the methods for contact, conversation, care, and community building with your constituents, and the methods for identifying, teaching, and rewarding those members of your community who are or may refer business to you.
I have resorted to several expressions around “who are you?” that seem to capture the entire process:
Speaking about your business:
“Who are you, and why should I care?”
About communications, and specifically about social media:
It’s not “what are your doing,” but “who are you?”
The basis of contact, conversation, care, and community engagement:
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
–Maya Angelou
Successfully creating and motivating your database:
“In order to you to get what you want,
you must first help others get what they want.”
—Zig Ziglar
Your Business:
- Referral Marketing is only as effective as the integrity of your business model and customer experience. Remember the Triple bottom line: People, Planet, and Profit.
- Your sense of mission needs to permeate everything and everyone involved with your operation.
- An honest self-assessment of your business, repairing “broken windows” will go a long way toward improving the customer experience.
- Being Green is more than recycling, it is how you treat your employees, vendors, and customers; engaging in sustainable practices, using locally produced product, and recycling
- Affiliate with a Cause. It not only raises your presence in the community, and your credibility as a business concern about more than profit, it gives both your customers and your employees a reason to feel good about going there.
The Communication Tools: Social Media and the Personal Touch.
- Social Media is only a series of tools. To be successful in using them, you must understand the protocols. One size does not fit all. And it is not possible to be all things to all social media users. In order to remain relevant to the search engines, currency in the social media is even more important than keywords. A recent Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn update is far more effective than a years old webpage.
- Depending on your business some of the most effective tools may be
- Your Website
- Blogs
- Linked In
- Especially participation in groups
- Recommendations
- Optimizing your profile page
- Facebook Fan Pages
- YouTube
- Email Newsletters
- Video Mail newsletters
- Recorded Webinars
- Live Webcasts
- Depending on your business some of the most effective tools may be
- There are specific management tools that can assist you in the use of these media such as:
- Hoot Suite
- TweetDeck
- Ping
- Salesforce.com
- Nothing can replace the personal touch of
- personal notes
- calls
- thoughtful items of value
The Referral Pyramid: Contact, Conversation, Care, and Community Engagement
Permission is the name of the contact game. Without it you have nothing. The object is to create engagement on the part of your constituents that moves them from the good will of being part of a community into being a referring advocate for your business.
To accomplish this requires a proactive program conversation and acknowledgement on increasingly intimate levels.
Creation, Care, and Feeding of Your Database.
Build, sort, and qualify your database. Identify those people that are in your corner and those that you would better off without, regardless of their patronage. Teach your advocates who are the best people to refer, but thank them always, for any referral they send you.
Thank you for your time and attention. Oh, I am always available for your referrals.
Rick Beeman, Conversation Maven at In Business for Good.
