This is the Social Strategy Podcast, episode number 23. Welcome to the Social Strategy Podcast, where it's all about making the most of your business with smart tips on what's working now in social media, online business, and good old fashioned network. And now your host was also known as Ross PR on Twitter, Vernon Ross. Hey, this is Vernon Ross, and welcome to the Social Strategy Podcast, bringing you the best in online business social media in your fashion network.
And today we're going solo. Yes, again, we are doing another solo round, I haven't done one for a while, and I do like to bring you guys some solo stuff every now and then, so that you know that I know what the heck I'm talking about, at least sometimes. Okay, so I've been talking and meeting a lot of new people here lately. It's been really exciting, I've been having a lot of fun, I spoke recently at a local community college, it was a great group, had a lot of good exchanges and stuff like that, and one of the things that we talked about, or the thing that I actually talked about is something that I call the community equation.
And I'm gonna publish that in the show notes, I'll link the PDF there so you guys can take a look at the presentation. It won't really do you a whole lot of good while having me go through it and explain it, and I may actually shoot a video for it and do some slides because I've had a couple people that were there at the actual speaking event, back to me for slides and video if at all possible. So I'm gonna do some of that. There was some video there I have to take a look at it, I'm not sure how great it is, but anyway, that was a fun time, I'm gonna get a little bit more into that into the show, but today we're going to be talking about referrals and referral marketing.
So if you guys have questions about referrals, I know that I've been getting some questions about referrals and I'm actually putting together something for a sales organization about referrals and about gathering referrals and doing some training there. So it's gonna be a fun time, I'm looking forward to talking about this, and so I will see you guys on the back end. Okay guys, so I am back, and let's get into talking about referrals and referral marketing. You know, if you guys don't know what referral marketing is, basically it is recommendations from someone else, whether it be another business or whether it be someone that you know that refers you to or refers your business to another person and the quality of that really depends on the relationship that you build.
And there is a difference between a good referral that's gonna help you reach your business goals and we refer you know, referrals are all about quality and not quantity and I think a lot of people get confused when they talk about referrals. I remember back in the day when I worked at Bally's, it was actually still called Vic Taney if you guys remember that as Health Club. And one of the things that we did is we ran on what we call gross and gross was how many people you actually got to sign up for the overly priced $1,152 membership and you know, they're monthly premium, you would make money on that. You know, the funny part about it is that we would go through the club and get referrals.
And usually it was us brow-beating members to get phone numbers of family members and friends and anybody that they would sell out to us to call and bug and I mean, really harass until we got them in the gym or you know, was able to try to sell them. And that was just not a quality referral, those were quantity referrals. We were chasing down anybody and everybody that we could. One of our tactics was to actually go through the gym and clean machines and then as we were cleaning the machines, talk to people about anyone that they may know that might be interested in joining the Health Club and that we would kick them back a little bit of an incentive for basically selling out their friends and we walk around with a clipboard with actual names on it.
It was pretty horrible practice, but it was effective. We did get referrals, most of them didn't close. So take that for what it is, but they weren't quality referrals. So there's a real qualitative difference in that.
When you're going out together referrals or not necessarily going out, or when you're going through your database of contacts or when you're on social media or when you're talking to someone face to face and you're thinking about referrals, you make sure that you're thinking about it from a quality perspective. Can you actually help the person who you're seeking the referral from? So I've got a few tips that I'm gonna share as far as referrals are concerned, but I kind of wanted to go over what a quality referral was first. So next I'm going to go over like four tips that I've used as far as gathering referrals and then I've passed on other people.
So the first part is referrals are about relationships and I kind of just cover that. But you know, the foundation of a good quality referral is a relationship that you have with your customer. You know, you both need to kind of understand each other. A customer or a client who doesn't understand your business is not gonna represent it the right way to anyone else.
So you wanna make sure that if you're asking for referrals that you've educated the customer or the client on exactly what it is that you're looking for in a quality referral. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with telling them, it's like, well, hey, I'm looking for this. So if you happen to cut grass, if you're a long guy, you have a long care company, you're not looking for people that have stone scapes unless you are very familiar with that. You're looking for people that want a quality grass cutting and they want leaf removal and they want gutter cleaning.
And you should tell your prospects that, or you're not your prospects, but your customers that it's like, hey, well, you know, if you have anyone that you know that's looking for quality, long care, leaf removal and all the stuff that I do for you, let me know their names and phone numbers and I'll give them a call and I'll let them know that you referred or why don't you give them a call and find out if they need those services and your next grass cutting is on something like that. You know, by the same token, they need to feel that they can trust you and that they can stand by you because they're actually vouching for you. That referral can affect their credibility. So you get a referral and it's from a customer client friend, whatever and then you don't come through, that can affect their credibility and make them look really bad.
That's why sometimes people are a little reluctant to give referrals depending on the way they're asked and if you don't have a strong relationship with that customer, you know, the funniest thing is like when you go to a car dealership and the sales person is trying to sell you a car and the first thing they say before they close a deal. Well, do you have any friends that you think might be interested in buying a car? And it's like, well, I haven't bought a car from you yet or you know, you don't necessarily have a great experience buying the car and then they're asking you for referrals. So you don't want to be that guy.
The next thing is, you know, good communication since it's, you know, all about understanding your business and it's essential that you communicate this well to potential people that you're going to have refer. You know, tell them exactly what you're looking for, basically just like I said, it can sometimes be helpful to say something like, I need more people like you. If they can understand, you know, why your business appeals to them personally, there's more of a chance they're going to be able to communicate that and identify that to others. But the next part of this is, you know, what's in it for them?
We used to call it with them in sales and we were talking about the other people, but it was, you know, what's in it for me? That's what the other person is thinking about. You know, the other side of that equation is, you know, you have to understand your customer and what their expectations are that you're going to do for them. Don't just rely on the fact that you've asked them for a referral and they're getting something.
I found that more often than not, it's really not about the fact that you're, they're getting something for free. They want to serve the people that they know, but they also want to make sure that you're going to go above and beyond if they're going to, you know, basically stick their neck out and refer your business. So you want to make sure that you always, in any time you can, exceed what their expectations are of you in the amount of service that you give them. And when they take the time to actually give you a referral, make sure you are going above and beyond and do something just a little extra form, an extra thank you letter or a free service that they didn't expect, something that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual referral.
Just pay a little bit of extra attention to them when they're doing that. And the last little part of that is, what are you using to track this with? You want to make sure that you're separating high quality referrals from lower quality, weaker referrals. So I mean, you want to ask every customer for a referral or every client for a referral, but some are going to be better than others.
And you need to have some type of tracking system in place that you can measure what the performance is of those referrals. So you can see if you have any patterns which referrals bring you more business, which customers refer you to more business. And then you can look at that performance and analyze it over time and see which customers should you really be mining for those type of referrals on a regular basis. And I think that's going to get you a lot further in your referral marketing.
Okay, so I'm not complicated, but it's something that a lot of people just don't consider when they're going out and getting referrals. They don't think about the stuff that's in it for their customers and the things that I talked about. So at this point, I want to go over five actual tips. And this is five ways that you can use your content to drive more customer referrals.
So of course, one of the ways to get referrals is leverage content that you create. And there's things that you can do with your content that's going to result in more referrals. And so I'm going to give you five tips that can get that out of the way. The first is customer specific emails.
It's very important in most email marketing platforms that are out there now, constant contact. I know does this, MailChimp does it, Aweber, get response, all of the popular ones, EntraPort, they all have this feature where you can segment out your email list. And so you can segment out these specific groups that you're going to believe that you believe are going to help you get referrals. And then you can send them specific messages about products and services that you have, but you personalize it to them as much as possible.
Your current customers have already done business with you. So segmenting them out into a list and then sending them special offers that's going to enhance whatever service or product that you've already sent to them is going to be valuable. So that's going to prompt them to send more business your way. But consider sending them custom emails and segment them out from the other people in your email list.
You don't want to give customers that have already paid for services, clients that have already spent money with you, spent time with you. You don't want to send them the regular email. You want to send them a special email that's just for people like them that bought. And you want to communicate that to them.
Say, hey, you guys are getting this email only because you've purchased this thing from me and you're special. And so this email only comes to you and not the general public. One thing I know that's the next tip is not new, but this is like tip number two is to create a customer-only Facebook page. Now, of course, you know about having your own business page.
But has you ever thought about it considered creating a Facebook page that is just for your customers, like a specialized group that gives them a chance to discuss your business, its products, related topics, and anything else. And then you can offer special content that's created just for them. This type of thing works wonders in a consulting business or like, you know, graphic artists or something like that, where you have customers that can discuss, not discussed, but discuss just about anything unless they discuss it with you. But customers that can discuss just about anything about your brand and the products that you offer.
Now, you have to be careful anytime you create a group in a public forum where you have customers that hopefully all of them that are in the group are going to be satisfied. And I would say that you don't put every customer that you have in the group, but special customers, maybe customers that spend a certain amount of money with you for a year or something like that. Let them know, hey, I have an exclusive Facebook group for customers that are at your level, that I wanted to send you and invite to. And it's a community that you guys can belong to to discuss anything about the product or about services and stuff like that.
And I check it, and I'm in there often and can, you know, do stuff like that and therefore you can come and talk to you. And it's just a community that we've decided to build around some of our more special customers like you. It's a really fun thing to do with customers, and it makes them feel really special, and it makes clients feel really special that you have just a Facebook group for those particular customers and other customers that are like them. This works particularly well if you have high-end clients that deal in high-end stuff that want that type of attention.
Another thing you can do is, and just like I was talking about with the Facebook group, is to create customer special offers or customer exclusive offers. And not like a loyalty program, but it's a way, well, I guess it is kind of like a loyalty program. So this is kind of like a loyalty program for your special customers. You know, they get rewards and every time they give a referral, they get something special, but it's just a, you know, it's literally a loyalty program, but you don't have to go through all of the trouble in creating an official loyalty program.
This can be just for a small segment of your customers, or some of your higher-end customers, where they get like extra special, this or that. And that's gonna prompt them to refer more business your way when they're getting extra stuff. And then finally, well, actually not fine, there's two more, answer customer questions. You know, one of the things that you can do on LinkedIn, LinkedIn is one of the places that you can do this, is you can answer questions.
But see, this is a perfect time for you to take an opportunity to use that special Facebook group, to actually answer questions for your customers. Or you can create a forum off of your website, or have your web developer, you know, create your forum off of your website. And you know, it's fairly easy. Or like I was saying, you just use social media and do it.
And that way you can answer questions, you can take them through webinars. If you guys are not familiar with HubSpot, HubSpot does a really good job of this. And it's really considered in-bound marketing because you have people coming to you. And then you're answering questions.
You can do videos, how-to videos, and maybe have a customer-only YouTube channel, where if you have a product, in particular, that you get a lot of questions about, hey, how do I do this? Or how do I set this up? Or how do I set that up? Or how do I do, you know, XYZ, just fill in the blank?
You can shoot a custom video series for your customers, and it's for your customers only. You can make them private videos, and give them a private link, and publish that in the Facebook page. Or you can just, you know, put it up on YouTube, and make it available for everyone to see, but then you can point your customers to that video, to explain to them exactly what it is that they need to do. And that way you can take the specific questions, and then you can publish even more content, and then release that to customers, to build even more loyalty.
And that's going to get them to the referred business to you, because they're going to refer business to people and finally, my favorite one out of all of these five tips that I put together is to interview customers about their experiences. Now, of course, you guys know that I love interviewing people and talking to them about what they experience and what's happened to them and their stories, but how excited do you think a customer's going to be if you're going to showcase them, or actually have someone else showcase them about an experience that they had with your business? Now, this can't be random, this has to be planned out, and you want to make sure that these are customers that you have exceptional relationships with, that of course, they're not going to badmout your business, or your services, but this thing works like gangbusters. I'm telling you, if you have someone that's, you know, spent $10, $15, $20,000 with you, and you go, hey Pete, I just pulled that name randomly.
I had a high school teacher named Pete Muraski, and that just came to mind for some reason, so that was a very random thought. Anyway, getting back to the show. So you say, hey Pete, you spent like 15 grand with us so far this year. Would you like to be interviewed?
I'm going to have my Mia guy come by and do some interviews, or he's going to call you on Skype, or if a person has a studio, can you think you can go buy a studio, or he's going to come to you, set some things up at your office, and then interview about your experiences here, because we want to use that as testimonials for our business, because customers like you are important to us, and we want to let people know exactly how happy you are, and what you love about our service. Would you like to do something like that? They're going to say yes, and then when they say yes, and they've got the video out, guess what they're going to do, or audio, they're going to tell all their friends to go listen to it. It's like, hey, I was just featured in a video for so-and-so's company, or hey, there's this guy, he just interviewed me on his podcast about my experiences with so-and-so legal firm, and you guys should go check it out, go listen to it, here it is, and here's a link right here, and that person's going to be excited, because it's their little taste of being a celebrity, and everybody wants to be a celebrity, right?
So take advantage of interviewing customers about their experiences. Not a lot of people are doing this, and I've done this for a few friends of mine, and they have had nothing but good things to say about the fact that, hey, wow, this was amazing, we got an amazing amount of traction off of this, actually have a friend of mine that's a filmmaker, and he put together the video, basically promoting the relaunch of his company, and we did the interview, and it was an amazing video, and they got a lot of traction from the video when he shared it to his network, and it was a good video for me. It wasn't crazy about the intro of music, it was a little dated, if you asked me, but it was really good, and he just put it together really quick and threw some stuff out there, but it was such a good video, very well done. I think they did three cameras, and part of it was in black and white, and it was just a fun thing to do, but it made them look a little different than other companies, because they now have a promo video actually talking about why the hiatus, why they were back, what it was gonna be doing, and stuff like that.
So definitely consider interviewing customers about their experiences, and talking about your business. Okay, and lastly, I'm gonna get into a little bit of the community equation presentation that I did, I st. Louis community, or St. Charles Community College.
It was awesome, it was a fun event, and I'm just gonna cover one aspect of it, just one thing that I talked about, and that was the part about, and I didn't talk to them about this during the presentation, but I talked to quite a few people afterwards, is borrowing authority, is building trust, and building trust actually fits really well into what we're talking about as far as referrals are concerned, because your audience has to trust you, your customers have to trust you. They don't really have to trust you, but they at least have to trust that you're an honest business person. I think you should take it a step further, and you wanna build a community of customers. You don't wanna just have customers that come to your business because you're the cheapest, because if someone else comes to town and they're cheaper, then guess what?
They're gonna go with a cheaper price. You don't wanna always shop someplace just because it's cheap, you wanna know that people care about you, and your family, and your best interest. So we talked about building trust, and one of the ways that you can do it is becoming an advisor. You don't necessarily wanna be selling, you wanna be advising.
So a lot of you guys don't actually know, I drive a Hyundai, and I've actually driven Hyundai's since 1994. I've never had another car, personally, my wife's had a bunch of different other makers and manufacturers, I've stuck with Hyundai the entire time, and it's because the first Hyundai that I got was a 1993 Elantra. Had 11,200 miles on it, and it was a program car that they had been taking around to the different car shows. When I got this car, it had every option that Hyundai has now that standard, but it wasn't standard then.
It even had this kind of weird leather roof to it, because they had it in the car shows and they wanted to make it easy to wipe off, and they didn't wanna get dirty. So it had this leather roof and all this leather on the inside. It was insane. It was the best car I'd ever had as far as like small little cars concerned.
Chrome, alloy, wheels, it was just more car than I deserved at the time, but it was awesome. And I love that car and everything about the dealership that I went to was great. And so the next time I was rated by a car, I went back to that dealership, and because I was going back to the dealership and had bought the first car from them, they actually treated me really well. And it was an exceptional experience.
And so the next time I went back to buy another car, they treated me even better. And it just continued on that trend. And so the last time I bought a car, I literally just called and was like, Hey man, it's time for me to get rid of this Santa Fe. I wanna get something a little bit bigger, and I've been thinking about this Veracruz, he's like, Oh, come on by, just come on by, take a look at it.
I'm like, Oh, okay, well I get there, and they just gave me one. He's like, Hey, here, take this home for the weekend, drive it around and let me know what you think. Handed me the keys. There was no, Oh, well, let's come sit down and talk about this or talk about that.
There was none of that. It was like, Hey, Vern, what's going on? How you doing? I was like, Hey, what's going on?
How you doing man? And it literally was that kind of conversation. He had keys in his hand. He goes, where's your vehicle at?
And I'm like, Oh, it's right there. He's like, well, where are your keys? And I'm like, right here. He's like, well, give me your car key and the alarm thing.
So I handed him my keys. He's like, we're going to take that, pull that around back and park it on the security lot. Here's the keys to the new varicrues. Just take it home.
No obligation, no anything, don't even worry about it. We got it just needed to sign a couple things so that we can make sure we're taking care of the insurance for you. So you don't have to worry about it. I'm going to have the Porter grab your garage door opener and your briefcase out of the car.
Is there anything else in there that you need? And I'm like, no, not really. That's it. Actually, you know, I wasn't ready to do that, but no, I don't do anything else.
And that was it. I mean, I was in and out literally in 15 minutes, drove home with a brand new vehicle. And the wife was like, what the hell did you do? I can do anything.
I didn't buy the car. I mean, Scott just gave it to me. He gave it to me, told me to drive it home so that we could take it out, test it out, drive it around, see how we liked it. We kept it all weekend, had fun with it.
He didn't call me on Monday morning. I gave him a call like Monday afternoon. I was like, hey, man, what do you want me to bring this car back? And he goes, when is it convenient for you to bring it back?
I'm like, well, I actually can't get back out there, really, to be honest, and to Wednesday. He said, we'll just keep it. Drive it back and forth to work and see how you like it. And then just bring it back.
And if you don't like it, no big deal. You bought cars here before. You'll get whatever you want when you want it. And I'm like, this is amazing.
So of course, I'm going to go back to that dealership. And then I'm going to ask him questions about, well, do you think I should get this? Or do you think I should get that? Because he's shown not only that there's a relationship there, but he's shown that he trusts me with a $30,000 vehicle just on the fact that I've bought cars from them before.
And I've bought several. So that would be like the six or seventh car that I've bought at that dealership. So there's a relationship there. And he incentivized that relationship by not taking me through all of the silliness that they would normally do to do something like that.
He just gave me keys to a car that I can drive around for basically five days without worrying about it. And then told me not to worry about putting gas in it that they would feel it back up. So it was an amazing experience. And at the end of it, I ended up buying a car a week later.
And I tell them, I think I'll come back this following weekend and we'll look at it and we bought the car. So long story short, building referrals is about building trust and building a good relationship with your customers. And not every customer is going to be like that. But the more customers that you have that can share a story, like the one I just shared with my Hyundai dealership, that's amazing.
And if you can build those type of relationships, whether it's real estate, I just, I left a meeting with the social media club of St. Charles this evening and we were learning about real estate from real estate agents that use social media and giving them some ideas and tips. And one of the things we talked about was referrals and building that trust so that when people are selling their house or considering selling their house or they have children that are considering buying their first house that they will think about you first when it comes to doing those referrals. So that is a very interesting topic.
I love talking about referrals and sales and the sales process. Let me know what you guys think. Let me know if this was helpful to you. I hope that it was.
Referrals are huge for your business. And it is one of the ways that you make sure you stay in business when the leads may not just be coming through your door. You should be working your current customers for referrals. Definitely through email, of course, through social media and any other channels that you can create to make your customers feel special.
All right guys, that was it for this episode. Another solo round in the can. I do appreciate you guys tuning in. And I do need those reviews and those subscriptions on iTunes and on Stitcher.
Actually more so on iTunes. Stitcher is a very cool network. And I get quite a bit of traffic from there. But we're trying to get this show to more people to stay in that top 200 in iTunes.
And yes, I was actually, I made it to the top 200 podcast in iTunes for a couple weeks. I'm trying to get back there. So we're trying to get to 50 reviews before the end of July. So go out there if you have not already and leave a rating and a review and subscribe to the podcast.
All right guys, thanks a lot. I do appreciate you tuning in. And remember you can find me online at RossBR. And I will see you guys in the next episode.