Sales Surge: Harness the Power of Referral Marketing

Referrals should be a major source of new prospects for your business. Referrals are the basic form of word-of-mouth advertising. Leveraging referral marketing can amplify this effect, driving consistent growth and customer acquisition.

Do you have a referral program for your business? Boosting the amount of referrals you get is simple because it involves one thing: asking for referrals. Yet, most salespeople and businesses do not ask. Basically, everyone in your business who has contact with the customer should be trained and incentivized to ask for referrals.

That last part was important—incentivized. Develop a way to reward your personnel for getting referrals. Make a game out of asking for and getting referrals. For example, rewarding the employee who gets the most referrals to a dinner at a nice restaurant.

When developing incentives, do not forget to reward your customers for referring people to your business. It can be as simple as a Starbucks gift card, cash credit on their account, or a discount on future service. Your incentive for referrals will strengthen your business relationship with your customers.

Printed statement stuffers or Care Enough to Share referral cards can generate a lot of referrals for a business. Service-based businesses like dentists, chiropractors, cleaning services, and home health services are a few business models where Care to Share cards are very effective.

Including a printed referral card in invoices and statements will increase the amount of referrals you are getting from your clients. Referral or Care to Share cards are inexpensive and we have several examples we can send you if you like.

Your business can also use social media to get recommendations and referrals. Many business owners over the age of 40 still have not fully wrapped their wits around how to use social media. In the most basic sense, social media is a wonderful tool for getting referrals. It is a platform that revolves around “likes” and getting people to follow your business.

Public relations is basically the science of making good works well known. Social media for business is a vital tool you can use to make your good works well known and with that, generate more referrals.

A good referral program for small business involves four things:

1. Constant intention on the program and constant implementation of the program.
2. An incentive and reward program for customers and employees
3. A printed element.
4. A social media component.

Getting referrals is an easy way for you to grow your business. The investment is usually small and the returns can be great. We can send you examples of printed pieces we created for other businesses to give you some ideas on what you can do for referral marketing for your business.