My friend John Jantsch invited me (and a bunch of other people you probably know, including David Meerman Scott, Guy Kawasaki, Rohit Bhargava and Chris Brogan, Ivan Misner, Bob Burg, Ben McConnell, Dan Schawbel, Anita Campbell, Lisa Barone, Scott Allen, Scott Ginsberg, Janine Popick, and Pam Slim) to participate in his second annual Make a Referral Week, which is this week (March 8 through 12). What’s Make a Referral Week? The goal is dead-simple: To give 1,000 referrals to 1,000 deserving small businesses across the country.
I love this idea. Here’s how it works: Make at least one referral to whomever you think could use new business, and add your recommendation #marm)
• Blog about it on your own blog
• Add this badge to your site
There’s more happening this week to help small businesses learn how to leverage the power of referrals, including daily guest-posts on John’s blog and an online seminar.
MarketingProfs is a sponsor of this event, along with GoTo Webinar, PR Web, Constant Contact, Perkett PR, Palo Alto Software, Duct Tape Marketing Coach, Sage, BNI, Vertical Response, Verizon, alphagraphics, InfusionSoft, The Referral Engine, Gold Star Referral and Intuit. If you are a small business, BTW, you may already know that MarketingProfs has tons of content geared toward small business. But did you know you can browse our archives by that category here and here? (The latter, by the way, is our Small Business-centric newsletter: Get to the Po!nt Small Business. Do you subscribe?)
So how do you encourage more referrals for your business, or inspire customer love?
My take is that there are two fundamental approaches to generating more business: The first is to focus on making your existing customers insanely happy, so that they want to tell others about how much they love you; the second is to simply be a resource — or be helpful — to those who aren’t customers yet. That’s a sneak peek of what I write in my post running on John’s blog this week, and I offer 17 tactics on how to accomplish that. Watch for it over there .
So how about you? What’s your referral secret? Add it below?
UPDATE: My post is now active; check it out: 17 Terrific Tactics to Inspire Customer Love (And Get New Business)
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Tags: business referrals, Make a Referral Week, referral marketing, small business, Small Business Marketing
I love this idea. What a great way to organically stimulate small business.
I agree that the best thing you can do to encourage referrals is to have a product/service that is outstanding. Beyond that, creating a culture where giving referrals is commonplace is crucial. In a nutshell, small businesses can do this by sharing referral success stories in their marketing communications, talking about referrals regularly, and openly rewarding those sharing referrals (even if just with thanks and praise).
Very cool idea, you guys! And you didn’t invite moi?
I’ll be watching for it.
This is awesome — I’ll work to get it done on our site. I know we appreciate every referral we have received and work hard to demonstrate that the referrer made a good choice.