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Referrals are often one of the key factors influencing someone to work with you. How many times do you see someone asking for recommendations on social media? When someone needs a professional or work done, they ask in their networking group who they know who does what they’re looking for.
Having a referral marketing plan in place helps ensure raving fans are telling others about you. However, while we know the importance of asking for referrals when it comes down to it, the asking part can feel awkward or even aggressive. But when you believe in the value of what you offer you can feel good about having others tell the world about you. You know the trust has been established. When you have the right mindset and a proven process in place, getting referrals is easy. Here are some ways to get more referrals that don’t feel desperate with examples you can use right now: 1. Set an expectation for referrals Before you begin working with a new client, you can condition them to think of you as someone to send business to. You can also mention the incentive you offer for those referrals that result in a sale. 2. Ask for a virtual introduction A really terrific way to get referrals is to ask a contact to do a virtual introduction with the prospect. this can be done via a email or social media 3. Ask Satisfied Clients You Have Or Are Working With The best time to ask a client for a referral is right after you finished working with them. They are excited about the results you generated and are ready to sing your praises to the world. Try something like: "It’s my goal to help other great clients like you. So I was wondering if you knew of any other people who could use my services? I’d love it if you could send a short note to them with a few kind words and asking them to connect with me?" 4. Offer a gift or a small reward for referrals Giving a referral takes time and energy. When you make it worth their while, people are more likely to take the time to do it. As a sign of your appreciation for their efforts, offer to give them a gift card, a referral fee, discount, or other gifts if someone they refer you to hires you. Building a business through word-of-mouth marketing would be more successful if there is a fee or a gift involved in exchange for getting more referrals. You can make a referral page on your website. Write an email to send to your clients and connections. Ask people in your Facebook groups. Let other networking friends or associates know you give rewards for referrals. Event if they don't or just can't use your particular type of service. Good luck and now go get that business! -Roy
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Fall is the time of the year when many businesses like to hold events, attend trade shows and dig those booths out to attract new business. The air is cooler and people are getting out. But how to you get the best bang for the buck in locking in that booth space? Here are a few tips to get you going.
1. Invite your customers and business networking peeps Don't always depend on ground traffic to make your booth purchase successful. You do need to invite people via email or in person. Go through your contact list and see who might be able to attend if the event you signed up for is free or you have the budget to comp them a event pass. 2. Phone Calling Besides the emails, do personal phone calling. Sadly while emails are good, they are not always seen. Busy office people often see something and think it is a sales pitch (which well, it is) and hit the delete button. Make your call personal and exciting! 3. Show Time Follow-up There’s power in numbers. While one call can make an impact, two are even better. Remember, your prospects are as busy as you are, so remind them about your seminar or to visit your booth a couple of days before the event. 4. Social Media Reach out to people indirectly as well. You can include information about the event on your website and promote it via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other outlets that you may connected to your social platforms. 5. Make Sure Appointments Are Filled At Your Booth! Your time is valuable. If you have help at your booth, you don’t want them to waste their time talking to each other in the booth or checking out the swag table of a competing company.(although it is fun to do) make sure your and their time is productive by scheduling appointments with decision-makers when you’re on the phone or if the email hits work out. You don't want to just stand around and smile. You also will want help to keep other sales people from wasting your time at the booth. Those that try to sell you at the show while you are there to create business. 6. Prepare for Data Collection Make sure you have a system in place to collect prospect's information and respond quickly. In the trade show business due to all the competition that is there, you snooze, you lose. Be able to respond quickly as soon as you pack it up. 7. Determine Your Hot Leads Decide how you will begin following up as soon as you are back at the office. Know how will you score them to determine which ones are hot, warm, or not worth your time? You want to get back to the hot leads first so you don’t lose the opportunity. 8. After The Show Follow-up There are multiple ways you can follow up after an event: Consider email, direct mail, social media, phone calls, and online conferences. Decide which tactics you will use before your event. Perhaps it’s a combination of tactics that will work best for your company. It may vary based on the personal preferences of your leads. One person might respond best to a LinkedIn message. Another may prefer a phone call. It’s important to go to your prospect’s preferred channel. Also, you may need to create content for follow-up communication, such as webinars, direct mail pieces, and demonstrations which will create additional one-on-ones for your prospects. 9. Be Patient and Persistent But Not Annoying! It’s human nature to want the sales to materialize quickly. You may be lucky with some of your prospects. However, most will not be ready to buy today. So don’t consider your follow-up to be a once and done thing. You will need to be patient and follow-up but do not be a pest and drive your prospects nuts. If you don't get a bite after one or two months they have your card so let it go. Nothing irritates people than over-aggressive sales people. Instagram Is now making it possible to have a "guest" (another viewer) on your live feeds. This new feature is rolling out to Instagram users now and bringing with it a wave of creativity and communication for company and business branding. Not everyone yet has this capability but it is coming your way. As with any Instagram Live video, a two-person video is simple and easy to do. The platform has simple integration and relatively smooth technology to make the process seamless for you and your guest. As of now, the feature is only available on IOS (iPhones) but Android phones are coming very soon so stay patient out there. In the meantime this is how you bring on a guest on your next Instagram live video feed. This is so cool for marketers and small business promotions!
#1: Start a Live Video on Instagram To launch a live video on Instagram, open your Stories screen. Swipe right from the home feed or tap on your photo in the Stories banner at the top of the home feed to open the Stories screen. Along the bottom of the screen under the shutter button, scroll to the Live option and then tap Start Live Video to get your live video started. Launch a live video on Instagram to invite guests. #2: Greet Your Viewers in Attendance Before you invite anyone to join your live video feed, take a few moments to greet your viewers and introduce your topic or subject matter, or your event you are promoting. This gives viewers a chance to tune in and for you to get settled before introducing anyone else into the video. Let your viewers know that you’ll be including one or more guest(s) throughout the video. #3: Invite Your Guest(s) Now that you’re ready for a guest to join you live, you must invite the person to join you. Your guest must be present as a viewer before you can bring them on your video. At the bottom of the screen, tap on the two-face icon next to the comment box to open the list of Instagram users who are currently watching your live video. Tap on the two-face icon to invite a guest onto your live video. The username of each viewer is listed for you to choose from. If the viewer is able to join (they have the two-person feature rolled out to their Instagram account), their account name will be listed beneath their username. If the viewer doesn’t have the ability to use two-person video, instead of their account name, it will read “Unable to join.” Choose your guest from the list of viewers who are able to join your live video. Tap the person you wish to bring on your live broadcast from the list. On the next screen, Tap the Go Live With button to bring the guest into your live video. Select Go Live With to invite the guest into your live video. For now, you can only have one guest on with you at any one time. #4: Talk With Your Guest Now that your guest is live with you, make the most of the ability to have a “face-to-face” conversation with them. You’ll both appear on the screen as two square videos, one on top of the other. When you have a guest, that vertical screen is split into two squares, with you as the host on top and your guest on the bottom. Having a guest on your live video splits the screen into two squares with the host in the top video screen. Be aware that comments rolling in from other viewers will appear over your guest’s screen. This detail may have an impact on how you conduct your live video and what that guest does on-screen. This can be annoying to you and your guest so keep that in mind if you want comments to show up on your screen or not. If not, turn off comments. #5: Say Goodbye to Your Guest When you’re ready for your guest to leave the live video, simply tap on the X in the top-right corner of their video screen to remove them from the video. They’ll go back to being a viewer and your video will return to the full screen. To remove a guest from your live video, tap on the X on their video screen. Five Ways to Incorporate Two-Person Live Instagram Videos Into Your Marketing Now that you understand how to launch an Instagram Live video with a guest, it’s important to think about how you’ll use this feature. If you simply start using it randomly and without intention, you risk annoying your audience and may discourage them from tuning in regularly. Instead, to ensure your brand builds on this exposure, have a plan in place for inviting guests and providing value to your audience through this feature. Get Comfortable On-Camera If you are nervous going on camera and hosting an Instagram Live video, having a guest may calm your nerves. Rather than worrying about carrying the whole conversation on your own, you’ll have someone else there to help keep the conversation going and put you at ease. Have fun and be relaxed. Try rehearsing your interview. Invite a friend, fellow employee, or trusted customer to come on live with you. Plan the live video in advance so you both have some clear ideas for the direction of the conversation. As you get into she show and gain some confidence you and your guest will carry on naturally and your personality will shine through more authentically. Answer Questions Open up your Instagram live to audience questions and invite individual viewers to join you as you answer their questions. Your audience has questions, and hopefully, you have the answers. Choose a topic or even open up the live video to an ask-me-anything format. Invite your guests to bring their questions to the live video broadcast. Ask guests to type their question in a comment so you know who’s going to ask which question, and then invite each viewer to join you live to ask their question and discuss the answer face to face. People love to share their opinions, and inviting them to join you on a live video is a great way to get their honest feedback. If you have a product that you want to update or improve, ask your guests to join you live to discuss which features of your product they would change and why. If you have a service-based business and you’d like to find out which services your customers would like more (or less) of, have them share their thoughts with you live. If you have a business that is local to your market area, invite your customers to share their experiences with you. Have fun using this new Instagram feature coming It has been awhile since I did a byline on using Facebook For Your marketing campaigns and so some, these tips may sound like no-brainers. However, for newbies to Facebook marketing and there are a lot of those in SMBs, hopefully these will help you find your way a bit easier on using Facebook in your scheme of things.
Building Your Audience One of the biggest complaints about leveraging any social media for content marketing, much less Facebook in particular, is that it can often be a waste of time: because posts go off into the ether of the internet and are never seen by anyone. This is a real concern… but only if you don’t take the time to build your audience base. If the likes on your page aren’t relevant, they do nothing for you or your business brand. You need to spend the time and effort to ensure that the likes your page gets are from individuals genuinely interested in your product or business. When those individuals see the content you’re promoting, they’ll be more likely to click through and learn more about your brand and your offerings of products or services. Manage Your Online Reputation Online reputation management is a big deal, and a poor reputation online almost always translates to lost customers and lost sales. You can do one of two things. Manage your reputation yourself by constant monitoring of what you have out there or pay a professional reputation company to do it for you. Try to respond to comments and ratings about your business in a timely and positive manner. Always respond to bad reviews, and make certain to ask the reviewer what you can do to improve their experience. It’s important to address every bad review so that review readers feel that you care about the quality of your business and product. Use Video And Images On your Timeline! Did you know that Facebook posts with images get wildly more clicks than posts without them? And watching videos comprise approximately 80% of all the activity on Facebook! Videos and images will ensure that the content you share gets more likes and more reads. Where images are concerned, ensure they’re horizontal images which have text titles on them, which can increase engagement. Examples of this are videos shot by your cellphone, Links to your YouTube Channel , Images of your products or services shot by you or your customers, and do Facebook Live events. Useing Facebook Promoted Posts Using small, short, highly targeted Facebook ads can help you get new viewers for your content pretty easily. Of course, promoted posts are primarily recommended for individuals who have grown their Facebook page likes beyond a threshold of 100, simply because promoted posts are traditionally displayed only to friends and connections of those who have liked a Facebook page. While there is also the opportunity to use Facebook ads, they’re not recommended for Facebook. I have mixed feelings about Facebook promoted posts as their effective reach varies and success rates on your ROI is questionable at times. Link to Your Own Website When sharing content, ensure that content is always on your own website when you share! Promoting links to your own website not only brings new potential clients or visitors to your website, but can provide a small SEO boost. And of course, having all of your website’s schema markups operating correctly can pull sample text and images from your website quickly, rather than requiring you to manually enter them, which can save a few minutes of work. Always, always link to your website whenever possible. I hope these tips give you a bit more insight into using Facebook for your marketing scheme. Do NOT mix your personal Facebook Page to your business Page. Keep things separate. Remember the above mention on your reputation? Mixing business with your personal life can kill that in a instant. -Roy FDMC Digital Media LLC www.floridadudemarketingconcepts.com |
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