In last week’s Business Builder Newsletter, I outlined what I called the building blocks of a marketing tactic. This is a model I like to use to plan the elements that go into the successful execution of a marketing tactic. I also like to use this model as a diagnostic tool when reviewing marketing tactics for new clients who may not be happy with the results they are getting from their marketing efforts. The newsletter article was fairly generic, so I thought I would show how this model can be used to examine one of the most common marketing tactics for professional service firms – referrals.
Here is a diagram of the model (click on the picture for a larger view). I read this model from the bottom up. Today, I’ll start by talking a little about the first block – Strategy.
Strategy – we begin by making sure that our tactic is built upon our Marketing Strategy. Simply put, our strategy is the combination of 1) Who (specifically) is our ideal customer and 2) our Core Message, or the problems we solve and how we go about solving them for our ideal customers. Having this clear strategy will help us tie this tactic to our overall marketing system. It will also help us answer questions in the other part of the model as we go along.
When speaking of referrals, our strategy tells us who we want to meet – people who look like they may fit our ideal customer profile. We also want to meet people who can introduce us to our ideal prospects, even if they themselves are not prospects themselves.
When people introduce us, they need to be able to describe what we do. Having a clear Core Message will help us teach others to describe what we do. We’ll talk more in the Tools section about making it easy for people to introduce us.
The strategy block also contains goals and expectations. This is where we want to have a clear idea of our purpose and begin to think of metrics we can use to evaluate this tactic.
One of our goals is to meet potential prospects, so we would be well served to focus our attention on people who are predisposed to giving referrals.
What sort of expectations should we set? Are there metrics we can use to track and evaluate our progress? In a previous post, I listed 3 metrics for referrals you may want to consider – referrals given, referrals requested, and stay-in-touch conversations. If you set a goal to connect with 3 strategic referral partners this quarter, how much effort will that take? How many introduction letters will you have to send out? Of those, how many will lead to a meeting or phone call? Of those, how many will be a “good fit” for a strategic referral partnership? You probably don’t know the answers to these questions now, but you can start tracking some basic information so you will know soon.
Much of the frustration I hear from professional service firms related to consistently getting quality referrals stems from skipping over the strategy block. Everyone is not an ideal prospect and just because other professional have a similar client base as you doesn’t mean they will be a good strategic referral partner. Take the time to create a clearly defined strategy and all of the other blocks in the model will be much easier to deal with.
Next time, we’ll look at some of the tools you may need to successfully implement your referral marketing tactics.
Bill Brelsford Small Business Marketing Consultant
