Recent studies continue to show the top two most trusted digital referral sources for your business are friends and family. The research revealed makes sense. There are two powerful psychological associations in using someone recommended to you by these two groups. First, social acceptance – sharing in the positive experience your peer group is benefiting from right now. Second, affirmative association by individuals who share your standards. For example, if your mom and best friend are satisfied with a services provider chances are you will be too and you will have something to share together.
Does your marketing plan include reaching these individuals? How will make the interaction meaningful? What is your plan and within it what are your objectives and tactics to reach success? Your relationship marketing plan needs to be consistent and easy for you to implement in your business.
Here are practice42’s 3 simple strategies for engaging friends and family:
1. Interact with past clients.
These are satisfied people who benefited from your services, paid for them and are perfect candidates to be walking endorsements for you. They can’t do this, however, without your direction. Your relationship marketing campaign needs to create multiple ways – both digital and personal – to connect with them to generate referrals.
2. Make relationship marketing part of your strategic campaign.
Relationships generate clients but relationships don’t start and stop with one or two meetings. Your strategic campaign should be designed for multiple, consistent interactions across multiple platforms. In today’s marketing landscape you will not reach everyone the same way. Take the time to invest in others and your practice by building relationships in your digital and local community.
3. Give them something to share.
No one can talk about you all the time if you don’t share frequent materials with them. Your campaign should be built with topics to discuss and share. Easy starters are conversation topics like: life moments, upcoming events, teaching new concepts, sharing important updates. Let them be proud of you and informed and watch the word spread.
The easiest way to do all three of these things? Start a digital relationship marketing campaign that’s lets you build and maintain momentum. Knowing that you want to positively impact friends and family is only the first step in the right direction, now you need to put the plan in place to make it happen.
Not sure where to start? We would love to share ideas with you. These are important considerations for you to define before you engage in any marketing campaign where you will be dedicating your time and money to generate new clients.
Did any of your employees not come in for work on Monday, February 29th, because leap year added an extra day to the year? Does your employee handbook mention Leap Year explicitly? Does it outline what is expected on the 366th day of the year? Or did your employees simply plan on being at work like any other normal (365 day of the year) Monday?
While I would have anticipated the latter, I was surprised to find a number of no-shows in the workplace this Leap Year Day. In interviewing different businesses I work with, the rough number was two out of five employees chose not to come in on Leap Year Day. I can’t assign any particular features to the issue such as specific ages, genders, or education levels yet, but there were numerous reasons given – from I didn’t know if I’d be paid for my time to how was I to know what to do to it was never addressed in the Employee Handbook – and a surprising lack of apologies.
After my Leap Year Day experiences at the start of this week, I have three take-aways. My first is immediately actionable. Go right now and update your employee manual to very specifically mention a Leap Day policy. You may want to go the extra mile and add in other possible day-off warranting holidays such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Fat Tuesday, and Boss’s Day. My second take-away is this issue could easily have been avoided with a conversation on both sides of the management team. It could be as simple as a paid time off policy update at the start or close of the calendar year. If you’re refreshing your policy manual, why not bring this up too?
My third take-away focuses on creating an environment of trust and respect in the work place. Both of these features need to be present in the behavior of each member on your team. You need to have a balanced approach to promoting employee self-worth and value together with reaching your business and profitability goals. In a recent presentation I gave on overcoming multi-generational work force challenges, I shared with the audience that the majority of the younger generation work force is actively looking for worth-oriented recognition, streamlined advancement, and a culture focused on team building, all focuses that were not required (and demanded) in the work place by previous generations. This dramatic shift in work force culture is resulting in trust issues on all sides and, if left unaddressed, will easily results in unpredicted, damaging moves – like an entire team not arriving for work on a busy Monday morning.
