A New Way to Find New Clients

I recently joined ReferralKey. It's a wonderful way to find new clients through referral marketing.

I'm especially impressed with its focus on giving and receiving referrals. The system is designed from the ground up to support business networking. In my view, this makes it vastly superior to LinkedIn as a way to meet business owners and network.

You can take advantage of all the networking tools ReferralKey offers free of charge. There is no 'pro' upgrade. This is about referral marketing plain and simple.

Sign up to ReferralKey. Once you're a member, send me a message within the system and I'll explain how to make it work for you.

Strategic Business Networking

This resource on Business Networking London describes 28 different ideas that combine to form a powerful business networking strategy.

The first page lists all 28 methods and gives a brief description. You can then click through to more detailed information about the idea itself. As I write this, only the first page is posted (the detail pages are not yet in place). But they're not needed to benefit from this information.

The summary information is enough to understand the principles involved, and I thoroughly recommend it to you. It's a brilliant way to approach business networking, and turn it into a highly profitable source of revenue for your business.

Relationship and Referral Marketing with Twitter? Here's how...

A client and I have been discussing the use of Twitter in online marketing over the last week. Today, this client came up with a brilliant new way to put it to use. Here's a quick run-down on the background...

1. One of their target markets is brides (they provide wedding entertainment for receptions and/or parties)
2. We ran an experiment to see whether or not it's possible to find brides using Twitter
3. While we attracted many companies seeking the same market, Twitter didn't send us many brides (i.e. they're not using Twitter to look for information about weddings)

I was discussing the outcome of this experiment with Claire Park of Incognito Artists, and we both agreed that Twitter wasn't likely to be a useful source of leads. Despite this, there are 2 things Twitter did well...

1. It was a quick and low cost way to test the potential of the market
   
2. It built a list of potential future alliances (i.e. complimentary suppliers)
   

1. Market Testing with Twitter

Twitter isn't a replacement for full-blown market research. What it offers is an approximation of likely behaviour over a very short period of time (48 hours in this case), at no additional cost.

What is obvious from the followers we picked up, is that many complementary businesses are using Twitter. And that it probably is a useful tool for building alliances. It was Claire that spotted the opportunity to use Twitter as a way of developing mutually beneficial relationships as follows...

• The company's Twitter page attracts followers over time
• Most of these followers will be companies looking to supply complimentary services to the same market segment
• We make contact with these companies, offer to post a free tweet on their page, and ask if there's anything special they'd like us to post
• We retweet when they post something useful or interesting

This use of Twitter can be further refined to ensure we pick up the right companies...

• Schedule tweets to go out only during UK business hours
• Tweets are crafted to include the targeted company's name and the primary keyword relating to that topic

The objective then, is to use Twitter as a means of forging a relationship with those company's likely to be in a position to refer their clients on to Incognito Artists. As a supplier of wedding entertainment, this company is often one of the last to be booked. Everybody else in the supply chain is generally called up first. And that makes almost everybody a potential source of referrals.

To put it another way, Twitter can be used as a B2B relationship marketing and referral tool.

Business networking Conversation Starters

Conversation is the key to business networking, and it starts by showing an interest in the other person. Here are some of my favourite conversation starters and follow on questions...

• What business are you in?
• How did you get into that business?
  
• What do you enjoy most about it?
• What kind of people do you like to do business with?
• I bet you have some stories to tell? Only ask if person is in an industry where this is likely to be true

These questions allow the other person to talk about themselves. At some point, s/he is likely to ask you what you do. This is your chance to shine. Consider the difference between these 2 answers...

1. I'm an online lead generation expert. I find ways to turn casual visitors into serious business enquiries
2. I get you the people who are ready to say yes

The first is a technically accurate, and encapsulates what I do. It's a more complete description.

The second doesn't fully explain what I do, but packs far more emotional punch. It provides an obvious follow-on question that most people will ask. It is more engaging, and generates more interest in my service.

I strongly recommend you develop a similar one-sentence pitch that speaks directly to the outcome your service delivers, rather than providing a technical description.