Generate more good reviews, recommendations, and referrals for your business.
Businesses are always looking for new ways to bring in more business. They want to grow and expand as much as possible, so they can make profits and satisfy the owners of the company. The business will grow as long as there is a steady stream of customers coming in. If you are the owner, then you want to have more people who can refer new customers into your business.
The underlying question here is, what drives business? Answer: Good Reviews, Recommendations & Referrals.
Importance of Reviews, Recommendations, Referrals
These are the 3 Rs: Reviews, Recommendations, Referrals.
A referral is when a customer sees your business and tells someone else how good it is, so the other person comes to you instead of going to another business. Let’s say you own a business that sells groceries. You need new customers to come into your store if you want to stay in business, so you can make money. One customer can tell friends and family about your business, so they come in to buy stuff. This is called a referral.
When someone refers other people, it is better than you going out and trying to find new customers yourself. You’re improving your brand by word-of-mouth, a great PR strategy.
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The meaning of a good business reviews
Let’s break this down to a more granular level. If you want people to generate referrals, the most important thing is that they are happy with your product or service.
The question is how to *generate* more business through referrals. Referrals from a person who is recognized as an expert in the subject matter, whose motivations are clearly and demonstrably good, which comes with no strings attached – for example: ‘I think this man is an excellent lawyer. I know him personally.’ This type of referral has some intrinsic value. The highest level of referral value is when the person making the referral has a strong personal relationship with the recipient of the recommendation.
A person who receives a referral from someone they know and respect feels good about it because he or she knows what it means, even if he or she cannot put it into words. The more personal the relationship, the greater power of influence. When you can foster a strong relationship with your clients, you can build a strong revenue stream on referrals, and MyOutDesk as a company gets many of them weekly from our loving clients.
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Relationship matters
If people like working with you, they will refer your work to their friends. You should take the necessary steps to make sure that they do this.
The key question is: what makes people compelled to give a good review? The answer is that you must bring value to your clients’ livelihoods. You need to understand the needs of other people and work towards making their lives better. If they are happy, then the chances that they would refer their friends and family will be high. Also, it is a testimony to your product or service.
If you have unhappy clients, then a bad review can be risky. But even in the case of unhappiness, it is important that you ensure that you follow up and ensure that their experience with your product or service was at least satisfactory enough for them to be willing to recommend others.
For example, if a customer is unhappy with the product and still wants to continue using it in order to save money, then he or she would not make a good referral. Referrals are only valuable when they mean something.
Therefore, if you want to generate referrals, it is important that your customers are happy with what they purchased from you. You have to make sure that their experience was satisfactory enough for them to feel comfortable recommending others.
If you want your customers to generate referrals for you, it is best that they would be happy with their purchases from you. It will make the process of generating referrals much easier.
3 Steps for improved referrals & lead traffic
1) Ask for reviews!
Start with your network and sphere of influence, friends, family colleagues. Ask them to write reviews on your social media pages, share your content and tell their own networks how awesome they think you are.
Build relationships with your client base and ask them to leave you stellar reviews as well. We had a conversation with Adapting Socials where we talk about creating your Brand Gladiators who will consistently share and rave about your business. You can catch that webinar here.
2) Ask for referrals!
According to studies by Neilsen, 84% of people trust recommendations from people they know. Referred customers are about 18% more likely to stay rather than other customers. Creating ads, being visible on social media and other platforms is extremely important. The 3 R’s should most definitely be a part of your marketing strategies!
2) Build a Referral Program
Offering incentives and other perks for referrals can also be a great way not to just encourage them but to thank people for sending new opportunities your way. For example, did you know that if a referral sent to us signs up for one month of service with us, we give out a $400 referral incentive?
You should also utilize the people within your organization. For example, MyOutDesk has a Personally Developed Lead (PDL) program where our Virtual Assistants and Support members have a chance to reach out to their clients and other people in their networks and ask if they know anyone who they think might benefit from our services. If they are amenable to having a conversation with us and employ one of our Virtual Assistants for at least a month, they get a PDL bonus. Imagine if inside your organization you could have everyone from your front desk guy to the account to your operations team engaged in getting new customers and keeping customers
There are multiple ways to encourage referrals, all you have to do is be creative and figure out what works for you and your business. We can show you how! Schedule a free strategy consultation with us.
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You can build an effective referral revenue stream too with the help of virtual assistants!
Implementing the 3 R’s in your business is a key strategy that you should not overlook.
“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail.”- Mark Zuckerberg
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Did You Know? MyOutDesk’s origin story is set during the last global financial crisis of 2008. Yes, that’s right — our business started by scaling businesses with virtual assistants during a recession! Pioneers of virtual assistant services, our first client in 2008 went from five to seventeen VAs with a completely revamped organizational model in short order, and he told MyOutDesk, “Our virtual professionals have shaved $250,000 off our monthly overhead.”
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