How To Scale Your Business When Your Referral Network Dries Up

We all love referrals. Without them, we'd be out of business. The only problem with them is that referrals are hard to scale at will.

Recently, I was asked by a prospective client on how to scale his business development opportunities and sales beyond referrals. Here are four opportunities that I rarely see businesses and entrepreneurs deploy.

One: Partner With Non-Competing Brands

Partnership marketing is a strategic, mutually beneficial collaboration between two brands. It’s important that the brands in question aren’t direct competitors; rather, they should complement each other, and have overlapping target audiences, in order to maximize the benefits of the partnership.

The Benefits of Partnership Marketing

When done correctly, partnership marketing is truly a win-win situation – everyone, including the brands’ clientele, benefits from the relationship.

Some of the benefits of partnership marketing include:

• Expanding your reach to previously inaccessible audiences
• Being able to spread the marketing workload associated with lead generation across two firms.
• Gaining credibility through affiliation with a highly respected brand.
• Helping to move your business in a new, profitable direction.
• Your firm’s clients benefiting from exposure to a trusted provider of a service or product that they require.

Two: Leverage LinkedIn to Connect With Your Ideal Prospects

You can scale your connections on LinkedIn by sending up to 100 invites per day. Spending a half hour a day making new connections and nurturing these relationships has been a game-changer for creating new opportunities for my brand.

When it comes to networking on LinkedIn, there are two primary functions – just like in real-world networking: Building your network and nurturing relationships.

Adding people to your network won’t help you build a relationship with them. You need to engage with them regularly. Here’s how:

Interact

• Provide status updates on a regular basis. It keeps you visible to the people in your brand community.

• Like and comment on LinkedIn posts that you think are valuable, and share the posts with your connections and other groups you belong to.

• Share content you find at other sites – like Fast Company or Forbes or Huffington Post – that you think would be valuable. When sharing, remember to add content saying why you think it is valuable and expressing your point of view.

Acknowledge

LinkedIn does the heavy lifting when it comes to staying on top of people in your network. They provide notifications when someone you know has a birthday, work anniversary, or new job. You have the option of “liking” the notification or sending a message. I suggest choosing “send a message” and writing a personal note. Determine a time of day you will check in and get in the habit of doing it daily so you don’t miss any of your connections’ important dates.

Three: Create & Distribute More Video Content

Many business people tremble when contemplating video production. They are intimidated by the medium and sometimes mistakenly think of it as a high-cost endeavor with low ROI.

But video is a necessary component in most content marketing strategies. By 2021, 82% of consumer internet traffic will be video, according to a recent Cisco study.

One can begin to create videos with their mobile device, like have with my videos on YouTube and Facebook.

Buy Advertising

When done effectively advertising is an essential strategy to scale sales because:

• Advertising is the only medium you can control – If you want your message to hit on the day a product launches or event is about to happen, this is the only vehicle you control completely.
• Advertising allows you to target ideal customers only – when you match a very personal message to a very select audience you get far greater connection.
• Advertising creates awareness for your content – The force that drives a great deal of conversion and trust building these days is educational content – eBooks, seminars and blog posts – advertising is a great way to help get that content found and consumed once you’ve gone to the effort to produce it.
• Advertising adds credibility to your message – Don’t ask me why this is exactly, but every time I run advertising people comment that business must be going well. The perception that you can afford advertising is often enough to sell and resell prospects and customers alike and makes it easier to get attention for your entire message.
• Advertising amplifies everything else you’re doing – When you are using advertising to create awareness for your content you automatically create more awareness for everything you are doing. Journalists find companies that advertise, referral sources remember companies that advertise, people fan and follow and friend from ads, and employees can point to well-placed ads as a source of pride in place they work.

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Edwin Dearborn in the CEO of Premiere Lead Systems and a bestselling author