Consumers today are oversaturated with information, making it difficult to produce advertising that can successfully cut through the cluttered sea of modern media. Fortunately, one of the most successful tactics for reaching prospective customers with your company’s message is also one of the easiest: word-of-mouth.
Referrals and recommendations are among the most crucial tools in your marketing arsenal, especially for small businesses. In fact, a global study conducted by Nielsen found that 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertising.
Every employee has pre-existing community and family connections and immense potential to use them to build awareness of your business.
If you have 100 employees who have each worked with 10 potential customers and have strong connections to 20 other figures in each potential customer’s industry, that’s already 3,000 prospects that you can reach with little or no additional marketing spend. You can’t afford to waste an opportunity like that.
In addition, employee referrals are great sources of new hires. Employees hired based on referrals rank No. 1 for quality, application-to-hire time, applicant-to-hire conversion rate and retention.
The average employee has 150 contacts on social media networks. If you have 100 employees, you already have 15,000 potential candidates without posting even a single job.
You must take concrete steps to fully leverage your internal team. Train your entire staff, via company meetings and handbooks, to think like marketers. Everyone in your company should be asking questions such as “How can I strengthen my sphere of influence within companies to which I am already connected?” and “How can I generate more word-of-mouth referrals for our company?”
You should also take the additional step of devising a formalized strategy for leveraging your team’s connections. Ask your employees to contact key influencers and other connections, on a rotating basis, via LinkedIn. Develop a team networking calendar and send your employees to after-work events, industry conferences and trade shows.
Because we are all marketers in our own ways, make sure that when your employees arrive at networking events they are able to speak about your company’s unique selling proposition. At TribalVision, we go over typical questions that may come up or objections that may need to be overcome. If, for example, one of our employees answers the question “So, tell me about TribalVision?” with “Oh, well, we’re a marketing firm,” the questioner will stop there. But if the employee instead responds, “We’re a fully strategic, aligned outsourced marketing department for organizations that need marketing expertise but don’t have it in-house,” the conversation may lead somewhere.
Remember, this networking shouldn’t feel like work to your team, so make it fun for everyone involved. Use friendly contests, awarding prizes to the employee or team that generates the most referrals and new business opportunities from networking. When you get everyone onboard and fired up, your employees will become your strongest brand ambassadors and a key marketing channel.
In-the-trenches takeaway: To begin, share the importance of employee referrals with your team in an email or company meeting. Encourage your employees to think of any of their contacts for whom your product or service would be relevant, and give them the materials and training to influence that contact. Formalize a team networking calendar, and standardize the initiatives for referrals. Next, ask your staff to share company happenings on social media. Shares and retweets of your company’s content can be invaluable when they come from your company’s own employees.
Chris Ciunci is founder and managing partner of TribalVision, which has offices in Warwick, Boston and New York.
