Here is a powerful quote from the founder of Facebook.
“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 of advertising.”– Mark Zuckerberg
In this week’s podcast I talk about how I have harnessed this message in my business and how you can do similar in yours.
Transcript:
I like to use the content I create to develop a position in marketing called omnipresence.
Omnipresence means your prospects can’t look in any direction without bumping into you. Somebody is talking about you, somebody is showing them you, you are in the media they see you on socials.
The most effective thing you can do is to put yourself in the centre of the right group of people who you want to talk about you.
This will lead to a mass of potential clients to “swim upstream” into your network and start paying you money.
Here is my client acquisition data from the last full year of the consulting arm of my business.
I attained 76 new clients.
10 of them came to me directly from my marketing, two found me through my wife and eight others had worked with me over the years but are now in their own business and sought out my services.
The “eye popper” a whopping 63% of last year’s new clients amounting to 45 businesses “swam upstream” via my network (of which I am in the centre of).
Eleven came from purchasing a book.
There are two things about these numbers that I think are extremely instructive.
One is that upstream is a significant strategy.
You need to find ways to put yourself in a similar position.
Whether it is builders feeding clients upstream to a Mortgage Broker or a fabulous restaurant finding ways to get other types of businesses with the right customers, feeding clients upstream to them.
Keep in mind, I specialise in advertising and marketing and yet 63% of my new clients came from someone else.
I like to provide my referral network with great content and resources to use for their purposes.
I trade on the fact that everybody is lazy when it comes to content creation and, they welcome good content that they do not have to create themselves.
This provides a positive benefit for them. More importantly I have essentially created around a hundred influencers who expose me to their customers on a regular basis.
From this, the best customers swim upstream.
The smartest one’s swim upstream.
The biggest spenders swim upstream.
The most common comment I get is, I have heard about you here, heard about you there, so I decided to go to the source, and find you for myself.
The second thing to understand is that if you assume that the 45 new businesses are worth on average forty to eighty thousand dollars in annual value as customers, that is a pretty big number.
This strategy takes work, this strategy is not for the faint hearted and at times this strategy requires you to get out of your comfort zone, but a considerable number of my clients that have adopted the same “swimming upstream” strategy conclusively swear by the results.
To find out more about my Fast Money for entrepreneur strategies visit petergianoli.com/fast-money
