The Top 10 Referral Marketing Strategies to Grow your Business

Do you have a referral marketing program? If not, creating one is easy. You just need referral software, and you can easily set one up. Even new websites can do this. Best Drums Set Labs can launch one with a WooCommerce affiliate plugin. It is all about finding that software that is compatible with your current website.

Have an Interesting Program Incentive

The success of your referral system begins with your incentive. If you have a motive that attracts the audience, then it is far more likely to succeed. This means that you should do your part of getting to know your audience. You can do this easily by reviewing your analytics data. This will allow you to see how your audience is reacting to your campaign. Aside from this, you can also review the products and services that your market is buying. This purchasing behavior can clue you in on the types of incentives that you can give away.

If you want to be sure you can always ask your audience. It will help to have several incentive ideas and ask your audience to choose. This will help you select the best type of incentive for your campaign.

Make Your Program Unique

If you only create your program in the same way as other marketers do it, you will likely get the same result. This means that your campaign will hardly get any leads if you don't promote it. So how can you get the attention of your audience? You can do it by only making your system a little unique.

In a traditional referral system, referrers are asked to promote the program. They do this by inputting the names of their family and friends in a referral form and asking them to check out the brand. If they do this, they get access to a reward. But you can take this to another level by adding more tiers for rewards. This means that your referrers can get access to different rewards as they get more referrals. You can set milestones for your referrers, and they can get access to particular rewards if they meet a certain number of referrals.

Another way to make your system unique is to implement a contest. In this model, you no longer need to implement tiers. Instead, you just have a grand prize for people who managed to invite the most referrals into your system. This is also great for attracting people who have a significant amount of followers.

Use the Power of Content Marketing

Online businesses no longer stop with just promoting their products and services. They also help their audience by providing them with content. This should be content that is useful to the audience. It should also establish the brand as an expert in the niche. By doing this, the audience will see the brand as more than just someone who is trying to sell them something. Instead, it is someone who knows that they can trust.

The easiest way to implement content marketing in your business is to have a blog. This is where you can write in-depth articles and guides that will help your audience achieve their goals. From blog posts, you can also send your content directly to your market's emails. This can be done through a monthly or weekly newsletter or broadcast email. Just ensure that they are expecting the content from you. This way, they will be far more likely to open the email that they got from you.

Expand Your Campaign to Social Media

As mentioned, a traditional referral system is usually implemented inside of a website. Referrers can input the details of their referrals in the referral form that is embedded inside of a website. But this doesn't mean that you should keep yourself in that box. You can always expand your campaign to social media and get more leads in the process.

Social media is excellent for generating hits and views for a brand new referral campaign. If you have just created your referral program and you want to drive traffic to it, you may want to consider paid social media advertisements. Unlike other types of ads where it is usually a 'hit or miss,' social media advertisements are hyper-targeted. This is because you don't only get to choose where the ad is displayed. You also get to specify who sees it. With social media paid ads, you can select the demographic characteristics of your target market. Plus, you can also delve into their liked pages, interests, and surfing behavior. This will help you get nothing but the best leads for your business.

Also, social media can help you get more leads to your business through word-of-mouth marketing. When a referral promotes your brand on social media, he pushes it to his inner circle of family and friends. But the exposure will not stop there. His family and friends are just as capable of doing the same. By doing this, the word about your brand gradually spreads, granting you more traffic and sales.

Ask Help from Influencers

One of the easiest ways to ensure referral system success is to ask influencers for help. Influencers are called as such because they can influence decisions. They can range from online celebrities to thought leaders who aim to inspire their target market. Because of this, they usually have a significant number of followers. This is useful for businesses for their market is hyper-targeted and is more likely to act on a promotion.

However, you cannot just ask an influencer to promote you. Many business owners have taken this direct approach, and it did not help them. These messages often get ignored. Aside from the fact that influencers are quite busy creating content for their target market, they also care for them. This means that they will not promote a product just because you ask them to do it. You need to prove that your product is worthy of their audience's attention.

It will also help to do something special for the influencer. You can do this by creating exclusive discount codes or programs for them. Exclusivity has always been a key to getting an influencer to respond. This is because you are now approaching them as a sponsor who wants to promote a product to their audience exclusively. Influencers love that.

Fully Engage with Your Audience

Customers love brands that respond to their needs. But they also love brands that just communicate with them. This is the reason why brands who meet their audience in a humorous way like Wendy's are successful. This, in turn, allowed them to get more leads. 

Taking that as an example, you can also engage with your audience with a simple response. This can be as simple as liking their replies and responding to their comments. Influencers do this all the time, and you should do it too. You can also go another mile and visit the profiles of your audience to like and comment on their content. This will show that your business is not automated. This will lead your audience to trust you more, for they know that they are dealing with a real person instead of an automated robot.

Provide Exclusivity

As mentioned in the influencer section, exclusivity plays a significant role in most successful referral systems. The referral program is not available to the general public. Instead, it is only available to certain people.

What makes this exciting is that you can also implement this in your audience. If you have a segmentation system where you separate buyers from prospectors, you should have a good market. You can also divide your audience further by sorting them based on the categories of the products they buy. Then, you can give a different incentive based on the behavior of the audience. You just have to be sure that your audience is already segmented into separate lists. This way, promoting your exclusive program will be more comfortable.

PRO TIP: Creating exclusive programs is excellent for testing markets. If you are into split testing, this is a great way to test different referral formats and rewards. This may be quite difficult to implement if you don't have segmentation in place. So you may want to achieve this if you're going to use this method.

Appeal to Audience Values

It is not enough that you have a referral system. I have been saying this many times since the beginning of this article. But that doesn't mean that you can only make your campaign unique if you triple the rewards. You can also make it more attractive to a passionate audience if you simply appeal to their values.

This is the reason why there are companies who donate to a cause in exchange for referrals. It is because they understand that their audience wants more than just rewards. They also want to help. This is great for passionate audiences or audiences that usually fight for a cause.

Always Go another Mile

 If you want your audience to remember you, you should not limit yourself to what others are doing. As I have said earlier, doing what others are doing will only get you the same result. It is always essential to go another mile in every step of your business transaction if you want to get more referrals naturally.

What step is this every customer goes through several stages when they make a transaction? First, they discover a product through a recommendation from someone or through an ad. They click on that, and they look at the product and the description. From here, the customer goes into the decision making process. They start to think if they will buy the product. When they chose to proceed, the transaction didn't end. They will still need after-sales assistance.

Now, if you can be present in each step, your customers will feel more valued. Think about it this way. What if you are there when they are looking through the product description? What if you have a chat system to assist them in case there is something that they don't understand? Also, what if you are there, ready to help them when they buy your product? This may seem like simple actions, but your customers appreciate this.

In return, they will remember your kindness, and they will promote your products and services for you. Some customers even go to the extent of developing how you assisted them, aside from your excellent products and services. Kindness sells, and it should be standard practice for all business owners that have a referral program.

Use the Power of your Staff Members

Before you go outside of your company, look at your staff members first. They are just as capable of promoting your brand to other people. The best part is that you can require them to do it. If you have a company with around ten people, then you'll have a significant number of people who can promote your business for you. It may seem small, but the exponential power of word-of-mouth marketing will show you how powerful it is.

For this, you need to implement a system. This means that every staff member should be required to share your link at least once a day. You can integrate these quick tasks into your employee's daily plan. This way, you are ensured that you get consistent shares per day. 

Are You Ready to Take Your Referral System to The Next Level?

Referral marketing is powerful. It can stop shopping cart abandonment and boost your overall traffic and sales. It is one of the systems that can help you get new customers with high customer lifetime value. So it is essential to implement it in your business.

However, it is also just as important to be creative. You need to implement the strategies in this article to make your system unique and more desirable to referrers. You need to stand out. It is not enough that you only do what others are doing. You also need to implement unique strategies in order to stand out.