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Referral business, we all know how important that is in terms of driving growth in professional services. But one of two things usually happens, either we get the wrong referrals or we hear from our clients and referral sources that they are referring us, but we’re not getting any phone calls.
Well, our research shows that almost 50% of referrals who are referred to us never get our way because of one reason, they can’t understand what it is that we do and how we can help them. Where are they getting this information? Well, 8 out of 10 times, the very first place people who get referred to us learn about us, aside from the person who referred, is our website. 80% of professional services buyers check out our website first.
So in terms of getting referrals, the right referrals and getting them to call, your website needs to achieve three things. It needs to clearly articulate what you do, who you do it for, and why clients should choose you. Now this isn’t just about marketing copy. Marketing copy can say that, but what about proving it? That’s where educational content comes in . So I encourage you to think about when you’re using a referral strategy, think about how important your website is and how important educational content is to proving people should select you.
Related: Five Keys to Building Better Business Relationships
Now, educational content is not things like white papers that aren’t truly informative or syndicated content. It’s also not the marketing copy that I talked about, and you might be surprised that it’s not even in case stories or testimonials. All case stories do is while they’re interesting, they talk about what you did for a specified set of circumstances. So consider how important educational content is in terms of explaining the who you are, what you do, and why clients should choose you.
And finally, make sure that content is optimized. If it isn’t properly optimized, people won’t be able to find you in the first place when they’re looking for a firm who solves the problems that they have.
So if your referral strategy needs some adjusting, I encourage you to check out our course on Referral Marketing. Just go to hingeuniversity.com and click on the Referral Marketing course . Hope to see you there.