GET RECOMMENDED!

Let’s start off with “Word of Mouth” recommendations. If you are like most people, you want to share information about a great restaurant or a great movie that you recently experienced. Have you been influenced, moved to action, when others share their recommendations for a restaurant or a must see movie? When you have out of town visitors, where is the first place you want to take them and why?

Using Word of Mouth as way of obtaining recommendations requires that you engage your target market with your “WOW” (see blog on WOW) and the benefits you deliver. It requires you not only to share your story but, perhaps even more important, to listen to the other person’s story and learn from it.

The Triggers you use and the memorable impression you make are crucial to getting recommendation.
The second method I want to touch on in this blog is Social Media. In my opinion, very few small business owners are using social media effectively. Where are you in this sequence of social media use?

• The beginning is where you know you must use it so you look at Facebook and discover that many of your friends and relatives are on it. You know that our current president is a Twitter user so you occasionally send out a tweet.
• As you progress you find out that someone you know has over 2,000 followers on LinkedIn and even more on Facebook. In this phase the rush is to get as many followers as possible. Much time is devoted to this practice, but still no business.
• Eventually your social media activities are interfering with the business you already have. You may even find that you can’t possibly stay in touch with all your contacts.
• Guess what? You may now discover that a lot of your followers and those that you follow are also trying to sell something.
• The key is to learn how to use social media effectively. Social media is a platform that reaches out to other people (your target market) and provides value, information, encourages conversation and, above all, it produces recommendations.

Both these recommendation methods are important and deserve the work required to make them effective; the key word is consistency in both these efforts. A Word of Mouth or social media recommendation to your target market from a trusted source is the very best client source.

MAKE IT A GREAT DAY!
————————————————————————————————————
Tips & Advice by Nick Petra, CFP – Founder of Strategic Duck and BizQuack