The Most Important Marketing Strategy (It Doesn’t Require Social Media)

Today I’m talking about the most effective way to fill a signature program beyond private practice:

Creating and nurturing Ideal Referral Partnerships.

If I were to coach my clients to do only ONE kind of marketing, this would be it.

Another word for this is networking.

You’re probably already doing this, but you might not be doing it very strategically.

When I meet someone who says they don’t do any marketing, but they’ve got customers or clients, I know they HAVE been marketing. They just didn’t see their behavior as marketing.

I often find out that the marketing they’ve been doing has been networking.

If you have relationships with people who refer to you, even if you don’t do any of it on purpose, you’ve been marketing.

Maybe you’ve been networking with colleagues you met at trainings, at agencies you worked at, or from working with the same client at some point. You hit it off with these folks.

Some of these people have referred clients to you or introduced you to other people who referred clients to you.

If you're an extrovert, you might have experienced a TON of this with very little conscious effort.

It’s time to get strategic because your time is limited.

Michelle Warner teaches a course called Networking That Pays. She points out that we can each only maintain a finite number of meaningful relationships (between 100 to 250, according to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need).

We need to be strategic about WHO we spend our limited networking time and energy with.

You’ll also need to be more strategic when you’re selling a signature program because you’ll probably be serving MORE new people each year than you do in your private practice.

If you do long term work, you may only need 10 new clients a year to keep your practice full, or even less in some cases.

To keep a signature program full, on the other hand, you might need 30 or 100 or more new participants each year.

The math is a bit different, so the networking will be a bit more strategic.

I just peeked at my own statistics. This year, over half of my participants have come through my referral partners, NOT by stumbling upon my podcast or finding me through IG or google or paid ads.

But let’s look for a moment at the OTHER kinds of marketing activities I do and you might do too:

Sending out a weekly or biweekly email.

Creating a podcast episode.

Delivering a free live event.

Updating my website.

Creating a new lead magnet.

Setting up an ad funnel.

Posting on social.

Some of these things do help people find me, and I love that I can do these things in relative isolation.

AND… It’s a really bad idea to leave relationships out of our marketing practices. Networking will help to amplify the effectiveness of those other activities.

Dialing down your time spent on solo digital marketing activities and dialing UP your time and energy spent with ideal referral partners is going to grow your business WAY more quickly and more reliably.

Why is this kind of strategic networking so effective?

LOTS of your future participants are already in someone else’s audience.

The people who created those audiences are your Ideal Referral Partners.

By PLACE I mean things like:

a podcast, a free online community, a paid community, an email newsletter list, or a paid small group program.

When the person who leads and curates that gathering place invites you in and vouches for you and the work you do, you’re MUCH more likely to have the trust of members of that community.

Compare that to the trust that you can establish in a video on IG that is 60 seconds long.

I created a step-by-step process for this activity, not because it comes easily to me. Rather I created it because it is very important and does NOT come easily to me.

Here’s a quick summary of that process.

First, you figure out: Who are my Ideal Referral Partners?

They serve your niche

They probably serve your niche in a different way than you do.

(If you don’t know what your niche is, that’s your task before you can find your Ideal Referral Partners).

You have aligned enough values

You don’t have to agree on everything, but you resonate with the way this person works and you feel that they have integrity.

They have an audience

They do NOT need to have a huge audience. A very small audience of people who are highly engaged and in your niche is better than a big audience of folks not in your niche

That means they’ve already gathered a group of your potential participants.

(It’s OK to spend time networking with people who just work with folks 1:1. But your growth will happen a lot faster if they have at least a small audience.)

They may be open to sharing their audience with you in some way

How this sharing happens may become clear right away or later on.

Then, once you’ve identified an Ideal Referral Partner:

Step one: Find where their audience is gathered.

(A podcast, a community, a newsletter, a paid program, for example.)

Step two: Observe.

(Listen to the podcast, hang out in the group, or read the emails.)

Step three: Approach them with specific praise or observations and invite connection.

(If there’s any way to get an introduction, ask for it!)

Step four: Meet

(Come with a back pocket idea, but be open to their idea, a different idea, or NO idea happening.)

Step five: Try it

(Be a guest on their podcast, guest teach in their course, or share each other’s work.)

Step six: Check in

(Get in touch in from time to time and collaborate again.)

When you meet, you’ll start with an open ended conversation. You won’t rush in and say: “I want access to your group.”

They are as protective of the time, energy and well-being of their participants as you will be of yours.

Plant the seed for collaboration with no pressure. Make it easy to say no.

Think about what might be in it for them. Maybe you’re offering access to your audience if that would serve your audience. If you have no audience yet, what’s in it for them is simply your willingness to serve their folks.

You’re not there to extract value. You want to build trust both with the person who gathered those folks, AND with the people in that community.

Be open to giving more than you get. Be unattached to the particular outcome of you serving their audience.

Embrace some emotional discomfort!

You might feel tempted NOT to do any of this strategic networking stuff.

You might think:

What if they ignore my invitation?

What if the person I reach out to doesn’t like me?

What if I don’t enjoy my time with them?

What if it stays completely awkward?

I mean, have you ever had a horrible networking date? Those feel bad.

I get it.

I’m introverted. I find small talk exhausting. I don’t say that because I think I’m above small talk. I understand that small talk is a way to test easy topics and start building a bit of trust.

Small talk tires me out because I don’t understand it well, and meeting new people in an unstructured way is a bit painful for me.

And that’s what networking dates ARE. I KNOW.

Some of the time this process might not go well. But I promise you, some of the time it WILL go well, and it is TOTALLY worth it.

Resources Discussed:

Michelle Warner (https://www.themichellewarner.com/

Shownotes at: https://rebeltherapist.me/podcast/223