Edumarketer Tip #137: Identifying Referral Partners

You should always leverage your videos and use them to help build your business with your referral partners. 

Sharing your videos with your referral partners is one of the primary reasons to create videos and you should integrate creating edumarketing campaigns for your referral partners and existing customers. Let’s not forget that your customers are not just those who buy one time from you. Your existing customers can and may be a great referral source for you. They can also be repeat customers, so you will want to look at building long-term edumarketing plans for your existing customers to continue to buy from you in the future. By being that resource and trusted expert, you will build customers for life!

Identifying Referral Partners

Yes, you guessed it—another activity for you to complete. Every business, no matter who you are and the product or service you offer, has potential partners. If you are a mortgage originator, your partners are real estate agents. Why? Because their customers want to buy homes, and you offer the financing programs to help their customers buy homes. If you are a financial planner, your partners could be mortgage originators, insurance agents, real estate agents, attorneys, etc. If you are a chiropractor, your partners could be nutritionists, trainers, insurance agents, or attorneys. The reality is that everyone has a database of customers, and if there are potential questions that someone’s customers have that you could answer for them, then you can build an edumarketing campaign for or around them that can help you build your business.

The first step is to identify your possible referral partners.  

Let’s look at the example of the mortgage originator. Their potential referral partner list might look like this:

Potential Referral Partners for a Mortgage Originator

Now, your turn! Go ahead and list your potential referral partners. 

Activity

Who Are Your Potential Referral Partners?

Next, identify your referral partners and their customers. In other words, find a match.

Let’s look at our mortgage originator example:

Referral Partners and Ideal Customer Match

Once you have identified your potential partners and ideal customers, you can match them up with your product offerings and questions that you completed earlier. Some of the edumarketing campaigns you will develop can be used to send to your referral partners or repurposed to answer specifics that relate to their customers’ questions. You will also want to utilize your partners in your edumarketing campaigns because the information they provide to their customers could also be of value to your customers. Developing partnerships is vital to an effective edumarketing plan.

Let’s move on and briefly talk about your existing customers and what you can do for them to build an edumarketing referral campaign.

You have a database of existing customers who trusted you one time and would probably trust you again, but you forget to either continue to provide information to them or think they won’t refer people to you. Getting referrals is one of the most powerful strategies for gaining access to new clients. 

When you are referred to someone, there is increased credibility and trust, which accelerates the sales process. 

The reality is that an introduction from a happy client is a heck of a lot easier than making multiple phone calls, sending emails or attending networking events.  

The unfortunate reality is that most people don’t ask for the referral. Why? Usually people don’t ask for a referral because they see it as being too forward. That is why building an edumarketing campaign to continue to stay in touch with your existing customers, answer their long-term questions and provide information that they can share with their friends and acquaintances will allow you to discreetly stay in touch with your customers, continue to build value, provide information and be the expert. Part of your edumarketing plan will include creating an edumarketing plan for your existing customers.  

We’ve covered a lot in this chapter. Figuring out what questions your customers have will help you identify the information you are going to create for them. If you don’t readily know your customers’ questions or want to find out from them directly, consider sending out a questionnaire to your customers to find out what information you can provide them about your product or service.  

You may also consider conducting an introductory webinar that covers your services and asking what questions they have. Services like SurveyMonkey have easy-to-use templates to create simple surveys you can create to ask your prospects what they want to know.

So far, we have covered why you should use edumarketing in your business, how to identify your expertise and what your customers want to know. Our next segment we will talk about creating a content strategy plan.