In our previous two blogs we’ve been discussing the new book I’ve written with referral marketing expert Paula Hope. This book looks at how to combine referral marketing with content marketing in order to optimize your marketing for massive success. This is fundamentally what Personal Marketing is about. Today I’d like to delve a little more deeply into the two main components of Personal Marketing: Referral Marketing and Content Marketing. Let’s look at them one at a time.

Referral Marketing

This concept is all about creating business for yourself by growing your social capital and leveraging the high-quality relationships thereby generated for referrals. High quality referral relationships contain loads of trust which can be transferred to create referrals. These deep relationships develop over time, and always involve face-to-face involvement, which can range from coffee meetings, the occasional beer, meetings, parties, events, and any other way in which you can maintain regular face-to-face contact with selected members of your network.

Your Online Marketing Presence

By creating a powerful online presence and optimizing all of the online tools available to you, you can continually tap into the social capital that you have created through your high-quality relationships. It starts with selecting the right platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, your website), and providing timely, helpful and provocative content (blogs, white papers, newsletters, videos) on these platforms. And, by employing other digital marketing methods such as email marketing, you can continue to share your story, and that of you successful clients, on an ongoing and routine basis.

If you are thinking, Personal Marking methods seem to require a lot of time, work and discipline, you would be right!

As Paula and I note in our book, it does take a lot of time to employ all Personal Marketing methods. If you are executing properly on these methods, and if you include travel time to events and 1:1 meetings, plus daily time to keep in touch with your network online, plus creating content for online platforms, you should be budgeting 20-25 hours a week for new client development. At least! Every week.

Therein lies the real issue as to why business professionals fail to succeed with their businesses or practices. They are not committed or, more often, do not know they need to be committed, to at least 20-25 hours of new business development activities per week. And they end up with very disappointing, life-changing (not in a good way) results. Don’t let that happen to you! If you would like to gather some practical, actionable information that will help you combine referral marketing with your online content marketing, I invite you to get in touch today!