Many businesses struggle to understand the best ways to market their business in order to generate a healthy stream of sales.
Whether you operate as a sole trader, micro business, larger organisation or a start-up, there’s a place for referral marketing.
Referral marketing uses one of the oldest forms of marketing – that of word-of-mouth recommendations.
Groups of people meet on a regular basis to build trusting and collaborative relationships for the good of one another. Referral marketing meetings are structured to offer participants the opportunity to present a minute message to those in the room. This short presentation is a chance for participants to share an overview of their company, products and services and the solutions they solve.
Over time (a few weeks or months), as participants get to know each other and build trust, they organically start to recommend each other to friends, family members and colleagues. This peer generation of leads and referrals is extremely lucrative for many businesses.
Anybody can attend a referral marketing meeting. The main participants will be company owners or professionals employed in a sales, marketing or business development role.
The referral marketing environment doesn’t work for everyone because there is a level of commitment required to gain the best results – what you put in, you get out.
As well as the minute message opportunity previously mentioned, a longer presentation will be included and a valuable learning point – again, delivered by members. Because referral marketing organisations usually have an annual membership arrangement, these two presentations are a member benefit that helps to raise profiles.
Often, refreshments or a meal is provided because meetings typically take place at breakfast, lunch or in the early evening.
Open networking will take place at the start of a meeting to welcome guests and build a rapport between the members. A second networking section is sometimes part of the agenda during a break between the structured sit-down segments.
This is where the confusion of comparing referral marketing groups to business networking groups can set in. As mentioned, referral marketing offers a level of networking to encourage the building of relationships, whereas networking groups tend to be much larger and have more emphasis on meeting as many people as possible. Speed networking is a great example of this.
It is important to point out that sampling different meetings will give you a feel for what will work for you. The smaller close-knit culture of a referral marketing group will often produce longer-term collaborations and quality referrals, whereas business networking groups will grow your contact list quicker.
You have likely found this page because you have searched for ‘business networking groups in Stockport’ or ‘referral marketing groups in Stockport’.
NetworkIN is a referral marketing community that stretches across Staffordshire, Cheshire, Lancashire and the West Midlands.
Our Stockport Team meets fortnightly on a Tuesday morning from 7:15am-8:45am.
Stockport has a population of around 106,000 and is well-known for its hat production to the magnitude of over 6 million exports! The area is home to the War Memorial and Strawberry Studios – keeping British history and music alive.
Every NetworkIN Team grows by way of visiting guests joining to become advocates. Once an advocate joins a Team they gain sector exclusivity where someone from the same type of business is then unable to attend the meeting. This enables the paying advocate to raise their profile and become the go-to specialist.
Becoming an advocate opens up the opportunity to explore other Teams to further build awareness (so long as sector exclusivity doesn’t apply).
In addition to your Google search for Stockport business networking and referral marketing organisations, ask friends, family members and colleagues for advice. They may have already attended meetings and be able to provide useful feedback.
There are many benefits of referral marketing, some of which have already been outlined. In addition, as a NetworkIN advocate, you will also gain:
Fortnightly structured meetings
A chance to build your authority
Sector exclusivity
Free introductory training and business planning
The opportunity to publicise events and courses
Access to a personalised return on investment tracking system
Additional awareness created from online promotional resources
Corporate social responsibility opportunities to work alongside the NetworkIN charity consortium
percent of consumers identify word of mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision – Ogilvy, Google, TNS.
percent higher profit margins are achieved from a referred customer - Annexcloud
percent increased marketing effectiveness generated using from word of mouth - Market Share
percent of consumers trust referrals from people they know - Nielsen
The first step to seeing if this word-of-mouth platform is for you is to attend a meeting – get in touch with the NetworkIN team today.
Be IN the know and IN the now with NetworkIN.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
More information about our Cookie Policy
