This includes getting referrals from strategic alliances (ex: CPAs, Attorneys, Investment Advisors, Realtors, Insurance Agents, Mtg. Brokers, etc.)

If your plan this year includes increasing your referral flow, don’t overlook the advice today.

[This article is a guest article, contributed by guest contributor Darek Daniel]

“The Words a Picture Cannot Say to Your Customers”

We’ve all heard of the saying that a picture is worth a 1,000 words, but business owners beware. Don’t take this saying literally when it comes to your advertising. Too many times business owners make the mistake of trying to be too clever or creative with their marketing pieces that their message becomes muddled or unclear to their target market.

Although you probably don’t want to use 1,000 words in your advertising, words are an important piece to your marketing and should complement your graphics and help get the message across. There’s nothing worse than spending the time and money on an advertising piece only to find in the end that no one gets it. Sure it may look great, but is it effective? Remember, there are several important messages your clients should get when they read your advertising piece.

1.  
   1. Who are you? You spent all that time on your advertising, but can your client immediately identify what your company name is? If your logo and company name aren’t immediately apparent in the design, than you have no branding value to your marketing piece and it’s time to rethink your creative.
   2. What do you do? I can’t tell you how many times this happens. Business owners get so involved in the aesthetics and the cool factor of the design that they forget the entire purpose of the piece. If you can’t tell from looking at your design exactly what your company does, why bother spending the money?!
   3. What do you want your clients to do? Ok, so you’ve sent them this great advertising piece. It has your company name on it, and it clearly states what your company does. Great. Now what? What should your clients do about it? Should they call you? Should they visit your website? Set the expectations for what you want to happen by including what’s called a call to action. This is marketing speak for tell your clients exactly what you want them to do. Literally use the words, “Call 555-5555 now for an appointment,” or “Visit our website today at www.prova.fm.” Remember to keep it simple!
   4. Why should your clients follow through? Now that you’ve told your clients what you want them to do, give them a reason to do it. Offer them an incentive to pick up the phone and call your business. Whether it’s 10 percent off or buy one get one free, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s an attractive enough offer to entice people to use your products or services.

Offering incentives also gives you another great benefit besides bringing in new customers. Incentives allow you to track your marketing efforts. Not following me? If you offer a 20 percent discount only to people who have received a certain advertising piece, then when they call asking about it, you will know where they found your number and ultimately you can track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Try to make sure each marketing effort you employ gets a different incentive. This will make it possible to track your efforts.

Creating great advertising pieces that draw your clients’ attention with attractive graphic design is just the beginning of a successful marketing campaign. By keeping these rules in mind when you create your pieces, you will ensure that your advertising efforts will not be in vain.

Darek Daniel is a marketing writer and branding professional for Firefly Writing, & offers weekly advertising help for small businesses at Prova.fm. For more information on how your small business can benefit from the design services mentioned in this article, you can visit http://www.prova.fm. For more resources on this topic, visit our blog at http://advertisinghelp.wordpress.com/.

I was asked to give referral marketing advice to financial advisors– many whom have been kicked in the teeth by the financial markets and their clients. 

And regardless of your industry, there are many good nuggets of referral advice in this article that you can apply to your own biz.

Read the entire article below.

These days many advisors rightfully worry about portfolio losses—not only for the damage done to clients’ hopes and dreams, but for the psychological wedge those losses create between them and their clients. Advisors fear that their clients will never again be willing to introduce them to their friends or family. Their previous confidence about receiving referrals seems long gone.

The good news is twofold. First off, clients absolutely can reclaim their financial confidence and edge with your help. If they’re unhappy about the way things have been going, they don’t have to stay unhappy.

And second, market performance is never a good predictor of referral success in the first place. Don’t believe it? I hate to burst your bubble, but even in the bull markets of the mid-2000s, I rarely met anyone, not a colleague nor a family member, who gave much conscious thought to referring their financial advisor. Even when they believed their advisor was doing a fairly good job of managing their investments, they just weren’t tuned in to making introductions.

This may be hard to accept, but the truth is that people don’t brag about you in their day-to-day lives. They don’t spontaneously jump up and down on their friends’ couches gushing about your financial wizardry. It just doesn’t happen, at least not consistently. So regardless of market performance, it’s not likely that someone will spontaneously volunteer your name with a gasp of excitement when asked about who manages their portfolio.

Which gets us to the main point: if clients are slow to spontaneously refer you in a bull market, what are the odds of a client recommending you now, after a disastrous 12 months? Is it even possible?

Surprisingly enough, yes it is. I believe you probably have just as good a shot of gaining referrals now as you did when the Dow was up 16% back in 2006. And ironically, you could be in a position to attract even more referrals depending on your client communication strategy—because your competition is very likely not stepping up to the plate.

The post-market-crash referral guide
So, how do you bridge your own mental gap between your poor portfolio performance and wanting referrals? It seems counterintuitive, but it’s not.

1. Focus on what matters
The first step in your referral comeback strategy is to revisit your clients’ objectives and goals, and make any necessary adjustments. Call them in for reviews, and reassure them that they still have a plan going forward. Certainly, as wealth has evaporated, goals and objectives may have to be tweaked.

It’s never easy to discuss the loss of wealth, especially when you’re the overseer of that money. It causes feelings of pain and angst for you and your clients. But facing reality is a necessary part of being a professional advisor. Think of physicians who often must communicate bad news to their patients but are trained to focus on the options for recovery available in the present.

Before you can guide someone forward, you need to fully understand where he has been: you should retrieve past intake forms and profiles in your client files. Review his investment policy statements. Go over their risk tolerance and time horizon. Make notes, and follow up with a written letter confirming that clients are either still on track, or in need of a new plan.

2. Reconnect with your value
Despite the rough year, it’s vital to reflect on why clients originally selected you as their advisor and reconfirm that decision. This isn’t an exercise in reaffirming your own peace of mind. It’s designed to reinforce why your clients began the relationship with you in the first place. You provide value separate and apart from market performance. You help clients manage their total financial picture. They needed you for something other than a magical ability to make the markets move in a continually upward direction!

If you’ve been hiding out and ducking clients, it’s time to stop putting off your appointment with reality. It’s time to discover in detail whether or not your clients are still finding value in your professional competencies. Go ahead and ask clients how they’re feeling about the quality of your service and what you can do to serve them better. If a client has threatened to take her wealth elsewhere, try to remain neutral about other financial advisors and their services. Conduct an exit interview with those clients who do leave you.

There is an excellent opportunity right now to survey all your clients to find out what’s on their minds. Find out what they have valued about you in the past, and what they need from you in the future. Find out what’s keeping them awake at night, and you’ll likely tune in to where you can provide the most value in the future.

3. Stay top-of-mind
Once you’ve reconnected with your clients’ goals and rediscovered your value, you need to proactively communicate that value. I like to recommend communicating via entry points and low-cost experience points. Your website is one such experience point. Clients can connect with you through the site, and they can send friends to get a first impression of you there.

One of the simplest but most effective marketing moves you can make is to get your website updated now. More than ever, prospects judge you by your online presence. Your website is an online brochure and is equally important as any hard marketing materials you use or are planning to create. Your website should showcase your core competencies, include case studies, and offer stories that allow prospective clients to get an authentic experience of you and your work from the comfort of their homes.

4. Make referrals easier
Finally, are you making it easy for your clients to recommend you? As we’ve discussed, clients don’t spontaneously refer even in bull markets. Most of the time, the reason clients don’t recommend you is because they do not understand the full scope of what you do. People talk most about your work when they really understand it. But the truth is that the majority of our clients have experienced the benefit of only a few of our skills.

If you’re a fee-only advisor, for instance, your clients may have experienced your money management services, portfolio allocation, financial commentary, and investment review services. But those same clients have probably never experienced what you do when it comes to tax or financial planning assumptions (e.g., tax harvesting, time horizon management) or investment research (e.g., the mutual fund, stock, or bond selection process). They’re not aware of the continuing-education knowledge you garnered at a conference you attended this year. In other words, they never realize the full extent of your technical capabilities and how those skills can improve their lives.

Referrals come faster when clients recognize the extent to which you can and have improved their lives. So they must be able to understand all your services. They must be able to explain to others what you do. Focus on educating them about all areas of your practice, ideally by giving them the direct experience of benefiting from all your expertise—especially in times of crisis.

Bottom line
It’s been a tough year for folks in the financial services community. Many advisors feel guilty about client portfolio losses. But the reality is everybody is experiencing loss right now. So losses by themselves shouldn’t affect your ability to earn referrals.

Imagine a conversation one of your clients might have with a friend or family member after you have checked in with them as described here: “You wouldn’t believe what my advisor did. We reviewed all my goals, and we’re only slightly behind where we originally hoped to be. I feel so much better about my situation after our meeting. It’s not as bleak as I thought. You really should go see this guy/gal.”

Hey, it happens! You’ll only know how well if you try it out and see how it works for you.

In all, there were some good observations (but no definitive winner). 

Going through each of them, seems the common theme was… referrals and relationships are interconnected.

No doubt. That’s true. But it’s not what I was driving at with the diagram. As I said, the picture revealed much more.

I’m quite surprised someone didn’t figure it out. So… here’s the CORRECT answer…

If you study the diagram closely, you’ll notice that each Center of Influence (COI) (clients, prospects, family, etc.) I purposefully labeled in different COLORS.

This was to visually show you where the true VAST majority of new relationships can be found. And, the answer I was looking for was this:

The vast majority of referrals can be found in strategic alliances. ( I colored this COI blue in my diagram).

Now that may seem counterintuitive to many of you. In fact, you might be thinking, “Yeah, but my best referrals come from existing clients.”

I won’t argue that point. I agree with you. But what I will say is that from sheer inter-connectedness… strategic alliances will always present the greatest opportunity for vast, deep referral relationships.

Why?

No, not because of “volume” of people.

But business people are already “in” a business mode or mindset. It’s their focus daily. It’s what they do. So the people they connect with are often others that are seeking help and solutions to their business problems. This is good news for you, as a business person who solves other’s problems with X.

Focus on developing your strategic alliances. It is the fastest way to grow your strategic alliance relationships pipeline.