Social Media Marketing: Combining Your Social Media and Your Referral Marketing

Have you heard about social referral marketing? This idea revolves around boosting your referral marketing using social media. In case you didn’t know, “word-of-mouth” is one of the most potent marketing tools.

Customers will easily trust a brand that has referrals. This is why you must ask business associates, clients, and friends to tell others about your business. In this post, we will show you why you should combine social media with referral marketing.

Referral marketing

Before discussing the benefits of social referral marketing, let’s tell you about referral marketing. Referral marketing involves asking your customers to provide referrals for your products or services. To ensure that they do, most organizations provide incentives or rewards to such customers.

There are two ways to run referral marketing programs . The first one is casual in which businesses ask new customers to share how they got to know about them. With this, they reward the party that the new customers mention.

The second method is more formal. Here, the company creates a referral code for each customer. As such, any purchases or conversions from such codes attract automatic rewards. Both methods are inexpensive and will help businesses reach their target audiences faster.

Social Media Marketing

This process refers to using social media to attract traffic to your website and patronage to your brand. To do this, you must be ready to provide new valuable content that will increase organic followership. It also means that you must encourage your followers to refer to your brand using their social media handles.

The Relationship Between Social Media and Referral Marketing

It is no longer news that we are in a social media age. People spend a lot of time on social media these days. Statistics show that the average person spends between two to three hours on social media every day.

This tells you that social media presents an immense opportunity for referral marketing. Already, we have told you about how much impact “word-of-mouth” marketing is. With social media, it is even more impactful since people can share referrals across continents.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say that you give your customers referral codes. They can post these codes on their social media handles. Their followers and connections can click on these links and the word about your brand spread faster. The result of this is a wider reach for your business at almost no effort or cost.

Benefits of Combining Social Media and Referral Marketing

Now that you have a picture of the relationship between social media and referral marketing, let’s discuss the benefits. In this section, we will discuss what your business will enjoy from social referral marketing.

Referred Brands Gain More Trust

Here’s a simple question to buttress this point. Which would you choose, a brand you have never heard of or one with so many testimonials online? Now, we are not even talking about a product that someone you know tells you about. Most people will still choose products that have loads of testimonials.

This is the same way people view your products or services. After engaging a prospect, the aim is to convert them into a customer. It shouldn’t stop there. You must satisfy them enough to turn them into advocates for your brand.

It is more important to invest in this than in advertising. Do you know why? The more referrals your brand can gather, the more patronage you will enjoy. Many businesses invest in running social media campaigns using sponsored ads, Facebook viral marketing and giveaways. That’s not bad, but referral marketing using social media gives you more reach.

In the end, you gain so much trust from the prospects that they become customers and end up referring others. This is a cycle that is birthed from the ripple effects of delivering quality products or services and requesting referrals. Here are some helpful statistics to further buttress this point:

• Customers that are referred to your brand will spend about 25% more than usual.
• Referred customers will likely make a repeat purchase or patronage.
• Such customers are in a better position of referring prospects to your business.
• About 84% of all the B2B decision-makers make purchases because of referrals.

Expands Brand Awareness

Another important benefit of social referral marketing is that it expands brand awareness. We are in a tech age and businesses must begin to recognize social media as their voice. It presents you with an array of opportunities to spread the word about your business.

For example, your customers might mention your products or services in one of their social media posts. What happens after this? Their followers, many of whom haven’t heard about you, get to know about your brand. This leads them to find out about you and how to patronize your services or make purchases.

Another scenario is that a previous customer sees a post relating to your brand and remembers a previous experience. Now, they want to patronize you again and probably attract new prospects in their wake. This automatically expands your brand’s awareness without you making any specific effort.

Grows Brand Loyalty

Running a social media account for your business gives you several advantages. One such advantage is personal communication with followers. This means that you can answer questions or solve problems directly.

Several pieces of research reveal that doing this helps to grow the loyalty of your customers. They will rather deal with a brand that has a face and communicates one-on-one than a faceless brand. This means that you can use social referral marketing to grow loyalty among your customers and online audience.

Better Conversion

Do you know that every post that you publish on social media is likely to be seen by new customers? Of course, existing customers that follow you will see such posts, same for some of their followers.

The good thing with this is that whether the views come directly or not, you can still interact with your viewers. As such, you will get reactions and even redirects to your business website. Truth be told, not all leads end up in conversions. However, because of referrals, it may only be a matter of time.

More companies are understanding this and are beginning to take advantage of social media to give their brands a face. This helps them to improve online interaction, the key to getting more conversions.

Fewer Costs

This is probably one of the most important benefits of social referral marketing, especially to small businesses. While larger businesses have a huge budget for their marketing campaigns, smaller businesses are quite handicapped. With social media, it is almost a level playing field since you don’t have to spend a fortune.

Research shows that marketers that spent an average of 6 hours a week attracted more traffic to their website. These results are completely organic and are without extra cost except, of course, time. You don’t have to work with a high budget to get the best results on social media.

With an hour daily on social media, you can improve your marketing campaigns and attract more traffic. What you need to put an effort into is creating quality valuable content for your audience.

Conclusion

The importance of social referral marketing cannot be overemphasized. Many marketers and companies are attaining remarkable results from harnessing their efforts in this direction. We have shared some benefits with you in this post. What other benefits do you know?