When you are in the B2B world, customers are everything to you. Seriously, customers for B2B brands are much harder to come by than for B2C brands. This article is going to look into the buyer psyche corresponding to B2B clients and how this psyche works in providing references for a brand.
Think about it, when a consumer wants to buy a chocolate they do not ask their friends what chocolate they should buy. However, when it comes to hiring a solutions services company, a person would always ask their friend for a referral. This presence of referral psyche can be a goldmine for a B2B brand if they realize how to put it into use within their marketing strategies.
So basically what reference marketing consists of is turning your customers into advocators of your brand. This is not always an easy task, because no customer is going to get much out of referring your brand. So start with giving them something. Find out which one of your clients have been referred to by others and once you have your advocator list, send all of them a token of appreciation. It can be anything from a bottle of wine to a free webinar invite. But the act of letting them know about your gratitude can make a huge difference in their psyche. There are also a few software where your clients can sign up as advocators, and they would get returns according to their level of referring. Catering to your customers is one of the best possible methods of having a referral marketing plan in action.
But more than often you will find a customer who will not openly turn into an advocator. Maybe they do not have a problem referring your brand to a colleague, but they don’t want to be seen as an advocator of your brand. In that case the best thing to do is to ask them to write a review of your brand and services. Most potential customers check online reviews of a brand before hiring them, and this is even more evident for B2B markets. So having a list of good reviews alongside advocators is a great push to your reference marketing game.
Reference marketing is increasingly becoming important in today’s times, and therefore requires a sense of management attached to it. May this article be of help for such purposes.
