Marketing is a tough area for most businesses: Should people advertise online or offline? Is a magazine article better than PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns? The answer of course is that there is no answer; what works for one business may not work for another.
If you’re looking for a web designer, there is no better way of deciding on a company than a friend saying “choose Webbed Feet UK, they’re web designers in Wiltshire and they’re fantastic”. This is a referral in action and the idea for any business is to have as many people recommending it as possible. And this is where networking comes into play; it’s a way of expanding your network of contacts that’ll be able to sell your business on your behalf.
It sounds easy, and that’s because it is. It takes time, and does rely on a lot of ground-work, but once your network is established it is an easy way of driving clients to almost any business.
There are several different networking groups, all meeting at different times and with different formats. To name a few in and around Salisbury there is BNI, Ambassadors, Bonallack & Bishop, various Chamber of Commerces, Andover Mutual Business Group, Wilts Biz Club, FSB and 4Networking, which happens to be my preferred group. They generally meet every week, fortnight or month over breakfast, lunch or dinner, and allow like minded business people to chat to others.
The reason I like 4Networking is that it is relaxed, and that they have hundreds of groups across the UK allowing you to travel the local area (or even country) and have a breakfast up to 4 days a week.
The purpose of this article is to discuss my experiences with networking, specifically 4Networking, and how I believe you can benefit the most. I shall also discuss how networking goes hand-in-hand with social media, and how if they are used together you can achieve even more.
When you attend a networking meeting for the first time, it is tempting to give your business card to as many people as you can, collect as many as you can, and tell everybody about your latest offer. This may work occasionally, but think what you think when people do that to you; you usually nod and smile, and discard their card when you get back to the office. The basic idea of networking isn’t to sell your product or service to people in the room, but to befriend them so that they know you as a person, trust you, and will recommend your business.
Think of it this way, there may be twenty people in the room, perhaps even one that may need your services. However if each of these twenty people know you, would recommend you, and have two hundred contacts, then that’s a potential four thousand clients. How many times have your friends or family recommended your product or services to someone? Yet, how often have you tried to sell directly to your friends or family? This is networking, expanding your network.
In theory it’s simple, attend networking meetings and get others to start marketing your business; however you do need to put the ground work in and be patient. This means firstly by attending meetings regularly so that people get to know you. You then need to let people know what you do as well as getting to know people on a personal level; if you discover that someone has a similar hobby to you, talk about that, get to know them. The idea is to get each of these contacts to like you, try and build connections on both a business and personal level. Then you’re starting to build your ‘team’ of contacts.
You should then build a level of trust, perhaps by offering free snippets of advice, giving presentations, or indeed by referring other people or businesses that you know and trust. This is not achieved by selling, in fact the opposite. Go out of your way to help the other business people, just like you’d help your friends and family in a selfless way.
After time you’ll notice that when you walk into the room you’ll not have to nudge your way into conversations with strangers and talk uncomfortably about your business, but you’ll be greeted by your first name and asked about what you’ve done since your last visit. When that happens, you’ve cracked it! Without knowing it you’ve started trusted friendships on which you can base business relationships and more importantly, recommendations.
So how long does this take? Well of course that can vary, it may only be one meeting, but more realistically I’d suggest six months to a year.
Remember that not everyone will like you, and you’ll not like everyone. So focus on the people that you get along with, and build some high quality relationships, and importantly trust. Once you’ve done this, you’ll find them recommending you to their friends, family and business contacts. Plus of course, you'll find some new friends along the way!
I’ve been networking now for around a year, and the profile of Webbed Feet UK has grown significantly. Despite having traded for over ten years, it’s only been in the past year that your local presence and brand has really been established, and that’s thanks to networking. We had no recommendations for a while, but all of a sudden, we are getting referrals, and it’s just getting better as our relationships develop. This all started as soon as I walked into the room and everyone said “Hello Aaron, how was such-and-such at the weekend” We’re certainly looking forward to the future and what it may bring!
So how does social media help? There’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, FourSquare and YouTube just to name a few. Firstly you need to decide which social networks are best for your business. For the purpose of this article we’ll consider LinkedIn and Twitter, mainly because I believe that they are generally the most useful for the majority of SMEs. It is important to set up your profiles ensuring that they are complete with as much information as possible.
After every networking meeting, after you’ve chatted to a new contact you usually take their business card. These often get placed in a folder or draw in the office and lost. What I do is take their details and add them into my social networks, for networking the most important being LinkedIn. That way I have a permanent connection with them, and have all of my business contacts in one place. I’ll also check to see if they have a Twitter account, and if they do I’ll follow them so that I can keep up to date with their business, as well as hoping that they’ll follow @WebbedFeetUK in return.
You will usually meet networking contacts every week or two. In between meetings you may lose track of what they’re up to, and more importantly they’ll lose touch with you. That’s where social networking comes into play. A tweet on Twitter every few hours takes seconds, and is a handy way of broadcasting “here I am and this is what I do”. It doesn’t need to be much, and certainly not a sales pitch, but a gentle reminder of your business. You can also provide free tips and advice, or just retweet those given by others then, providing what you tweet is useful, you’ll start to build a reputation and improve on the trust in your relationship with your clients.
If your LinkedIn connections or Twitter followers are people that you see regularly then great, if they’re not then the updates are a gentle but constant reminder so that they don’t forget you.
Also comment on other people’s statuses and tweets, then you’ll start to build an online personal relationship, a bit like networking between networking meetings. This way when you see the person next it will be like you’ve not been apart. For example, if you go away on holiday for a few weeks, and have no or little contact with your friends and family, you wonder what they’re up to and have a lot of catching up; whilst if you’re continually phoning and texting, on your return it’s like you’ve never left.
An example of what I tweet would be: Links to interesting web-based articles; SEO, social media and web development tips; links to recently completed projects; links to new blog articles such as this; announcements of future networking meetings; interactions with other social networking users; retweets of interesting tweets; answering users’ tweets (in a generic way that any reader will appreciate); updates of what I’m doing; announcements of developments of Webbed Feet UK. So it’s certainly not hard to tweet a handful of times every day.
Networking works; social networking works; however if you put the two together, and add a bit of persistence and patience into the mix, you have a winning formula that can establish your brand and generate business.
If you would like to try 4Networking, I am marketing assistant for Salisbury, we meet every other Thursday. Contact me