Hello, everybody. Mickey Griffith here with the Referral Institute in the North San Francisco Bay Area. Speaking of referral marketing as we often do, part of what we really talk about is there’s things about you that make you specifically attractive to certain people. No, I’m not going to go into a full target market discussion here because that’s a program that we do here at the Referral Institute and that we do over several hours, but I want to get you thinking about something. One of the ways that you could start to identify who’s more likely to work with you is to look at who’s working with you right now. Who is it that naturally shows up in your client list if you were to look back over your clients over the last year, two years, five years, 10 years, whatever that looks like, what are the similarities about them? Can you make up a road map, if you will, or a description of a person, if you will, about some common factors that they have?
For instance, let’s say you just happen to have 77% women that have been your clients over the years then there’s a good chance that that’s the people that are normally attracted to you and maybe, that’s where you should be putting some of your focus. What are some other things that you can zoom in on? It could be location, maybe they’re really close to where you are, could be that they have a specific type of business, maybe they have a certain number of kids or even kids at all could be one of those things.
Now, the thing to be careful about when we’re looking at this “what kind of clients are normally attracted to you” thing is to not just get hooked up in the demographics. So there’s all these demographic information like income, where they live, how much they have to spend, whether or not they’re both working, those kind of demographic things are important, they’re part of the target market. And what I’m also looking for here is what else can you say about them that’s a little more unique or even sharpens that conversation any more? By going out and saying, “We just want to work with everybody,” we don’t get the return that we’re looking for with the clients that give us the most joy in our business.
What are some other attributes that are more unique to them? One of the things we talk about in the Referral Institute is behavioral styles. So if you’ve ever done a DISC assessment, and you’re familiar with the DISC assessment, we use that information in a program we teach called the Room Full of Referrals. Maybe, what you will find out going back through and looking at your clients is that there’s a particular behavioral style that naturally keeps coming to you. And it could be for a variety of reasons but if that’s who’s showing up, maybe that’s who you should be looking for. Go back through your past clients, look through them and try to draw a picture of who it is that’s naturally showing up and not just the demographic information.
I’m Mickey Griffith with the Referral Institute.