I recently enrolled in an Acitve Rain contest. The challenge was to blog about market shifts and how they affect your marketing strategy. I love AR contests, they are imaginative, fun and useful.
I began thinking about past successes and I reminded myself that no matter what you do in regard to marketing, it is likely that the vast majority of your new business will come from referrals. I was further reminded of my work with Jay Abraham. For those of you who may not be familiar with Jay, he is a foremost marketing and business strategist. He launched Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra. Jay has dveloped 93 ways to obtain REFERRALS.
I was the CEO of the largest dermatology and plastic surgery newtork in the United States. Our model practice received 85% of its new patients from referrals. Our marketing people kept spending millions of dollars on advertising (note, NOT marketing). Finally, I had to put a stop to this because it was not a good use of funds. The government should learn from this...stop doing, what is NOT working!!
Ultimately, no matter in what state or city one of our facilities was located, the new patients were obtained by referral 85% of the time. I could not ignore this fact. It was always 85%. We concentrated on referrals and saved millions of dollars in marketing budget. I put all of the marketing people to work on referral programs that we developed to in-house programs that made the offices more friendly and nice. We had the model practices in the country (we sold the network in 2005).
It is all about referrals....
Paddy Deighan J.D. Ph.D
http://www.bestmeetingclub.com
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