How To Get More Referrals And Why Spaghetti & Meatballs Are the Answer!

You have the opportunity to share that question when somebody says, hey, what do you do for your business? And yet they forget most of what you say. So the question is, how do you share your story about your business so people remember you and you'll get more referrals? Well, I want to talk about that today. And the story goes like this, spaghetti and meatballs. And if you think about spaghetti and meatballs, you'll remember how to do this the next time someone says, hey, tell me about your business. What do you do if you think about this? Spaghetti is everything you do. As an example, if somebody said, hey, Jeff, what do you do at Swing Point Media? Well, we do email marketing, we do SEO, we do websites, we do lead generation. We do titles, we do descriptions. In other words, it's overwhelming. They don't remember. And I often refer to this as noise. And if we think back or if you've ever been experiencing, when you have a radio and you have it on AM and if it's not on a channel, it's making a lot of noise, we kind of tend to delete that out. And we don't want to really go back to that. Well, to me, that's spaghetti. And when we are sharing everything we do with the people who've asked that question, what happens is we're just throwing spaghetti against the wall and we're hoping some of it will stick. I want to share with you a potentially a much better way to do this. When you think about spaghetti, it also has a meatball in it, and the meatball is the star of the show. That's what stands out. And I want you to think about, out of all the things that you do, what's the one thing you can share with them that now when they'll be out seeing their friends or other business colleagues, that they'll remember your meatball. And let me give you an example. My overarching message might be when somebody says, well, what do you do, Jeff? And I says, well, I help local businesses get more customers using organic content and content marketing. Well, that's the overarching message. And if they say, well, like as an example, how would you do that? Well, there are many ways, but one of the ways that we do this is with email marketing. And now I'll only talk about email marketing because that's my meatball. That's the thing that I want to attract that person to tell that story. Now, speaking of stories, that's also something that when people are out and about, they like to talk about things other than the weather. So if you can give them a story that helps them remember you and it's shareable, there's a good chance they're going to share that story with people they know. I'll answer that question, say, well, one of the ways we do this is with email marketing. I'll give an example. Three years ago, we started with this guy. His name is Steve, and he owns a company called Desert Barbecue Cleaning. When we first started, he had a smaller database, about 1300 people, and he was getting an open rate of about 25%, which for a lot of people think, they think that's really good. But unfortunately, the way he was dealing with his email marketing and that valuable asset, which were repeat customers, he wasn't getting the response he wanted. He was only getting like two or three sales every time he sent the email out. He should get a much higher rate than that. In fact, a warm market will get about 10%. So what we did is we went in and redid his emails and system and we started telling stories that were relatable and things that people would want to open up and read about and get to know Steve and his business. What's happened now, three years later, we fast forward and now we consistently get between 55 and 60% open rate, and he gets anywhere from 10 to 20 or more orders every time we send out an email. So if you're looking for someone who needs some help getting more customers, you using a database more effectively, that's what we do. You see, that's the difference between me telling them all the things we did. Now, there's a lot of other things we did for Steve, but if I tell you that it becomes spaghetti and I'm just throwing things against the wall hoping some of that will stick and you'll forget my story. And I want to give you that story. So when you're out, when somebody says, wow, email marketing is dead, and you say, well, I got a story for you. Because now you can engage in the conversation. And it's like when you know a joke, you want to share it with people and tell them. When you hear a good story, you want to do the same. So think about that the next time you're in a conversation with a potential client or you're in a networking group and you're thinking, how can I get people to remember me? And how can I increase my referrals from the people that I did meet. Think about spaghetti and meatballs. Are you the spaghetti or are you the meatball? I encourage you to be the meatball.