Short YouTube video by Phil Risher advising local service businesses to use network marketing—particularly groups like BNI—to build a referral-based brand. He recommends (1) meeting individually with group members to discover referral opportunities and (2) adopting a 'givers gain' approach by providing free information or small giveaways to build goodwill and encourage reciprocal referrals.
Chapters
If you're a local service business, one of the things that you can look at doing to build your brand is network marketing. So we're in a group called bni and they're all over the country, all over the world, actually. And basically what it is, it's a group of people that get together that you know like and trust that are out there listening and selling for you and giving you referrals. So for local service businesses, it's a home run, because if you go there and people see the service that you offer, they're going to be trying to refer you business and vice versa. So there's two things that we found by being in this group that are effective. The first one is setting up meetings with everyone in the group. You never know who knows who and who can refer you business. And then the second one is to be an asset and not just someone that's a taker. So their mindset is givers gain. But the more that you can give, whether it's free information, whether it's free stuff, whether it's a bottle of spot out, or whether it's this other service that you offer that's not that expensive for you to do, givers gain. And you can build goodwill by doing things for people.
