SEO
5 Referral Marketing Strategies to Win More Sales
Winning more sales ultimately comes down to trust.
The prospective customer has to trust that your product or service is valuable and that you’re honorable enough to not sell them something they don’t need.
The way to win trust only comes in three forms:
- You’ve built trust by getting to know who you’re selling to and showing them that you’re invested in their success.
- Your brand has enough reputation in the market to warrant widespread trust.
- You get an extension of trust by getting your product or service recommended by someone they trust.
In this article, we’ll talk about the third option and show you five ways to deploy referral marketing strategies and ultimately close more deals:
What Is a Referral Marketing Strategy?
A referral marketing strategy is a marketing tactic that enhances your company’s ability to spread word of mouth about your products and services and receive more recommendations. It’s a competitive advantage that extends the reach of your marketing efforts beyond your own efforts.
Referrals are a great way to get the word out about your product or service, whether you’re a SaaS company or an e-commerce site. People tend to share what’s useful and makes them look good. They want to be seen as someone who has good taste, cares about their peers, and provides practical value. Referring to great products and services is one way to do that.
The hard part about marketing is getting people’s attention. It’s a noisy world full of too many great Netflix shows and products and services. We can’t buy everything and can’t watch all those shows. We have to find ways to filter out the noise. Getting recommendations is one way to do that, which is why referrals can be an integral part of your marketing strategy.
5 Referral Marketing Strategies That’ll Help You Win More Sales
There are a lot of referral marketing strategies out there that can extend your reach and ensure that you’re giving your company the best competitive advantage. Here are a few that’ll help you win more deals:
1. Host a Free Event for Customers
Doing something exciting for customers will always improve your retention rate. But how does it improve your referral rate?
When you provide that free perk, make it a “plus one” affair. That way, they’re encouraged to bring someone who isn’t a customer but could potentially be one. You get a chance to have a captive audience full of like-minded people ,and hopefully an opportunity to convert them to paying customers.
Digital events work just as well. You can host a seminar that’s paid but offer free invitations for current customers to give to friends, colleagues, or family.
2. Automate Your Ask
If you rely on your marketing or sales team to do it, you’ll see some decent results, but finding ways to automate asking for referrals is the secret sauce. It starts with doing a little research to figure out the prime time to ask for referrals.
From there, it’s as simple as sending out an automated email to each new customer asking them to forward this email to someone who might be interested.
The easier you make it for people to refer to you, the more likely it is that they’ll do it. Creating a simple referral link that they can copy and paste works wonders. Or take it another step further with a button that has a pre-written message typed up outlining the benefits of your service. Then they literally just have to decide who to send it to.
3. Maximize Your Incentives
Sometimes it’s enough to ask people for referrals, but why not boost your chances by offering an incentive? That could mean something as small as giving them a credit on their account for each referral that signs up.
It could also mean that they get a cut of the first deal or monthly subscription cost if you’re offering a service. As Content Mart rightfully stated,
The better your incentive, the more likely it is that customers will go out of their way to tell their friends, family, and colleagues about you.
4. Harness the Power of Reciprocity
The “law” of reciprocity essentially says that when you do something nice for someone, they’re more likely to develop an urge to return the favor and do something nice for you.
With referral marketing, you could evoke this urge by giving your customers or prospective customers a gift. It could be tickets to a concert or a sporting event. Perhaps something simple like a branded coffee mug or coupons to their favorite shopping store.
You close the deal, offer up a gift or kind gesture, and ask for a referral. If you find something that works well, then make it part of your sales plan and automate it. Build it right into the sales process and go even bigger for those that actually send a referral your way.
5. Take a Leap of Faith
Of the many popular sales closing techniques, none stands the test of time better than simply asking for the sale. That’s right. Sometimes the best strategy is asking your prospect if they’d like to make a purchase today. Or sometimes assuming the sale by asking, “how do you want to make your first payment?”
Turns out, that’s equally true for asking for referrals. Sometimes just asking is all it takes to get one. And if you do it consistently enough, the odds will stack in your favor. It could be an automated email like above, but sometimes a personal touch like a phone call or an in-person meeting works better.
What works especially well is being specific with your request. Swap “would you consider sending me a referral?” for “who else do you know that would benefit from our product?”
The strategies you can deploy to maximize your chances of getting a referral are endless. The best advice we have to offer is to pick one and stick with it for a while. Testing your efforts will help you truly understand what works, what doesn’t, and will ultimately help direct your investment the best.
3 Real Life Examples of Successful Referral Marketing Campaigns
1. Lyft
Lyft’s referral marketing strategy is a perfect example of what it takes to spread word of mouth from current customers. Lyft incentivizes current customers to refer their friends and family members by offering up free ride credits.
The company also markets itself through features such as the ability to share riders’ ETA with other non-customers, as well as locating lost or left-behind items. Lyft further incentivizes newly referred customers by offering up free rides when they sign up, regardless of whether or not they use a friend’s referral code.
2. Dropbox
Dropbox puts their referral marketing strategy into the hands of its customers by offering up plenty of incentives in the way of additional cloud storage space. Dropbox Basic accounts are awarded 500 MB per referral and can earn up to 16 GB of additional storage, while Dropbox Plus and Professional accounts can receive 1 GB per referral and can earn up to 32 GB of free storage.
Customers can even track the status of their own referrals that they’ve sent, which allows them to have the ability to follow up with anyone that they’ve sent an invitation to without Dropbox ever being directly involved.
3. Tesla
Tesla’s overarching goal is to “build the best clean energy products”, and its referral program goes hand-in-hand with that objective. Current customers can share their referral link via the Tesla app, which – like Dropbox – allows them to track the status of their sent invitations as their Loot Box rewards.
Rewards include 1,000 miles of free Supercharging with the purchase of a new Tesla car for both the referrer and the new customer, a $100 reward for the activation of a new solar energy system or Solar Roof, as well as a $400 award for each solar referral. A Powerwall can be earned for the referral of 10 solar customers, which is more than a lucrative enough incentive to keep current customers referring potential new customers.
4 Tools Companies Can Use for Referral Marketing
Getting starting with a referral marketing program can seem like a daunting task – but it doesn’t have to be. There are plenty of available tools that allow you to hit the ground running with your referral marketing strategy, all of which allow you to customize and configure your program as much or as little as you want. Here are a few solutions to check out:
Referral Factory
- Website: https://referral-factory.com/
- Price: 15-day free trial, then from $95/month
Designed for small to medium-sized businesses, Referral Factory makes it “easy for any business to build their own referral program.” You’re able to choose from 1000+ referral program templates, or create your own with your company’s branded colors and logo. Just set up your rewards, and you’ll be set to track your referral campaigns in real-time. This is a great tool to start your own affiliate marketing program.
Friendbuy
- Website: https://www.friendbuy.com/
- Price: 30-day free trial, then from $249/month
Friendbuy believes that “referrals are your best channel for dynamic business growth”, and puts its money where its mouth is with its refer-a-friend program. Automated rewards fulfillment and A/B testing are just some of the features that Friendbuy provides, with the ultimate goal being marketing your company through customer engagement and word of mouth.
Ambassador
- Website: https://www.getambassador.com/
- Price: Unavailable
Ambassador allows you to turn your best customers into brand ambassadors by segmenting them into categories such as “customers, affiliates, influencers, partners, employees, and other advocates.” These roles are incentivized and tracked in real-time, allowing you to make the most of your referral program while further understanding who your customers are and creating more opportunities for engagement.
Mention Me
- Website: https://www.mention-me.com/
- Price: Unavailable
Mention Me aims to drive referrals throughout the entire customer journey, incentivizing current customer referrals whether they are new happy customers, or long-time, repeat customers. With reporting and analytics tracking your customers’ purchasing behavior, you’ll have plenty of actionable insights to pull from.
Think back to the last time you referred someone to a product or service. What was it? How did you tell them? Share your findings in the comments below:
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SEO
Google On The 2 Types Of Searches It Still Struggles With
While Google has made strides in understanding user intent, Director & Product Manager Elizabeth Tucker says two types of queries remain challenging.
In a recent episode of Google’s Search Off The Record podcast, Tucker discussed some lingering pain points in the company’s efforts to match users with the information they seek.
Among the top offenders were searches containing the word “not” and queries involving prepositions, Tucker reveals:
“Prepositions, in general, are another hard one. And one of the really big, exciting breakthroughs was the BERT paper and transformer-based machine learning models when we started to be able to get some of these complicated linguistic issues right in searches.”
BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is a neural network-based technique for natural language processing that Google began leveraging in search in 2019.
The technology is designed to understand the nuances and context of words in searches rather than treating queries as a bag of individual terms.
‘Not’ There Yet
Despite the promise of BERT and similar advancements, Tucker acknowledged that Google’s ability to parse complex queries is still a work in progress.
Searches with the word “not” remain a thorn in the search engine’s side, Tucker explains:
“It’s really hard to know when ‘not’ means that you don’t want the word there or when it has a different kind of semantic meaning.”
For example, Google’s algorithms could interpret a search like “shoes not made in China” in multiple ways.
Does the user want shoes made in countries other than China, or are they looking for information on why some shoe brands have moved their manufacturing out of China?
This ambiguity poses a challenge for websites trying to rank for such queries. If Google can’t match the searcher’s intent with the content on a page, it may struggle to surface the most relevant results.
The Preposition Problem
Another area where Google’s algorithms can stumble is prepositions, which show the relationship between words in a sentence.
Queries like “restaurants with outdoor seating” or “hotels near the beach” rely on prepositions to convey key information about the user’s needs.
For SEO professionals, this means that optimizing for queries with prepositions may require some extra finesse.
It’s not enough to include the right keywords on a page; the content needs to be structured to communicate the relationships between those keywords.
The Long Tail Challenge
The difficulties Google faces with complex queries are particularly relevant to long-tail searches—those highly specific, often multi-word phrases that make up a significant portion of all search traffic.
Long-tail keywords are often seen as a golden opportunity for SEO, as they tend to have lower competition and can signal a high level of user intent.
However, if Google can’t understand these complex queries, it may be harder for websites to rank for them, even with well-optimized content.
The Road Ahead
Tucker noted that Google is actively improving its handling of these linguistically challenging queries, but a complete solution may still be a way off.
Tucker said:
“I would not say this is a solved problem. We’re still working on it.”
In the meantime, users may need to rephrase their searches or try different query formulations to find the information they’re looking for – a frustrating reality in an age when many have come to expect Google to understand their needs intuitively.
Why SEJ Cares
While BERT and similar advancements have helped Google understand user intent, the search giant’s struggles with “not” queries and prepositions remind us that there’s still plenty of room for improvement.
As Google continues to invest in natural language processing and other AI-driven technologies, it remains to be seen how long these stumbling blocks will hold back the search experience.
What It Means For SEO
So, what can SEO professionals and website owners do in light of this information? Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Focus on clarity and specificity in your content. The more you can communicate the relationships between key concepts and phrases, the easier it will be for Google to understand and rank your pages.
- Use structured data and other technical SEO best practices to help search engines parse your content more effectively.
- Monitor your search traffic and rankings for complex queries, and be prepared to adjust your strategy if you see drops or inconsistencies.
- Monitor Google’s efforts to improve its natural language understanding and be ready to adapt as new algorithms and technologies emerge.
Listen to the full podcast episode below:
SEO
Google Warns Of Soft 404 Errors And Their Impact On SEO
In a recent LinkedIn post, Google Analyst Gary Illyes raised awareness about two issues plaguing web crawlers: soft 404 and other “crypto” errors.
These seemingly innocuous mistakes can negatively affect SEO efforts.
Understanding Soft 404s
Soft 404 errors occur when a web server returns a standard “200 OK” HTTP status code for pages that don’t exist or contain error messages. This misleads web crawlers, causing them to waste resources on non-existent or unhelpful content.
Illyes likened the experience to visiting a coffee shop where every item is unavailable despite being listed on the menu. While this scenario might be frustrating for human customers, it poses a more serious problem for web crawlers.
As Illyes explains:
“Crawlers use the status codes to interpret whether a fetch was successful, even if the contents of the page is basically just an error message. They might happily go back to the same page again and again wasting your resources, and if there are many such pages, exponentially more resources.”
The Hidden Costs Of Soft Errors
The consequences of soft 404 errors extend beyond the inefficient use of crawler resources.
According to Illyes, these pages are unlikely to appear in search results because they are filtered out during indexing.
To combat this issue, Illyes advises serving the appropriate HTTP status code when the server or client encounters an error.
This allows crawlers to understand the situation and allocate their resources more effectively.
Illyes also cautioned against rate-limiting crawlers with messages like “TOO MANY REQUESTS SLOW DOWN,” as crawlers cannot interpret such text-based instructions.
Why SEJ Cares
Soft 404 errors can impact a website’s crawlability and indexing.
By addressing these issues, crawlers can focus on fetching and indexing pages with valuable content, potentially improving the site’s visibility in search results.
Eliminating soft 404 errors can also lead to more efficient use of server resources, as crawlers won’t waste bandwidth repeatedly visiting error pages.
How This Can Help You
To identify and resolve soft 404 errors on your website, consider the following steps:
- Regularly monitor your website’s crawl reports and logs to identify pages returning HTTP 200 status codes despite containing error messages.
- Implement proper error handling on your server to ensure that error pages are served with the appropriate HTTP status codes (e.g., 404 for not found, 410 for permanently removed).
- Use tools like Google Search Console to monitor your site’s coverage and identify any pages flagged as soft 404 errors.
Proactively addressing soft 404 errors can improve your website’s crawlability, indexing, and SEO.
Featured Image: Julia Tim/Shutterstock
SEO
SEO Reporting for Agencies (With Real Report Examples)
SEO agencies obsess over their SEO reporting process. It’s their main method to share their achievements with their clients. Without it, clients could be left in the dark about their SEO progress—and trust me, you don’t want that.
In this article, I’ll share the structures of some real-world agency reports that have been shared with me and how different size agencies approach SEO reporting.
SEO agencies juggle multiple clients, so time spent on a fixed task like reporting can quickly add up.
For example, let’s say your agency has five clients and spends two hours per month on the entire SEO reporting process.
That’s over one day per month just spent on SEO reporting.
For this reason, as an agency owner, you want your clients to be high-paying with standardized reporting deliverables, but this is often far from reality.
And it can often look something like this:
And often, the higher the budget, the more tailored your reporting becomes.
Let’s face it: An enterprise client probably won’t be impressed by a basic PDF report you generated in 10 seconds using a third-party tool if they’re paying $XX,000 per month.
Likewise, a client paying $1000 per month would probably not know where to start if you gave them a 60-page SEO report and hooked them up with a Tableau dashboard.
So, based on this, we can say that there are two main types of client reports:
- Small-medium business (SMB) SEO reports
- Enterprise businesses’ SEO reports
But before we discuss the details, let’s explore the main differences between SMB and enterprise SEO reporting.
| Element | Small-medium business (SMB) SEO reporting | Enterprise business SEO reporting |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Usually, one domain in one business category | Can have multiple domains, multiple territories, and multiple business categories |
| Target audience | Site owners, marketing team | Marketing team, development team, senior stakeholders, other teams |
| KPIs | ROI, website traffic, conversions, leads | Different teams may have different KPIs for SEO |
| Recommendations | High-impact changes that are easy to implement | Incremental changes that provide long-term growth |
In my experience, SEO reporting for SMBs usually consists of three elements:
- SEO dashboards – Allows the client to check their SEO performance or KPIs at any time—usually fully automated
- SEO report – Periodic update on the total SEO campaign, usually monthly. Focuses on commentary and insights, and the format of the report can vary
- Presentation – Often, a video call with the client to run through the report and get feedback on the SEO performance
Sidenote.
Sometimes dashboards and SEO reports are combined, creating a hybrid format.
Agencies can automate their SEO reporting easily by using a free and easy-to-use solution like Google Looker Studio (GLS).
With Google Looker Studio, there are three options:
| Option | Difficulty | Time investment |
|---|---|---|
| Set up your own dashboard | Medium | Time-consuming |
| Use existing templates | Easy | Less time-consuming |
| Use Ahrefs GLS templates | Easiest | Minimum |
If you don’t want to create your own dashboards, we’ve done the hard work for you and have three Google Looker Studio connectors that pull the best bits from Ahrefs.
If you aren’t confident with APIs, this is one of the best ways to get data out of Ahrefs so your clients can see it without time-consuming manual reporting.
SEO reports for SMBs are usually a document that gives a periodic update on a website’s performance.
So what’s normally included in an SMB SEO report? In my experience, it can cover some or all of the following topics—depending on the focus of the client.
Tip
Not sure how to tweak it? Here are some real SEO agency report structure examples you can take inspiration from.
SEO agency report structure #1
With this report a lot of the detail was in the organic visibility section, where it split out visibility by sector.
Also interestingly, it detailed the links acquired during the month for the agency in a classic link report—at the enterprise level, this is less common as enterprise clients acquire links all the time without lifting a finger.
SEO agency report structure #2
This is a delivery-focused report. The “impact analysis” section is interesting as it details the impact that their landing page optimization work has had, concluding with two growth figures.
This is a good way to communicate to the client the value of the work you are doing.
Clients like to have their say when it comes to the SEO calls—after all, they’re paying for it. For SMBs, ensuring they get a good ROI is usually top of their minds.
At an SMB level, the agency should be able to provide a comprehensive assessment of the SEO status of the website and get feedback from the client.
For most SMB clients, the usual format is this:
- Weekly status update call
- Monthly report call following delivery of the monthly report
In my experience, it rarely deviates from this format.
The first rule of enterprise SEO reporting is that there are no rules. So, generally speaking, what the client wants, the client (usually) gets.
Here are a few examples of scenarios that can happen when enterprise clients come on board at your agency and start talking about SEO reporting:
- “We already have our own in-house report. You can use our template [sends you horrible looking template].”
- “Our old agency had this report, can you do something similar?”
- “We want dashboard reporting so we can monitor results in real-time.”
- “Integrate your SEO reporting with our existing tools.”
- “We want the SEO report to be integrated with PPC.”
- “We want SEO to be included in a regular performance report.”
As enterprise SEO reporting is often just a chapter of the bigger performance marketing report, the SEO section has to be tailored to exactly what the client wants, with zero fluff.
When it comes to dashboard reporting, enterprise clients will usually expect a Tableau, PowerBI, or a custom-built solution, plus some data from Google Looker Studio.
Here’s a snapshot of what that can look like:
I used Tableau when I was working with enterprise clients and found it hugely useful for SEO reporting.
The deliverables for enterprise SEO reports are broadly the same as those for SMB reports, but as always, the devil is in the details.
In short, there’s usually:
- More personalization to the client’s business
- More tools used – Rather than having one or two trusted tools for SEO reporting, a “big six” agency will have access to most, if not all, of the best enterprise SEO tools in the market
- More reports created and shared with different teams
Here are three examples of enterprise SEO reporting for inspiration.
Media agency report structure #1
This report example shows that it’s mostly focused on performance and technical SEO. This agency report had a separate content report that they shared with the content team.
Media agency report structure #2
In this example, the client already had Tableau and Google Looker Studio dashboards set up and got most of their data from these two sources.
The report was created to communicate SEO activity within the business and educate stakeholders about its value.
As you can see, the focus of this report was organic performance, technical SEO, competitor performance, and dissuading clients from self-sabotage (AMP).
Another thing to notice: there is no executive summary.
The client just wanted to drop straight into the organic performance, and this was a screenshot directly from a Tableau dashboard with commentary.
This client operated in ~20 major international markets and needed a summary of the most important movements within those markets.
This report was mainly used to educate other stakeholders on SEO’s benefits and gain buy-in for further SEO improvements to the website. The “industry updates” section helped to do this.
Media agency report structure #3
Although reporting with a spreadsheet may seem archaic to some, it was what this enterprise SEO client had always done—and they weren’t prepared to change.
In this example, the spreadsheet report was a weekly requirement, and the client also requested a monthly and quarterly report in slide format.
Presenting your reports to enterprise clients is a big deal, and you’ll often present your findings to more than one team during the month.
Here are three examples of the reporting presentation schedules that I had with some of my previous clients. As you can see, a single report or dashboard is rarely enough for most enterprise SEO clients.
Client 1
- Daily performance reports on core KPIs from Adobe Analytics/GA 360 with a call if necessary
- Weekly commentary update with SEO performance highlights using Ahrefs, Pi Datametrics, GSC, and other tools
- Weekly performance call to discuss performance for the week
- Bi-weekly call with the development team to discuss priorities, notes written up using Confluence and Jira tickets submitted
- Monthly multi-channel performance report slides presented in person to highlight key wins and discuss strategy
Client 2
- Weekly report with call notes taken on Trello for the marketing team
- Weekly report spreadsheet, data from Adobe Analytics, discussed in call
- Monthly multi-channel performance report in person or video call
- Quarterly business review in person to discuss strategy
Client 3
- Weekly call with notes written on Confluence and submitting JIRA tickets for development requests
- Monthly report using slides and presented through video call
Final thoughts
The type of SEO reporting an agency delivers usually depends on your client’s budget. At SMB level, it’s easier to standardize elements of SEO reporting, but at enterprise level, sometimes you have to throw your trusty templates out the window and start from scratch. As every client is different, their reporting needs will differ too.
SEO reporting is an art for many SEO agencies. Do it well, and clients will give even poor-performing SEO campaigns a second chance. But do it badly, and you’ll almost certainly get the chop when it comes to contract renewal time.
Got more questions? Ping me on X. 🙂
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