Life is built upon relationships. Think about the people you voluntarily spend the most time with: your family, your friends. They’re the ones you call in a crisis, the ones who do what they say they’re going to do, the ones who have your back. That same dynamic is at the heart of referral marketing trust: you rely on people who’ve proven themselves. If you were busy and needed someone to run to the grocery store for you, you’d never ask a stranger, not just because it’s unusual, but because you’d have no guarantee of ever seeing them again or receiving what you asked for.
Well, referral marketing trust is just as crucial as trust in your everyday relationships. It’s why BNI holds building relationships as a core value. No matter the business you find yourself in, there are a multitude of reasons why relationships drive better results.
Time Spent Together Builds Referral Marketing Trust
Unlike other networking groups or community mixers, BNI drives relationship-based marketing by holding weekly meetings for chapter members. In BNI, weekly meetings serve as a “basecamp” of sorts to allow the chapter members to share information about their business, and what they’re looking to achieve, and motivate each other to progress both as a chapter and in their individual businesses, with the support of other members driving it all.
Trust begins with a consistent presence at these weekly meetings, proving reliability to the other members. Outside of the weekly meetings, BNI encourages one-to-one meetings to deepen those roots of referral marketing trust. The group meetings are important, but you truly begin to operate on a similar frequency as someone else through time spent getting to know what gets the other person out of bed every morning.
In BNI, everyone looks out for one another away from the meeting room by keeping each other and, more importantly, keeping their current needs and goals top of mind, leveraging word of mouth marketing to serve as advocates for their fellow members’ businesses. That’s powerful.
Relationship-Based Marketing Affects Everybody
When networking and building trust in business relationships, referral marketing trust goes both ways. Once relationships become more thoroughly cultivated through your time in BNI, you’re naturally going to become more comfortable sending someone in your group to help out a personal friend.
The plumber in your group goes from “that guy who I’ve heard does good work” to “this friend I know who does business with integrity and will take the best possible care of you.” The time spent around group members, especially if you get the opportunity to do business with them directly, makes you a firsthand witness of how they conduct themselves and becomes a major driver of referral marketing trust.
It works the other way around, too. Every time you pass a referral, your own trust is on the line. As you spend more time with the people in your group, you learn who they love working with and who they’d rather avoid, you can make smarter, more confident introductions.
Your trust can either grow or depreciate depending on how an interaction with a referral plays out and how much qualifying you did beforehand. Time is money, and trust can erode in no time if time is wasted on a referral. Thankfully, the BNI system of relationship-based marketing deters poor referrals!
A Targeted, Intentional Way of Growing Your Business
Word-of-mouth marketing, while considered old school, can still be one of the most precise and targeted ways of getting your name out there! When you have other loyal members on your side, along with the slew of connections they bring to the table, you can be as specific as you’d like as to the type of customer you’re seeking, and chances are in your favor that there’s somebody in the room with the keys to assist. Then, you can help them out in return, exemplifying Givers Gain® and deepening the roots of referral marketing trust.
