4 Ways to Put Your Marketing on Cruise Control

The last thing you want to do is market your business passively. Right?

Wrong.

Passive marketing is the key to move your business to the next level.

Passive marketing is marketing derived from an activity in which you do not materially participate. Word-of-mouth, referrals, recommendations and repeat business are all examples of passive marketing. Passive marketing is thus marketing on cruise control.

So how do you achieve cruise control?

Here are four ways:

1) Gather and Publish Testimonials: testimonials are very powerful. They build credibility and brand awareness. Ask a handful of your best customers for a brief testimonial. Take the best ones and put them on your website, in your blog, on your brochures, etc.

2) Incent Referrals and Recommendations: a realtor client of mine offers a 25% referral fee to anyone that refers business her way. 25% of a $5,000 commission is extremely attractive. Needless to say, she has many people doing some of her marketing for her.

3) Refer and Recommend Other Businesses: you have to give to get, right? The Golden Chain of Referrals is extremely powerful. Refer your friends and customers to other non-competing businesses and watch those same businesses fill your sales funnel. A leads group, a networking group or a business association is a great place to do this.

4) Create and Use a Customer Retention System: repeat business is the most important component of passive marketing. New customers are always more expensive to find than existing customers. So for each customer interaction, make sure you have a method to follow up with that person. The easiest thing to do is to capture contact information and mail that contact regularly. Try SendOutCards for some great personalization. Or go big and invest in a customer resource management software to really put things on cruise control.

In all, passive marketing is about filling your sales funnel with as little effort as possible.

Nevertheless, don't think that passive marketing is easy. Quite the contrary.

Achieving passive marketing requires much time and energy. Passive marketing is not autopilot. It's cruise control, so you still need to steer the course and be aware of what's going on.

In the end, passive marketing will move your business to the next level more efficiently and more effectively than active marketing. When nurtured properly, the 3 R's (referrals, recommendations, repeat business) can generate amazing returns on your marketing investment.