The Most Important Marketing Strategy (It Doesn’t Require Social Media‪)‬ Rebel Therapist

Today I’m talking about the most effective way to fill a signature program beyond private practice:
Creating and nurturing Ideal Referral Partnerships.
If I were to coach my clients to do only ONE kind of marketing, this would be it.
Another word for this is networking.
You’re probably already doing this, but you might not be doing it very strategically.
When I meet someone who says they don’t do any marketing, but they’ve got customers or clients, I know they HAVE been marketing. They just didn’t see their behavior as marketing.
I often find out that the marketing they’ve been doing has been networking.
If you have relationships with people who refer to you, even if you don’t do any of it on purpose, you’ve been marketing.
Maybe you’ve been networking with colleagues you met at trainings, at agencies you worked at, or from working with the same client at some point. You hit it off with these folks.
Some of these people have referred clients to you or introduced you to other people who referred clients to you.
If you're an extrovert, you might have experienced a TON of this with very little conscious effort.
It’s time to get strategic because your time is limited.
Michelle Warner teaches a course called Networking That Pays. She points out that we can each only maintain a finite number of meaningful relationships (between 100 to 250, according to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, author of How Many Friends Does One Person Need).
We need to be strategic about WHO we spend our limited networking time and energy with.
You’ll also need to be more strategic when you’re selling a signature program because you’ll probably be serving MORE new people each year than you do in your private practice.
If you do long term work, you may only need 10 new clients a year to keep your practice full, or even less in some cases.
To keep a signature program full, on the other hand, you might need 30 or 100 or more new participants each year.
The math is a bit different, so the networking will be a bit more strategic.
I just peeked at my own statistics. This year, over half of my participants have come through my referral partners, NOT by stumbling upon my podcast or finding me through IG or google or paid ads.
But let’s look for a moment at the OTHER kinds of marketing activities I do and you might do too:
Sending out a weekly or biweekly email.
Creating a podcast episode.
Delivering a free live event.
Updating my website.
Creating a new lead magnet.
Setting up an ad funnel.
Posting on social.
Some of these things do help people find me, and I love that I can do these things in relative isolation.
AND… It’s a really bad idea to leave relationships out of our marketing practices. Networking will help to amplify the effectiveness of those other activities.
Dialing down your time spent on solo digital marketing activities and dialing UP your time and energy spent with ideal referral partners is going to grow your business WAY more quickly and more reliably.
Why is this kind of strategic networking so effective?
LOTS of your future participants are already in someone else’s audience.
The people who created those audiences are your Ideal Referral Partners.
By PLACE I mean things like:
a podcast, a free online community, a paid community, an email newsletter list, or a paid small group program.
When the person who leads and curates that gathering place invites you in and vouches for you and the work you do, you’re MUCH more likely to have the trust of members of that community.
Compare that to the trust that you can establish in a video on IG that is 60 seconds long.
I created a step-by-step process for this activity, not because it comes easily to me. Rather I created it because it is very important and does NOT come easily to me.
Here’s a quick summary of that process.
First, you figure out: Who are my Ideal Referral Partners?
They serve your niche
They probably serve