Make a Referral Week – a good small business marketing practice for the whole year

This coming week in the United States is the 2nd Annual Make a Referral Week.

This is an initiative started in the United States in 2009 by John Jantsch, the founder and small business marketing brain behind the Duct Tape Marketing System and is about stimulating small business by encouraging people to work towards a simple goal – to provide 1,000 referrals to 1,000 deserving small businesses across the country – here’s an article on Inc. Magazine where John talks about the initiative.

No doubt you are all aware that referrals are one of the best ways of generating new business and this is a great initiative to help remind people about the power of referral marketing.

The interesting question though, is that if everyone recognises that referrals are such a great way of generating business, why don’t more businesses actually make this a part of their marketing system?

Chances are that if you are like many small businesses today, you don’t actually have a marketing system – a structured approach to executing your marketing tactics, based on a clearly defined strategy. So how do you build a marketing system for your small business, where do you start?

Heres a great introduction to the approach – a report entitled the Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success – that explains the basic concepts and steps behind building a small business marketing system that works – and of course – utilising the power of referrals is a key component of that system.