To stay in business, you need to regularly receive referrals from your existing customers. In fact, companies with formalized referral programs experienced 86% more revenue growth over the past few years when compared to the rest.

So how exactly do you attract referrals without spending an arm and leg on advertising your affiliate program?

There is actually a way to do this that piggybacks on your current content marketing efforts.

Here is a foolproof strategy for using content to generate referrals that major companies are already using to get results.

Build a Tool to Manage the Promotion of Your Content 

The first step of the strategy is to build a tool to manage the promotion of your content. This is an affiliate content management tool that you can promote to your customers and affiliates alike. It is a great way to take your content marketing strategy to the next level. 

1. Convenience

An ingenious tool that manages your online content for you — like Instapage’s Content Referral Tool — can exponentially increase your traffic, referrals, and social shares on autopilot.

A tool that makes it easy to create affiliate links from your blog content is flexible, efficient, and easy to use. This allows you to focus on what matters — creating great content. Your affiliate program will do the rest. 

It’s about convenience. With an all-encompassing content marketing affiliate tool, your affiliates will promote your content for you, while you focus on other important tasks.

All you need to do is build your strategy around what’s trending in the industry and this content management tool will take it from there.

2. Compliance

With a content management tool, the material being shared by your affiliates about your brand is automatically in compliance with your affiliate program guidelines.

This eliminates a major problem that often results from allowing affiliates to create their own content to promote your brand as an affiliate.

With readily available branded content, affiliates will have less incentive to create articles that break TOS like those “scam” and “review” articles that they often create without ever having even used your product or service.

3. Helps Affiliates to Avoid Creating Content That Is “Too Salesy”

By providing this tool, affiliates will see that they don’t need to take an overly promotional, spam-like approach in order to sell your product.

With nearly sole control over the content that is promoted, you will create amazing leads and generate referrals without the overly pushy approach that only results in sending customers to your closest competitor.

Ultimately, your content management affiliate tool is about getting you more referrals with less work on your part.

There are a few guidelines you still need to follow in order to optimize this strategy and experience its full benefits.

Let’s talk about the role you will play in the content promotion strategy.

How to Publish Content That Attracts Affiliates and Referrals

Now that you have your content management tool in place, the second part of foolproof referral generation is adjusting your content strategy to make it work.

The majority of business owners have cited content management as “very important” or “absolutely critical” to their lead generation process.

Here’s what you can do to make sure your content is generating referrals for your business.

1. Create Amazing Content

People read your content. In fact, they read 3-5 pieces of your content on average before engaging with a sales representative.

By default, the best way to get referrals is to create awesome content designed for sharing.

You will get more engagement with your content management tool if the likelihood of your content being shared is higher. In turn, you will have more chances of generating leads.

2. Appeal to Buyers

Now that we’ve covered the importance of producing great content, we have to talk about your audience.

Appeal specifically to the different buyer personas within your audience and it will be easier for you to come up with topics to write or create videos about that directly result in leads for your business. 

3. Publish Regularly

Producing engaging content consistently is the biggest challenge for 57% of B2B marketers. It is crucial, however, for attracting new customers and getting referrals. 

Create fresh and relevant material for your affiliates and followers to share regularly.

That’s it! Now you have a referral generating machine that only requires you to keep generating content for your business.

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