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Professional services firms rely upon a variety of marketing channels to gather leads, attract new clients, and encourage other professionals to refer their firm. Many see event sponsorships and the networking functions associated with them as effective ways to build visibility for their firms, score face time with key individuals who influence prospects, and win referrals.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

The Hinge Research Institute recently conducted a survey of almost 1,200 managers and c-suite professionals in a wide range of industries — the individuals most likely to influence business referrals — and the results published in our Referral Marketing Study may surprise you.

The survey revealed that sponsorships and the networking events associated with them were the least effective ways to influence referrals. In fact, less than one percent of respondents learned about the agencies they referred through sponsorships, and only 3.4% found networking events effective for finding and recommending potential service providers.

The Problem with Sponsorships

So why don’t sponsorships work? While they can contribute to your brand awareness, they are lousy at conveying your agency’s value proposition. Printing logos on cocktail napkins and tournament signage has zero value if the individuals who see them have no idea what you bring to the table.

Sponsorships only make sense if they present a valuable “pay-to-play” opportunity — for instance, allowing you to speak to a group of influencers. Sponsorships may also provide some benefit if they demonstrate your involvement in a group that’s crucial to your business. In either case, you’ll want to use your participation to improve your agency’s visibility. That could mean securing a speaking engagement or an article placement as part of the deal.

So if sponsorships are such a poor source of referrals, what does work?

How to Get Referrals Without Sponsorships

Take a look at the following graph. There are a number of referral techniques that can yield significant results, starting with reciprocity. Our studies revealed that the more firms referred others, the more referrals they received in return.

Social and professional relationships can also be valuable referral producers. The best relationships are those that combine both social and professional interactions. However, the study found social relationships had little effect on referrals if there was no associated direct knowledge of expertise. Like sponsorships, if your contacts don’t know what you do, they aren’t going to refer you.

By far, the greatest source of referrals is what we call Visible Expertise — the degree to which people in your firm are well-known industry experts. Individual experts develop this kind of visibility by speaking at industry events and publishing valuable thought-leadership pieces in trade publications, newsletters, and online.

Another Hinge study focusing on the best practices of high-growth professional services firms discovered that the five top marketing techniques that yielded the greatest return were, in order:

• Speaking engagements
• Blog posts and articles
• Social media
• Book or other signature content
• Online presence

An inbound marketing strategy is the clear winner for demonstrating expertise, building visibility and value for your firm, and influencing key professionals to refer your company to others.

So the next time your firm is offered a sponsorship opportunity, you might want to politely pass on it — unless it presents a solid opportunity to secure a lucrative speaking engagement in front of a group of business influencers.

You have traffic and lead generation campaigns that are filling up your database. Your cup runneth over. It’s time to make sure that your best prospects aren’t the ones falling by the wayside. You need a lead nurturing program that helps you identify the prospects who best fill your ideal student persona and focus your efforts on them.

The crux of the inbound methodology is getting the right message to the right people at the right time. But your team doesn’t have the time to pick out the right piece of content, at the precise magic moment, for each individual prospect in your database that will move them further along their enrollment journey. There’s no point in sending an invitation to meet with an admissions counselor to a rising junior prospect who just downloaded your free study tips guide. That’s worse than wasted effort! Your school will look unorganized to this prospect — not the impression you want to make. 

Instead, use automated email workflows to nurture prospects into enrolled students by send the most relevant information at each stage of the enrollment journey. Automation amplifies the productivity of your team and your database. Too much gets overlooked when you rely on manual nurturing.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to design and execute an amazing student-nurturing workflow. 

1) Have a Goal in Mind

Actually, you need two goals. First, define what your objective is for the workflow. Let’s say you need to boost enrollment in the next two dental assistant program enrollment cycles. You’re running live, on-campus information sessions targeting your January and June enrollment dates. You can put together a nurture workflow with the goal of getting quality prospects to attend one of these sessions.

Then, you need a Goal List. How many people do you need to attend these sessions to translate into the right number of applications and enrollments? That’s your Goal List — the list of prospects who entered this workflow and took the action you wanted. In our example, it’s the number of people who attended an information session.

2) Identify your Starting Criteria

Create a smart list that scoops up prospects who meet the specific criteria that make them good candidates for this workflow’s goal. Think about criteria about who they are right now, where they are in their school decision journey, and what sort of action they’ve taken. No broad strokes here.

So a list of people interested in your dental assistant program who mostly access your content via mobile device is too vague. Start with that criteria, but add: lives within 25 miles of one of your campuses offering your dental assistant program.

In short: Be specific!!

3) Map it Out  

Truly — write this out by hand to get the flow right. Include three data points per spot on your workflow map: 

• What content you’re sending them — make sure it aligns with where they are
• The goal for that specific piece of content
• Day delay count — this is the number of days between each email in the workflow (aka the “cadence”) 

Using our current example, we know that these potential students are in the consideration phase, looking to short-list the schools they want to apply to. The goal of the workflow is to get them to attend your live, in-person information session on campus. So the workflow map could be: 

• Trigger: Lead who meets the criteria “downloads the program’s admission requirements checklist.”
• Delay 5 days: send email with link to your Facebook post of a video message from current dental assistant students. The goal of this email is to personalize your program and help prospects see who their peers could be.
• Delay 3 days: send email with a link to download your report on the various types of dental positions this program prepares its graduates for. This email’s goal is to put in real terms exactly how your program prepares them for a career.
• Delay 5 days: send them a link to blog post of your dental program’s FAQs. This content is prep work so they can clarify the bigger questions they’ll want to ask in person.
• Delay 2 days: send email invitation to attend a live information session, mentioning this is where they’ll learn about program selection criteria, types of practicums available, and have opportunity to meet current students and admissions officers.

4) Write your Emails!

Keep all these data points in mind to write clear, focused, single call-to-action (CTA) emails. You can also use the email copy to tease or set up the next email. Your email with the link to the program FAQ can frame it as the source to get answers for the most common questions, while your invitation email promotes the session as the opportunity to get their personal questions addressed.

For more on email, check out our free ebook Email Marketing for Schools >> 

5) Decide on an Exclusions Policy

Refine your workflow here. Exclusions can be not sending on emails on Fridays, because you know you get nearly zero engagement on those emails.

You can also create suppression lists of people who meet this workflow’s criteria, but you don’t want included in it. This could be people who’ve already submitted an application. You want them in a different workflow that invites them for an admissions interview.

In fact, another suppression list can be anyone who’s currently in another active workflow. You don’t want to inundate prospects with too many emails at once. Let their current workflow play out. You’ll have more info on them to divert them into the most applicable workflow once it’s done.

6) Turn the Workflow on!

 That was an easy step…

7) Measure and Improve

Always be analyzing. Look at your results to see where you need to improve or tweak things. Your top-level metrics are the number of people who enter this workflow, the number who reach your Goal List, and the workflow’s conversion rate (prospects in workflow divided by those who took goal action = conversion percentage).

Take a closer look at low performing emails to find out why people aren’t opening or taking action.

Why Marketing Automation?

Email is easy and inexpensive. It’s one of the best tools in your arsenal made more effective with automated, smart workflows. Automating email lead nurture campaigns optimizes your database and your marketing efforts by making sure your best prospects don’t get ignored, which translates into more quality applications, and higher enrollment numbers.

Want to learn more about nurturing prospective students or parents into applicants? Check out our free ebook, From Stranger to Student.