How big is your network, really?

As an insurance agent or other type of service provider, you might be accustomed to thinking of your network in terms of your current client base. But in today’s world, that’s a very limited way to view your network, since any business based on personal relationships is sitting on a huge cache of social assets.

Your customers have hundreds of friends and connections who trust their choices and opinions. When you take this into consideration, it becomes clear that the size and power of your business’s extended network is much greater than you may have realized.

Not convinced? Let’s do some simple math. If just 10 of your customers share your information through social media or an online referral site, you can instantly reach 2,000 of their friends and family. According to the 2015 Insurance Marketing Survey:

• 80% of agents rely on informal requests to generate referrals.
• Nearly 50% of agents believe social media is the best channel for attracting customers—particularly millennials.
• Only 30% of agents actually engage with customers via social platforms.

So before you get carried away by the twin fads of social media posts and social media advertising, ask yourself: Do I have the skills to generate large numbers of Facebook fans and Twitter followers? Do I have the time to create—and do I enjoy creating—daily content that interests these followers?

If not, then your biggest marketing assets are likely underperforming. To make your online marketing tactics more effective, you need to consider more automated solutions to extend your reach.

Social media advertising is best suited to large brands that lack one-on-one personal relationships with their customers. If your business doesn’t fit that model, avoid adopting these strategies. Instead, your marketing platform should build on your strengths as an agent, leveraging what comes to you naturally: your personal relationships with your customers. If you make it easy for customers to help you in your marketing efforts, you’ll likely find they are happy to oblige.

To do so, you simply need to make it a no-brainer for your customers’ friends first to find you, and then refer you. It’s important to make them understand that you care about the relationship and appreciate their help in growing your business.

One proven method is through a referral automation platform that allows your current clients to provide referrals and endorsements easily. Such platforms simplify the process by allowing agents to invite their clients to select them as a business they know and trust, and allowing consumers who are looking for specific services to quickly find service providers endorsed by their friends.

To understand the power of a referral automation platform, remember that the size and power of your extended network based on your current client base is 100-200x for each client. With online referral automation, you can effortlessly extend your reach to a whole new market without constant content creation and network-building.

In short, a referral automation platform is a great way to supercharge your current network as an agent. It gives you more bang for less buck, more reach for less effort and more amplification by doing what you already know how to do best: relate to your customers.

Vinay Murthy is cofounder and vice president of business development at KnownCircle, a social referral network where consumers can discover and connect with local businesses their friends, family and trusted connections are already using.