Hi Nick, 80% of your new contacts are referrals, or word-of-mouth contacts. That's actually a brilliant place to start.
We all keep thinking about online marketing activities in the same vein as traditional marketing, but it many ways, it is vastly different. In that, rather than being easy to define demographics, now we are actually billions of individuals having 'conversations'. The fact that 80% of your new contacts are word-of-mouth means that you are already part of their conversation, so perhaps you can capitalise on that.
A few months back I wrote an article about a client. It really was about them, not me or how brilliant I am! I sent a link for the article to the client just to let them know I had put something about our work together on my site. I didn't promote it anywhere else. Just sent one link to the client. A few days later, the link, with an image and intro to the article turned up on MY Facebook news feed. It turned out the client's niece, who I've never met, had posted the link to her fb timeline, and, after going around the town and bouncing around for a few days, it came back to me. Checked my site and sure enough, I had received 216 visitors to the article on my site.
So, my thoughts on this from your perspective;
1. To become part of their conversation, whatever you're going to write must be focused on them, not you.
2. Can you produce blog posts, focused on one customer at a time. Post these on your site, and share the link with the customer. And let them do the 'spreading the word' for you? But, the post MUST be about them. Of course you're going to be mentioned, but this has to be personal. so,
3. Contact happy customers for a testimonial. Invite them to include an image of them, with your product. Make it easy for them to give you as much information as possible by asking them specific questions that can answer in the testimonial, about how they used your product, what did their students think ...etc. If you can think of a way to get humourous stories out of them, even better, but I don't know what your product is so....
4. Write a short blog around that testimonial. Just 200 - 300 words. Talk about where they are, who they teach, find something nice to say about their teaching style, or something similar.
5. Post it on your site... with the image (really important)
6. Share the post with the client and let them share it with their contacts. Remember though, you want to send them a link to your site. Don't give them the full article in the email!.
Then when they share the link on their own fb account, the image and an intro to the full post will appear in their timeline, with a link automatically inserted, back to your site. Where hopefully they will find other similar personal, fun and image rich testimonials.
I have to say, I think getting an image of them is actually really important, and I wonder if that is what made my example work so well. I had gone into the store and photographed the client with the work I had done for them. If you can't get a photo of the teacher, can you get a photo of some of the work produced with your product? Ultimately, you are looking to increase their chances of sharing your post by including a relevant image.
If you can get a couple of dozen of these circulating, you should see a significant increase it the site traffic, and you will have created a closer bond with your existing customers.
Just an idea. And of course, if your site is built on a content management system which you can easily add to yourself, then the whole exercise has zero cost.
Cheers
