Networking learnings

Hi everybody and welcome to my Wednesday wisdom series so today I thought I would talk to you a little bit more about networking. So, I do a lot of networking I go to women in business events BNI and I go to ad hoc events when I can and I think I’m getting to the point now where I’ve been doing this for about two years and I’m looking at what’s worked for me and I thought I would share a couple of insights with you.

So, the first one is that networking is actually a form of marketing and I know that sounds really obvious but I actually forgot about that I do a lot of one-to-ones and I go to a lot of networking events and when I’m meeting these people this is the opportune place for me to talk about what it is that I do and for people to get to know me and for people to start developing a relationship with me. So, my tip is if you’re going to networking events make sure you follow up because that’s really when they’re going to get to know you and your services.

The other insight that I’ve just gleamed recently, I was talking to a web developer and we have chats every kind of two months and we were talking about networking strategy and she said I don’t want to go to networking events I want to go to events and network and I thought oh that’s such an interesting way of thinking about it because I just think I’m going to a networking event. Actually there’s a lot to say for some very natural kind of interactions that you have with people when you go to seminars and workshops or conferences and it just feels a little bit less pressurised and you can go and speak to people in a more informal way. So I’m definitely gonna start to look at where I can go or what events I can go and network at.

The other thing that I’m really thinking about is where should I actually go networking so, when I started I had three networking groups I went to for women in business. I’ve gone to BNI and they’re all working really well but my key audience are smaller law firms, firms architectural practices anybody in professional services. So, now I’m trying to get a little bit more niche about it and really focus in on these types of clients and also the people that might work with these types of clients. So copywriters that specialise in professional services or web developers that specialise in professional services because I need to build up that network now and become a little bit more niche.

I don’t want to be too generic anymore I need to kind of focus so I think one of the things that I would advise you guys to do is think about who your target market is and go and look for those events where they are going to be because you need to make sure that you attend those rather than the more kind of generic open business events.

I hope that’s given you some insight it’s really just based on my experience about networking to date I love it I go out and speak to as many people as I can and I hope you guys do too anyway bye for now.