www.beachheadmarketing.com/content Beachhead Marketing explains the importance of referral traffic and how you can harness its power. Visit beachheadmarketing.com/content to learn more. Hi and welcome to Competing on Content, a guide presented to you by Beachhead Marketing. Today we're going to talk about how content increases referral traffic. At Beachhead, we define referral traffic as traffic coming from real people referring other people to you. This most often will show up in Google Analytics as Direct Traffic because Google cannot track the actual source. More likely, this traffic came from a press release or from a personal recommendation. These things don't show up but they are incredibly important. The single biggest way content increases referral traffic is it empowers your evangelists. It's like spinach to their Popeye. A recent study shows 49% of Executives have received video collateral through personal contacts and the numbers aren't too far off for podcasts and white papers. The key insight here is that executives are receiving all matters of media from their personal contacts. Every piece of media you have available increases the opportunity for your evangelists to share with others. Does this personal referral matter? When executives receive a video form a personal friend, 64% consider this to be influential. Compare that to when they receive a video from a sales rep; only 48% consider this influential. That's a 33% increase in influence. When you produce more content you provide your evangelists something to share with others. They don't want to tweet your homepage, they want to tweet something useful. Give them something useful to tweet and they will tweet it. To summarize, referral traffic is a strong trusted source of traffic. Nothing is more powerful than a personal recommendation from a friend or colleague and we've seen today these are trusted by executives 33% more than recommendations from you sales team To increase referral traffic, you need to give you evangelists something to share. Creating more content will lead to more referral traffic which will lead to more overall traffic. If you liked this presentation, please follow the link in this video and register to receive our Insider's Course on content marketing. In this series, you'll learn how content increases your traffic, how content accelerates your funnel, how content closes more deals, and most importantly, you'll learn how to win the content arms race against your competitors.