When you’re busy, the last thing you want to focus on is bringing in more clients. But if you’re not constantly filling your pipeline there will come a time when you come up for air and panic because it’s all gone quiet.
That’s why it’s so important that your marketing strategy has a mixture of both long and short term lead generation actions. So your revenue is a constant climb rather than feast or famine.
How to Attract New Clients
1. Create Relationships With Other Businesses
Develop a co-marketing strategy where you collaborate with other businesses for your mutual benefit, taking something that could be seen as a negative (competition) and turning it into an opportunity for growth (cross-promotion). You can unite your audiences and expand your reach. This can be done in various ways: e.g. guest posts, discounted deals, etc. You can also build a relationship where you recommend clients that aren’t the right fit for your own business to the other. Create win-win outcomes.
2. Delight Existing Clients
The average client lifetime value is greater than the acquisition cost of a new client.
When you’re focusing on bringing in new clients and scaling your business, it’s easy to fall into the trap of overlooking your existing clients. Are they aware of all the services you have to offer? Is there an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell to clients who already respect and trust you? Consistently build practices into your systems where you over-deliver, educate and delight your clients. They in turn will become your biggest advocates at buying from you, and recommending you to their networks.
3. Ask For Testimonials
Asking for referrals from existing clients to review your business or write a testimonial should be a part of your business systems. For example we ask new clients to fill out a short survey at one month and three months to get both their feedback and testimonials. If you have an online shop or course, write customer reviews into your procedures.
Showcase these across your website, social media, lead magnets, email sequences … the ways you can use a review or testimonial is endless.
Visit our post on how to use testimonials in your business for the step by step process on how to ask for a testimonial, how to create the testimonial and where and how to use them. Credibility and social proof is worth its weight in gold when it comes to attracting new clients.
4. Paid Advertising
Paid advertising isn’t for the faint-hearted, or the inexperienced. Done well it can be one of your leading strategies for attracting new clients but our advice here is:
- Start small with a small budget and measure closely which lead magnets, landing pages and call to actions attract the right clients.
- Split test everything until you have the best possible conversion rate, only then do you scale up your advertising.
5. Optimise Your SEO
For any business, being findable through search engines is a must in order to attract new clients, even if you don’t have a physical address. If you aren’t searchable on Google or anywhere online, then clients won’t be able to find you. Using tools like online business directories (Google My Business is a must) can be done for free and are a great way for clients to find you. Use a free tool like UberSuggest to make sure your website is optimised (and for the right keywords).
Our site audit product goes a step further and is a done-for-you approach to ensure your online marketing efforts are supported by a site that engages, educates and inspires your audience to work with you.
6. Old Fashioned Networking
Sometimes finding new clients can be as simple as word of mouth. If you want people to know you’re interested in taking on new clients, start asking around your circles, and gradually expand your networks. Update your website, LinkedIn and business card (and your digital business card!) to pass on as a first point of contact. Make an effort to meet and build relationships with new connections, leading the relationship by adding value and listening. Never going in with a pitch early!
7. Your Social Media Community
Remember, you don’t have to do all of the heavy lifting yourself. Increasing your visibility in the online communities where your potential clients are will raise awareness of what you have to offer. Start by identifying where your ideal client might be online, whether it’s in a Facebook group, under an Instagram hashtag or asking a question on Quora, there are many people out there who could use your help but just don’t know where to look. When you are actively involved with local communities on social media, targeting areas of interest to your demographics, you can find clients in real-time.
Make the connection by commenting on their posts, then move the conversation to direct message before taking the relationship offline to email, zoom and (Covid and lockdown levels permitting!) coffee. This simple recipe will help you build real, long term relationships and while not always a quick way to attract clients, it works.
