Want to Be a Client Magnet? Love-Up Those You Serve
It’s easy to get caught up in how to find clients. And while picking marketing strategies that are right for you and your target market, and doing them consistently, is important (very important!), there’s another aspect to getting clients that’s not talked about as often.
Loving-up those you serve.
When you work with people you truly enjoy, some miraculous things happen:
* Your current clients feel your love and love you back.
* You’re energized by your work.
* You’re more attractive to potential clients.
* You become a client magnet.
Three Elements You Need for a Successful Marketing Foundation
To lay a good foundation for your marketing and your business, you need essential tools and skills. In the Get Clients Now! program, we call these elements Success Ingredients. These are fundamentals that will make your marketing easier, and ensure your business is around for the long run.
Below are three different types of Success Ingredients. Having these elements in place will make your marketing activities more effective, leading to more clients and more overall business success.
What’s the Missing Ingredient in Your Marketing?
“How can I improve my marketing?” one of my students asked me. “I’ve spent hours and hours trying to get clients, and none of my efforts seem to pay off.”
I asked my self-employed student just one question: “What would you say is the missing ingredient in your marketing?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think I’m networking in the right places. I seem to meet a lot of jobseekers and salespeople, but I’m not connecting with corporate decision-makers or meeting other consultants like myself who might be able to give me referrals. That’s who I really need to be meeting. Say, I’d better find some new groups to network with!”
Video: From Surviving to Thriving in Your Business
If you’re like many of the self-employed people I’ve talked with over the past year, 2020 came with plenty of challenges that sent you scrambling and doing your best to hang on. Survival became the order of the day, and making it through another day, week, or month felt like a victory (and rightfully so).
Hard Work + Smart Choices Aren’t Always Enough to Land Clients
You’ll often hear me say that the secret to finding clients is to make effective choices about what to do to market your business, then do those things over and over. While that advice is absolutely true, implementing it sometimes runs into some roadblocks.
What happens when you deliver what you think is a dynamite 10-second introduction, but your prospective clients don’t seem impressed? Or you have several lunches with potential referral partners that seem to go well, but no business results from them?
Video: What Is the New Normal for Your Business?
As business owners, we’re all looking at the way we did business before the pandemic and asking if we really want to go back to the way it was.
I know I don’t, and neither do the clients and colleagues I’m speaking to.
Yes, Writing Blog Posts and Articles CAN Bring You Clients
“I’d like to attract clients by writing articles or a blog, but I’m not sure what to write about.”
“I tried blogging for a while, but it didn’t bring me any business.”
“When I write, people seem to like it, but I have only a handful of readers.”
These are some of the comments I hear from self-employed professionals who think that writing about their area of expertise might be a path to attracting clients… but feel like they don’t have a map. I understand their frustration. It’s easy to make crucial mistakes when using writing as a marketing strategy. But you CAN do this successfully. Here are six guidelines to make writing pay off.
44 Ways to Follow Up with Your Prospects
You know you need to follow up with prospective clients, but you often find yourself putting it off. “I already called them three times,” you think. Or, “They never answer my emails anyway.” Or, “I hate hearing no.” Or, “I don’t want to bug them.” Or, “What do I say that’s new?”
It’s only natural to resist placing phone calls or sending more emails to prospects who didn’t return your last call, never seem to reply, may not be ready to buy, or might say they’re not interested. But here’s the good news. Calling and emailing prospects and asking them to hire you is not the only way to follow up!
Yes, you can call or email your prospects and ask if they’re ready to work with you, but you can also send a letter or note by postal mail, overnight them a package, send a text message, tweet them, tag them on social media, or instant message them online. And those are just different communication channels you might use. The type of messages you deliver can be much more varied than simply asking prospects to do business.
Want Results from Networking? Follow Up!
No one works for themselves without hearing about follow-up. However, in the context of networking, do you know what it means to follow up, whether or not it really matters, and why?
Here are the short answers to these questions:
- What does it mean to follow up? It means you contact people you’ve met.
- Does it matter? Yes.
- Why? Because in many cases, if you don’t follow up, the other person won’t either, and you’ll have lost a potential avenue for business, a referral partner, or the opportunity to serve the world with your business services. You’ll have also lost a chance to truly connect with someone.
It’s easy to think you’ll go to a networking event, talk with a few people, hand out your card, and they’ll call you when they’re ready to do business. Most of the time, though, it doesn’t work that way.
Are You Marketing the Right Stuff?
Jan is a graphic designer who was always struggling to find good clients. “I could find plenty of people who needed my services,” she recalls, “but they thought my rates were too high. I either ended up agreeing to work for less, or they found someone else. And then when I did get the job, they took forever to pay me.”
Like many graphic designers, Jan’s marketing emphasized her business identity work — creating a company’s logo, business cards, and other collateral, with matching design elements. Her primary audience was new businesses who were just getting started. But then Jan had a brainstorm.
“I realized that the clients I was marketing to were people who didn’t have enough money to pay me,” says Jan. “They were startups with tight budgets. And since they hadn’t been in business long, they didn’t place much value on working with an experienced, high-quality designer. They were just looking for the lowest price.”
