Plain and simple: you want to know how to get more clients for your service business. This is understandable—a service-based business can be more complex to market than one selling consumer products, since you don’t have anything to show potential clients. And in this economy, people like to spend cash on stuff they can see.
Of course, it doesn’t help if you’re working from a home office, rather than a fancy corner office in a high-rise. Or that you have no connections to decision-makers who can write those large checks, and you have zero potential leads. A marketing budget? Yeah, right.
So what do you do with your service-oriented business, whether it’s in digital marketing, business consulting, or freelance gigs? You try researching online. You read book after book, article after article, and if you are like me, you are no closer to getting clients than when you started. I got tired of reading fluff: those articles that think they’re telling you how to get customers, but in return are telling you just enough so you will call them and pay for consultations.
I was working from my home office on Virgo Girl Media, and things were not going as well as I hoped. I had a small team of freelancers on a monthly retainer, and I knew failure was not an option. I had to make some quick decisions if we were going to be successful. It was time to get creative and quit playing around.
Here are a few tactics that worked for me:
1. Start small. Reach out to companies in your neighborhood. Send them an email that may go unnoticed, and then follow up with an in-person visit. Be sure to have a goodie bag (food preferred) with your pitch materials. Who turns down free food, especially if it’s cupcakes? Be prepared to be honest, friendly, and comfortable. You want to have a neighborly politeness about you that says you’re new to the area (business-wise) and want to make friends. Even if they don’t sign on with you, that doesn’t mean they won’t in the near future, or that they won’t tell their friends and co-workers about you. Before you leave, get their email address and send them your monthly newsletter and notices about special offers. And remember: nothing spreads faster than word of mouth when it comes to sharing what you’ve already brought to the table: “Oh hey, this person came into the office today with cupcakes. Too sweet!” “Really? What were they selling?” And this leads to a conversation about your business.
2. Freelance your talent. A great way of getting closer to big-box companies is through partnerships with other agencies. For example, one service Virgo Girl Media offers is content writing for social media. While I know our content is awesome, a large corporation doesn’t know that, and at the beginning, we didn’t have any big names to refer us. Thinking outside of the box, I pitched our services to small- and medium-sized agencies that offered social media marketing. Only this time, instead of pitching us as a company, I pitched us as a freelancer. I simply said, “Hey, I am from Virgo Girl Media and I would love to be a content writer for your company.” Anyone who has worked in advertising knows that 80 percent of the creative staff is made up of freelancers. Case in point: whatever clients you work for at that big agency (which puts dollars in your pocket or your company’s account, by the way) translates into projects added to your résumé or your company’s.
3. Have clients come to you. Now this one is a little tricky and can be time-consuming, but it’s worth a try. Create an online marketing campaign around your “dream clients.” Let’s say you want to attract restaurant owners for your business. How do you get not one, but tons of them to notice you? Create a trend where they have no choice but to see you. During restaurant week, state on your blog that you are looking for restaurants to visit so you can write a review on your blog, tweet about the experience, share, even pin—put it out there as much as you can and encourage restaurants to sign up. Everyone loves press—restaurants in particular. Using popular hashtags surrounding restaurant week, custom hashtags, and tagging different restaurants to sign up is a win-win. Send restaurant owners to your website to sign up, and while they are there, naturally they’re going to look around. You might not be able to visit all of the companies that sign up, but they will check out your website and see what you do. And hey, you can guess what happens next, right?
Photo credit: Lauren Kallen