Client Acquisition
I’ve Recently Landed my 100th Client as an Agency Owner — The Exact Steps I’d Take if I Had to Start Over
If I lost everything, how I’d rebuild my client base from zero
The paths of every entrepreneur, freelancer, and content creator intersect in one single place. A place where all of them are thinking about getting more clients.
I’ve been working as a UI/UX designer and an agency owner for over 5 years now, and client acquisition was always a pain in the ass.
We just want to do our work, create products, and offer services. Definitely not spend half of the time on marketing stuff, right?
But don’t worry, after getting my 100th client, I understood some of the basics that every specialist should implement to finally see the results.
Being an expert in my niche, instead of being so broad
I see this all the time. Many new freelancers are trying to capture the whole market and get the whole pie at the same time.
Instead of focusing on a tiny tiny niche, they’re looking super broad on the market. As a result — tons of competition and literally no clients at all.
However, there’s a really simple solution. Try stacking up to 3 of your best skills on top of each other.
In other words, if you’re a web designer, then don’t just say that you’re creating web designs.
According to a study carried out by Zippia, over 84,040 web designers are working in the USA nowadays. And it would be pretty dumb to just compete with all of them, right? So here’s a little trick that I’ve recently uncovered.
Place several other skills on top of each other, and you’ll get an expert who specializes in something unique. Let’s say your skills are web design, SEO optimization, and digital marketing.
So, now you position yourself as someone who helps to redesign & rework websites for small startups to increase their visibility by implementing SEO knowledge and the knowledge of promoting the product.
It’s just an example, but it still shows how you can be more focused on your ‘real clients’ and position yourself right on the market.
If I’d done that earlier, I wouldn’t have competed with so many other designers and would have even more clients now.
Engaging on X/Twitter
Building a personal brand and engaging with the audience is the only way to really get traction for your services. Right now, is basically the best time to start, especially on X.
I started engaging there just a month ago and already got 300k+ impressions, 1k followers, and several pretty big clients.
And it’s actually super straightforward. Literally nothing special, or something that you wouldn’t know about.
Here are some tricks that would speed up your results:
- Leave at least 20 replies every day
- Post at least 3 tweets a day
- DM every interesting person that you see below 1k followers
That’s it. You just do it every day and we’ll see results immediately, I’m the live proof of that.
Your main goal is to make friends on this platform. Your success depends on how good you are at networking and overall communication.
After getting at least 300 followers, you can start creating giveaways.
The better things you give away for free, the more followers, emails, and clients you’ll get in the future. Always remember this simple rule.
So yeah, getting clients on X is pretty easy, and I’ve already closed some of them in that short period.
If you need any help, feedback, or just want to share your achievements with me, you can always DM me. I always answer to everyone.
Starting an email newsletter sooner
I’m pretty sure that you heard the phrase that email newsletters are one of the most powerful tools out there. It’s like the second step after building an audience on X, but I’d advise you to start it as fast as possible.
I’ve come pretty late to this sphere, and it’s one of my biggest mistakes of all time.
I got over 1 million views on my Medium account and haven’t monetized it that much, except for the default Medium Partner Program monetization.
If I had an active email newsletter running at that time, I’d make 100 times more cash and have a much larger audience.
But it’s never too late. So, I launched mine a few months ago. And again, it already got me several clients right away.
Email newsletter is all about sharing your experience and knowledge with everyone. Look at it as talking with someone 1-on-1.
Ask questions, pitch, and just interact with the readers. Some of them might become your clients and bring you tons of new opportunities.
So, if I start everything from scratch, I’d definitely pay more attention to email newsletters as well.
Gathering testimonials earlier
I didn’t know that it’s crucial to gather testimonials and feedback from the very beginning.
In other words, if I already had a client, then it’s crucial to get his opinion and then show it on your website, social media, or anywhere else.
When people see that you have many clients and they talk great about you, then it just builds some trust in your brand. It just helps you to get more and more clients while gathering feedback from the previous ones.
The best tool to do that is Senja, in my opinion. It helps you to gather all of the testimonials efficiently and in the form of a short survey.
Here’s an example of how these testimonials look on my website. So, every new user that will come will see that we’re true professionals and will be able not to worry about losing money or not getting the right quality.
Conclusion
When you understand how this whole system works, it’s not hard to get clients anymore.
You just build an audience, engage with it, show your expertise, try your best in the tiny niche and if you’re doing everything right, you get tons of clients effortlessly.
I didn’t understand all that at the beginning. I thought that if I published some of my works on Behance, then clients would flow to me themselves. Yeah, they might but the chances of it are pretty low.
I haven’t heard about building a personal brand, I just wanted to make money from design, but several years needed for me to understand the right strategy to accomplish that.
I hope this article will save you lots of time, so you’ll be able to get more and more clients right away.
After all, opportunities await, it’s time to act!