Finding New Clients Strategy
It’s extremely hard to find the right kind of clients for your business.
Here’s a great little hack that’s worked extremely well for us at NourseMen Marketing.
If you were given 10 minutes a week to go into any business and walk around with nobody stopping you and speak to their clients and try and convince them to come to you. Would you do it?
Ummmmm. For most…no. It sounds awkward and like a lot of face to face time. Who has the energy?!
We’d like to think that we would and, let’s be honest, it would grow our business…but the thought of getting uncomfortable is a strong one.
Introducing a Low-Effort Way to Find the Right Clients
What if I told you, you could achieve the same outcome without the energy drain and discomfort?
Stay with me.
The difficulty comes in finding the business that you want to walk into.
If you’ve created customer personas and architypes this will be much easier.
If you haven’t, ask us how.
Customer architypes are ideal personas of your customers and it makes a couple of suggestions on where you’d be able to find your ideal clients.
Can you think of a business where your ideal clients would be hanging out in?
Let’s take a gym as an example.
We’ve worked with the F45 franchise before so let’s use them.
Let’s use the Hobsonville F45 (my home gym) – love those guys like family.
One of their perfect client personas are someone that goes to a gym, any gym.
So now that we know where these clients are let’s find some gyms and “go have a chat with them.”
How to Find the Perfect Businesses to Target
- Hop onto Google maps.
- Zoom into the area you want to target.
- Type in the type of business.
- You’ll see a bunch of businesses pop-up.
How to Leverage Google’s Authority Rankings
Important
The business names you see appear on the side are ranked according to Authority by Google. Google ranks these in order from “best” to worst in its “eyes.”
You’re business not coming up on top? Sign up to our newsletter and we’ll send you stuff on how to increase your local SEO standing.
I would look at the “Authority” ranking this way. The businesses that have the most reviews, are most active and good SEO are more than likely going to have a stronger community. You’d imagine trying to pry people away are going to be more challenging than those that don’t have such a strong community.
Keeping Track of Your Client Outreach Efforts
The hard part with all of this is keeping track of what’s happening. It’s extremely important to make sure that you write down your wins, conversions etc. That way when you’re passing tasks on to new people or allocating time to a new campaign you have a good idea of how the campaign can perform and you can plan your sales pipeline and get a good idea of how successful you could be.
So, make sure that you plan how you’re going to keep your records. An excel sheet? Paper? White board?
5. Make a “hit list” of all the business. The ones you want to attack first put at the top of the list.
6. A lot of businesses have social media links on their profiles. Others, try find on their website or search directly for them on Instagram. Let’s do that now.
7. See the profile page. Here’s where you can find out exactly who the customers of this business are. See “followers” at the top – click / tap on that.
Building Your Target Business Hit List
8. Here’s your Hitlist.
9. Tap on the name.
You can look at the profile if you want to. E.g. this guy below was injured and is just getting back into exercising. A great conversation starter.
10. Tap on the message button.
You now have the chance to chat to someone that’s
a) In the area.
b) A strong contender for an ideal client.
Important
It’s going to get extremely difficult when the numbers start racking up. Especially when you’re working with more than one person reaching out. Make sure to keep a good record.
You also want to be able to keep a note in your main CRM (Customer Retention Manager) how your outreach is going. You want to see if it’s worth the effort as well as how many times you have to reach out to people until one converts.
Crafting the Perfect Outreach Message
Important
You want to make it EXTRMELY easy and painless for people to come try your business. Have an unbeatable offer.
Here’s a good script that’s worked really well.
Something like this.
Tell them who you are, the connection.
- Hi there, my name is XX from Hobsonville F45 and I saw you were in the Hobby area.
- Hi there, my name is XX from Hobsonville F45 and I see you’re into your fitness.
Hook and Flatter
- We’re giving away free trials this month and I think you’d be perfect fit. Would you be interested? No obligation. No pressure.
Timeline
- Let me know if you’re keen. I have 3 more spots left and I’d like to fill them by the end of the week.
Involving Your Staff in the Process
This does take a lot of effort but it works. It just takes a consistent approach.
What works well is to gamify the system. Get all your staff to join in. Keep score with how many people they got to convert. Winner at the end of the month gets a prize.
Don’t stop there though. Every single person that converts to a membership, give the staff member who converted them a bonus (or extra paid leave). It does need to be huge but it would really drive them to reach out to more potential people.
Need a hand? Reach out to us and we’ll be able to give you a step-by-step strategy on how to win the social media space.
