Without a doubt, word-of-mouth recommendation is an incredibly desirable way to more clients for your agency. It requires zero marketing effort and usually converts at a higher rate because your agency has been recommended. You should always seek to promote word-of-mouth recommendations, and projects that come this way should account for a significant percentage of your revenue. However, you should never rely solely on word of mouth.
Word-of-mouth recommendation suffers from two distinct problems. First of all, it’s a passive approach to marketing your agency’s services. It takes your clients to recommend you, and you can only do so much to encourage that. This means that when the work dries out, you can take a few active steps to bring in new work.
The second problem with word-of-mouth recommendation is that it tends to attract similar customers. Most of the time, those who recommend you do this to people who work in similar companies and at a similar level. This is not a strict and fast rule, but that’s what I usually see.
The problem with traditional approaches
It’s not that most web design agencies don’t know about other marketing approaches or that any of them are inherently bad. On the contrary, in the second part of his two-part series on getting web design clients, Stephen Roe reveals the opportunities of these approaches.
The problem is, in general, many struggles to make a profit that justifies investing time and money.
COLD CALLING
Cold calling a potential customer is almost certainly the most demoralizing type of marketing you can do. People hate to be contacted out of nowhere, so the chances of winning a job are slim.
You also need to keep in mind that your timing needs to be perfect. For example, you need to contact someone who is thinking of running a project that you can help with otherwise, they will quickly forget you.
In the end, you have no status in the eyes of the potential customer. You’re just a random provider, so you’re unlikely to get their attention.
You face a similar problem with advertising.
ADVERTISING
When someone stumbles upon your ad, they don’t know who you are. You were not recommended and may not have heard of you from other sources. There is nothing that makes you stand out from the crowd.
In addition, advertising tends to attract smaller customers. This may be appropriate for your situation, but if you’re looking for older customers, you’ll find that they tend to rely on recommendations and reputation rather than advertising.
Even if older customers contact you through advertising, they may include you to invent numbers. Often, larger companies have procurement rules that say employees need to go to multiple vendors even when they have a preferred one. This means that you can waste your time on tenders for a project with a low chance of success because they already have a preferred supplier.
PURCHASE SITES
Larger organizations often post their invitations to tender on procurement websites. Although the answer to these can lead to work, it suffers from the potential problem that you just “invent the numbers.”
Smaller purchasing sites, such as Upwork or Fiverr, may also work, but they are extremely competitive and price-sensitive in these cases.
NETWORKS
One way to stand out from the crowd and make sure you are in a stronger position when bidding for work is to establish a relationship with the client ahead of time.
Networking is a great way to do this and is a reliable way to find new job opportunities. The disadvantage of the network is that it takes time and does not extend. That’s why many turn to content marketing.
CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is the main marketing activity that many digital agencies get new clients to use, from blogging to posting on social media.
On paper, this is a good move. After all, content marketing:
It should lead to good search engine rankings if they are well written and targeted.
Educate clients on best practices.
Demonstrate your expertise to readers.
Build a relationship with your followers on a scale.
It offers the opportunity to reach a large number of potential customers.
However, in practice, the results can be disappointing. This is due in part to the success of content marketing. Because it was so successful, it became fashionable and, as a result, extremely competitive.
There is so much content out there that getting someone’s attention, not to mention a good position on Google, is incredibly difficult. However, content marketing can still be one of the most effective techniques if properly focused.
How to focus your marketing?
Most content marketing agencies do not focus on their efforts. They post sporadically on a wide range of topics, regardless of the audience or their needs.
However, if you can rectify this, you’ll find that content marketing is the key to a regular flow of leads. In addition, you can even decide exactly what kind of customers you want to attract, targeting your marketing efforts.
This targeting involves two steps, the first of which is defining the audience.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Who are you trying to reach? Unfortunately, this is a fundamental question that seems to be regularly overlooked by freelancers and agencies as they blog or share content via social media. Too often, they seem to write to impress their colleagues, rather than potential customers.
Instead, imagine your ideal customer. Am I a small business owner or an employee of a multinational? Is it senior management or a lower-level employee who can influence that manager?
You may want to create an empathy map if it helps you, or even imagine that your marketing is created for one of your existing customers that you particularly enjoyed working with.
IDENTIFYING PUBLIC CHALLENGES
The harsh truth is that no one cares about you or your services. What they care about is overcoming the challenges they face. Therefore, you need to know what these challenges are in order to position your services as helping to solve them.
Find out what your audience’s goals are. What are they trying to achieve? Also, find out what painful points they are facing? What do they struggle with every day? Talk to existing customers in your chosen industry or consider conducting a survey.
Building a simple sales channel
Before we delve into the details of your sales funnel, let’s briefly recap what we need based on the shortcomings of other techniques. We need an approach that will:
Demonstrate our expertise.
Help us stand out from other vendors.
Allow us to stay in touch with potential customers until they are ready to buy.
It minimizes the effort we have to make in the long run.
To accomplish this, we may not occasionally post online blog posts or occasionally attend a networking event. Instead, we need a structure, and a clients sales funnel provides that.
Will build a simple four-step funnel.
Attracts potential customers.
Get permission to stay in touch, giving us time to build credibility.
Nurture that relationship until they are able to hire us.
Encourage your audience to contact you.
ATTRACT ATTENTION
The first step is to get the attention of potential customers. To achieve this, we will use all the traditional marketing techniques we have already discussed:
Writing posts for your blog, but using keywords that will do well in our audience searches;
Writing guest posts for blogs that our target audience reads;
Speaking of events attended by our target audience;
Creating social media content tagged with appropriate hashtags for our audience;
Participation in the communities in which our public is involved;
Even paid to advertise if you want.
ENCOURAGE CONTACT
Finally, whenever possible, encourage your subscribers to contact you. Ask questions and encourage feedback. It may even be appropriate to conduct an occasional “ask me anything” webinar exclusively for those on your mailing list.
This allows you to start building a personal connection with some of your subscribers, further improving your chances of getting hired in the future.
Most importantly, the benefits of having an email list with potential customers cannot be overstated. I’ve grown my mailing list to over 7,500 subscribers using this type of approach and gotten to the point where if I write about a particular topic, it almost always leads to work in clients that area.
The ability to generate new projects when needed provides incredible clients peace of mind and ensures the long-term stability of your business. From my point of view, this makes it worthwhile to take more seriously and work. If you agree, you may want to check out Mike Monteiro’s excellent book “Design Is A Job,” which explores the sale of your services along with the other challenges of running your business.