Client attraction is the heart beat of any business.
Most small businesses don’t want more clients they NEED them to survive.
Here are 3 strategies that can help you make client attraction easier.
#1 Build more trust.
Today’s consumer is savvier than ever before so the sales pitches of the past simply don’t work anymore. Customers are looking for more from the companies they choose.
David Penglase, in his book The Art and Science of Building Customer Trust, highlights that building trust is a prerequisite for true success in our professional lives.
Most people realise the importance of trust, but n today’s highly competitive and disruptive business environment, the evidence clearly points to how trust (or the lack of it) impacts almost every measure of a business’s success.
Put simply, you can’t take trust for granted. In business; trust matters and customers want and need to buy from people that they can trust to help them make wise buying decisions – whether they’re buying a product, service or professional advice.
When you are seen as the trusted source for telling it how it is and you resist the temptation to push out hype and overt sales pitches that your competitors do, you will become instantly more attractive to prospects.
#2 The Business is in The Business
As someone who has spent 15 years educating small business owners about marketing, I’m conscious that often entrepreneurs become tunnel visioned about the idea that client attraction is always about NEW business.
As a consequence, they don’t pay enough attention to the clients they already have.
In the Marketers Club we have an expression, “The business is in the business”. In other words, make sure you’re not leaving money on the table by failing to leverage the relationships you already have.
Your existing customers are your BEST source of future business and a key to unlocking the potential of referred business.
Bill Cates in his latest book, Beyond Referrals, suggests “If you want to attract and win more right-fit clients, you must ensure that the information you are conveying to the world about your value is, in fact, what you intend to communicate.”
The following 5 questions are designed to help you both assess your value and create an action checklist to focus your messaging.
- Have you taken stock of your complete value proposition by reviewing your entire client journey (prospect experience, new client onboarding, ongoing client experience), and identified all the points where you provide value?
- Do you have clear, well-defined target market(s) – where you focus all or most of your marketing efforts?
- Do you have specific, well-articulated Perfect-Fit Client Profile(s); covering both the demographic and psychographic attributes of the clients that you serve best?
- Are you perfectly clear about the primary problem you solve for your Perfect-Fit Clients?
- Do you have one or more clear points of distinction that your prospects can easily see which differentiate you from many of your competitors?
If you want to start attracting more referrals from your existing clients, then you need to start asking. So when is the best time to ask? Well, according to Bill, it’s straight after you’ve confirmed the value you’ve already delivered.
If you want to accelerate your client attraction, asking for referrals is a great place to start.
#3 Expand your network
If you want to attract more clients, you need to expand your reach and that starts with joining more groups.
Offline that means finding networks that offer you either direct or indirect access to your ideal audience. Direct access is when your ideal customer is the one in the network; indirect means the people in the network can connect you to your ideal client.
One network you might like to consider joining is the Marketers Club GrowthHUB, the focus of the GrowthHUB is on business development, so if getting together each month with a small group of savvy business owners appeals you can learn more about joining a GrowthHUB Here.
Online you need to be connecting with groups. Statistics show that people are 80% more likely to engage with someone on LinkedIn if they are in shared group.
Finding groups on Facebook and LinkedIn as well as other social platforms is a great way to increase your reach and create more exposure for your brand. Of course, it’s not enough to simply join a few groups, you need to select the right groups for your business and then become an active participant in the conversation.
Final thoughts.
Improving your ability to attract clients means making yourself easier to buy. You need to be consistently sharing your ideas with the world and adding value everywhere you can.
This will help increase your profile and build more trust around you and your brand. It’s also essential that you speak to your existing clients more often and remind them of the value you’ve delivered to them, so they become more active referrers of business to you.