How to Book More Clients

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As a small business owner, your number one challenge will be learning how to prospect and book more clients to grow your service-based business.

When you’re relatively new in your service-based business, you can always use more clients. Yes, the ones you’re working with now are awesome, great to work with and pay on time.

But you’re still not quite at your goal income level. Cash flow can also become a little tight at times. And frankly, you’d like to actually start paying down some credit card debt.

As a solo business owner, you’re already doing all the right things online. You’ve developed a social media strategy and you’ve already received a handful of awesome client testimonials.

But let’s face it! You need more clients that you can work with at a more strategic level, who are looking to implement your tactics, and ones that have bigger budgets. The hustle is real, so you’re always on the look out for how to increase your client work and book more clients.

The number one challenge for any small business owner is learning how to prospect and book more clients. Having a gorgeous website, blog or well-branded social media channels don’t mean anything if they don’t receive any traffic.

They mean even less if they don’t convert existing site visitors or subscribers into clients or at least prospects. Below are five ways that you can book more clients.

1. Get to Know Your Audience

The first step in prospecting and learning how to book more clients, is to understand your audience. Do some market research to understand exactly who your ideal clients are and how you can provide value and solutions to their pain points. Don’t just spray and pray.

Who are your clients? What are their most urgent and pressing concerns? What factors are they focused on in terms of hiring on an independent contractor (i.e, you)? Determine how your audience finds your site, what they read, and which social media platforms they most frequent.

This information will help you decide what strategy will reach them most effectively on every point from design and copy to keyword research and content deployment.

The better you understand your audience and what they need, the more effective your prospecting will be. Keep in mind who you’re writing for and what they want, especially as you go through the next steps.

2. Create Content

Once you know who your audience is, create content that will appeal to them and showcase you as an expertise in your industry. Share it on your LinkedIn and social feeds so people in your online networks know what you’re about.

Interview people and share your knowledge. Use your Instagram as a portfolio of your work—not just selfies. Produce short video clips to dish out advice and share them on your social feeds. Be strategic about your content and your social channels. Everyone is watching.

Creating content is a huge factor in building SEO. But if you’re not building your blog or social content to attract and book more clients, you might be wasting your efforts.

3. Publish on LinkedIn

Once you start creating content for your target audience, it’s important to share your content on LinkedIn.

Publish content and integrate images and videos into your LinkedIn profile summary and experience to make it a true multimedia portfolio of who you are, what you have to offer, and why your work is valuable.

Of course, each post, article and share is concluded with a call-to-action. It’s crucial to be clear about your goals—your reader should leave each piece wanting to call you or email you. As a service-based business owner, everything you publish online should want to make the reader become your client.

LinkedIn remains a good place to find new clients for your business, so if you’re not on LinkedIn you might be leaving money on the table.

4. Join Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups let people come together around a common interest, cause, issue or activity to organize, discuss and share related content.

With 6,000 Groups on Facebook, it goes without saying that it’s important to join Groups that focus on a niche that’s related to your area of expertise.

Join Groups where your clients are hanging out, discussing their pain points and asking questions about topics that you’re an expert at. Then, duh! Answer them.

Whenever you join a group, you’re always invited to introduce yourself to the members of the Group. Write a succinct group intro and trust us, you will book more clients. Try it for yourself. It might be a great place for your to book more clients for your service-based business.

5. Send Cold Pitch Emails

Cold emails—an email sent to a recipient without any previous relationship or conversation with them—can sometimes feel a little icky.

But when you need to book more clients, you can’t sit around waiting for your perfect customers to find you. You need to go out there, identify your ideal customers, tell them you exist and get them to purchase your solution.

Your cold email has to be relevant, well-researched and hit the prospect’s business pain point to get them interested in your services.

Your cold email should also have a killer subject line, compelling email copy and also a good email signature. Click here to learn more about cold pitch emails.

6. Attend Networking Events

Meeting people, handing out business cards and connecting online are great ways to book more clients for your business. But meeting people in person can’t be counted out as a way to book more clients.

Subscribe to the Eventbrite newsletter and receive a list of upcoming events that might interest you based on previous events that you’ve attended.

Meetup is another great way to know what events are going on in the city that you can attend in order to meet prospective new clients for your business.

Other ways to keep abreast of professional networking events include following online platforms like Notable, 10K Coffees and Levo League.

Some events do have a price point but you don’t have to break the bank to find quality events to attend where you know your target audience will also be in attendance.

Attending professional networking events, workshops or panel sessions will always be a great way to find clients for your small business. Once you meet them, follow up the next day with a LinkedIn connection request or quick email intro so they remember you for when they next need your services.

7. Ask for Referrals

Referrals are one of the top ways of booking more clients and growing your business. Seems pretty simple, but this is a step that many small business owners overlook.

Provide your existing clients with extra business cards or set up a referral discount for new accounts that come your way. You can exponentially increase the number of referrals by doing one simple thing—just asking for them.

The Takeaway

Despite all your amazing social media work and content publishing, your ideal clients aren’t always going to be flooding your inbox or ringing off your phone.

Most times, you have to go out and find them. It’s up to you as a business owner to reach out to prospective clients and acquire new business. It’s the only way to grow your small business.

Share in the comment section below. What has been working for you in order to book more clients for your small business?

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Image via Lumina