Like in every other business, acquiring first clients for your marketing agency can be challenging. The market is highly competitive because new agencies emerge every year. Therefore, it’s crucial to do things differently to thrive.
This article discusses six unusual yet effective ways to win and retain your first customers.
Let’s dive right in.
Top 6 ways to gain your first clients
Here are six great strategies to turn your leads into clients.
1. Conduct audience research with Attest
The first step to winning your clients over is to understand them. Then, you can attract them with an effective strategy that resonates with them.
To do this, conduct effective market research. It involves gathering information about users, enabling you to know their needs, challenges, interests, and goals.
This way, you can meet their demands by offering irresistible offers that turn them into customers. Audience research also gives insights into other things that improve conversions, including industry trends, competitors’ analysis, and more.
Gaining access to this information gives you an edge because you can fill up gaps competitors are missing and introduce the best practices to meet clients’ evolving needs.
So, understand their psychographics, including pain points, problems, and interests. Afterward, know their demographics, including location, age, and other details like preferred mode of communication.
This data guides you on the best way to communicate with your clients regarding their language, style, and where to reach them. Thankfully, you don’t have to do this manually; you can automate these activities using Attest, an efficient consumer research tool.
The software lets you skip the challenge of knowing your clients by yourself by streamlining the process. You will get accurate data about prospects, providing answers to all your questions about them.
Therefore, if you are struggling to know prospective clients beyond their names, performing audience research helps. However, it’s wise to do this with a reliable tool for the best outcomes.
Related Reading: How to Determine Your Target Market
2. Improve email marketing with invitation emails
As a marketing agency, you probably already know the role of effective email marketing in generating and converting leads to clients. It is direct and personal, facilitating connection and engagement.
However, you may not be reaching your marketing goals because you’ve been missing out on a critical aspect of email marketing; invitation emails. They create awareness and excitement around an event and effectively make an audience act.
For example, if you want to organize an event to network with clients, stunning invitation emails could get them to attend. From an upcoming webinar invitation to workshop email, early-bird registration email, and more, a perfect invitation e-message is how to involve customers actively.
Whether the meetings are physical or virtual, making your prospects present lets you build relationships and pitch services, increasing chances of conversion.
For exceptional invite emails, write catchy subject lines, include engaging images, and keep them precise. Click here to get tips on writing an event invitation email.
Related Reading: How To Scale Your Personalized Email Marketing Campaign
3. Improve presentations with graphs
Excellent presentations attract clients because they reveal a lot about your brand. They show expertise and convey your message.
An excellent delivery is crucial to convincing clients you are the best for jobs. However, this is beyond having a valuable offer but presenting offerings attractively to capture their interests.
If messages are dis-jointed, long, and without good illustrations, you may bore and confuse them. Therefore, investing in quality presentations that attract and sustain the audience’s interest is critical, and you can do this with graphs.
Make a graph to explain complex details, keep presentations concise, and reveal brand identity. For instance, if you have a complicated idea a client will benefit from or a detailed message to share, creating graphs helps.
If you also want to give prospects insights into your brand, you can customize content to show what you stand for. So, integrate fonts, colors, and images unique to your brand. Many graph makers offer customizable templates, so select and edit them to suit your taste.
Draw clients’ interests by including professional graphs in social media posts, blog posts, or pitch presentations. As a result, they will understand your offerings clearly, eliminating confusion and facilitating their decision-making process.
With graphs, it’s possible to gain customers with a single presentation because they compel them to act.
Related Reading: How to Create Engaging Presentations
4. Run a referral program
Referral marketing is how you turn clients into business advocates. This approach is practical because it allows individuals to advertise your agency, and 90% of people trust a recommended brand.
Customers gained through referrals have a 37% higher retention rate and are four times more likely to refer more users. So with referral marketing, you can build a stream of users loyal to your brand.
The first step to running a successful program is to create an exceptional experience whenever anyone interacts with your agency. You naturally get clients talking about the agency when you do this, leading to increased patronage.
Introduce a referral program that offers various rewards according to the number of recommendations. The benefits can be in stages, and every buyer receives incentives based on their steps.
This stirs the human competitive spirit, encouraging them to refer till they reach the final stage. Therefore, by simply incentivizing, you can generate your first clients and acquire more in the process.
Tool tip: Setup a Referral Progam for a SaaS.
5. Embrace inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is a strategy that pulls clients to an agency. However, rather than actively reaching people, it attracts them through value creation. This involves answering clients’ questions and solving their needs; it proves you are in the best position to help them.
Inbound marketing is cost-effective and time-saving. Unlike outbound promotion, which involves hoping to reach a target audience, inbound advertising is more strategic, allowing you to attract qualified leads.
Therefore, you will save time by channeling efforts into campaigns with a higher chance of a conversion. Examples of inbound marketing strategies are blogs and social media posts.
The content should be helpful, e.g., sharing tips on improving their business or combating challenges. But, again, this boils down to conducting audience research because it will reveal their pain points and how to help.
So sell solutions and not your brand because that’s what clients care about. However, to make inbound marketing effective, you should integrate SEO practices. Search engine optimization helps prospective clients find you quickly and creates a trustworthy web experience. It also encourages you to focus on user experience and improves brand awareness
Related Reading: 8 Inbound Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business
6. Collaborate with other agencies
Collaboration opens doors to more opportunities. When you network with similar brands, you meet more prospective customers and build relationships that might lead to future projects. Also, you see things from fresh perspectives and learn from them to improve your strategy.
Therefore, reach out to similar agencies for projects and organize events and shows together. Feature them on your website and attend podcasts. By doing these, you expand your network and reach more people.
Apart from marketing companies, find other brands with complementary services to collaborate with, including designers and photographers. They are not direct competitors, but they are likely to work with your target audience and recommend your agency.
How to retain first clients
Running a thriving marketing agency doesn’t stop at landing your first clients; it’s about building a consistent clientele that will continuously generate revenue. So, here are some tips to keep them:
1. Create a positive first impression
The first experience has a lasting impression on people. So, make it positive so they can return for more deals. Deliver an excellent job and maintain a transparent communication system, among other things.
Additionally, consider their needs and goals, and align your projects to meet their expectations. These and more sum up to create an exceptional experience for clients.
2. Follow up
The transaction doesn’t end after you complete a project; it continues. So, keep in touch with customers and ask for feedback about previous jobs. If they encounter any challenge, offer to help. This shows you are genuinely concerned about their business, enhancing an improved, long-lasting relationship.
3. Help them maximize their experience
Clients want to get value for their money. If they do, you will have delighted customers happy to use your services again. Also, they won’t hesitate to recommend your agency to their friends, creating better brand awareness.
So, after a project, help them maximize your services by tracking results and their progress. If they encounter better outcomes in some areas than others, offer suggestions on improving.
Finally, if you sell products, monitor their journey and suggest new features to enhance activities. The more customers can do with your services, the more encouraged they are to stick to your brand.
Related reading; Expert Strategies to Grow Your Marketing Agency
Conclusion
Adopting unique strategies gives you an edge against competitors when attracting new clients. Therefore, as a marketing agency seeking its first customers, know your audience, and use invitation emails and graphs in presentations. Also, encourage referrals, practice inbound marketing and expand your reach. Finally, after acquiring your first clients, retain them through positive first perception, follow-up, and optimal experience. By doing this, you will earn and keep them.