Before I get stuck in, I am making an assumption that you know your niche, who your perfectly aligned clients are, and you have an utterly irresistible offer that you’ve had some success selling. In other words, you’ve validated your market and your offer. Notice I didn’t say your “ideal clients” here, I am focusing on 80% of your clients for now. Not the 20% who bring you most of your profit, those are your dream buyers or your power buyers and that’s a long-term strategy for another day. There are fewer ‘ideal clients’ than all clients so I like to talk about your perfectly aligned clients.
How to Master Getting New Clients
Here it is, the big secret to knowing where your next client is coming from.
Very often I tell businesses that they don’t have a sales problem, they have a traffic problem!
Like I said, assuming you have your offer dialed in, your landing page or your website doing its job well, your data capture is on point, your nurturing sequences firing and follow up is one fire; you’re ready to put the big green lean lead generating machine to work.
It’s time to look at what traffic channels are the right marketing strategy for your business. Here are the steps to cracking the code to getting clients like clockwork.
Know your numbers
Step one. Have you got your numbers sorted? To grow your business effectively you need to have a handle on the numbers. If you don’t have a firm grip on your numbers, head back to my ‘Flywheel post’. Make sure you know with certainty what it costs you to acquire a lead, acquire a customer, and have your KPI scorecard at the ready.
Why? You need to know the value of a client and determine how much you can spend to acquire a client. If a client spends £8,000 a year with you, would you be willing to spend £800 to acquire that client? My answer would be absolutely heck yes so you see where I’m going with this.
What’s working now?
Now that you have a handle on your numbers, let’s take a long hard look at your existing marketing machine. You should be able to identify which channels create profitable leads and which ones you might need to reconsider. The data is important so that you’re making decisions based on results not reasons (or made-up reasons!)
I’m going to start with one source of new business that’s cited all the time by business owners. Inevitably there’s a heavy reliance on word of mouth and referrals for new business, am I right?
I will bet £50 that referrals are one of the best ways you get new business yet you don’t have a systematic referral program in place to leverage it. If that’s true, this is where you need to start before you go throwing spaghetti at the wall. It doesn’t need to be rocket science, you could start by sending a handwritten card and thank you gift if a client has given you a referral. Guess what, they’ll be more inclined to do it again.
Look around, there are referral strategies in play everywhere. Take an hour out of your week, schedule it now, and come up with a way to develop a systemic referral program for your business and implement it.
Just as I don’t like you to rely on one source of leads for business, I don’t want you to rely on one source of traffic.
Traffic Sources
First, my questions to you…
How many current methods of marketing and driving traffic do you have now?
How many of them are working for you?
Depending on your answers to those questions, you’ll tailor what we’re going to do. Look at one channel of traffic, test it, tweak it and get it working on automation and then we’re going to add another one and another one. Depending on where you are in business right now and your current resources or budget available will help you decide on which channel to start with. Your perfectly aligned client profile should help you with this decision too.
Get one channel working, then add another one until you’ve created a business pantheon. It’s really important to get one channel working, it takes testing and refining. You want to focus on improvements - I would rather you tried 1 thing and tested it 10 times than try 10 things at once.
There are dozens of ways to drive traffic. Search engine optimisation, Google AdWords, Social Media Marketing and Advertising, YouTube, retargeting. The list goes on. I’ve focused unintentionally on digital marketing but don’t forget there are dozens of other ways to generate traffic to an offer.
I’d love to get into organic, paid, and earned traffic strategies but I’d be here all day. However, here's a little inside secret that I will share. Personally, if I have a new landing page or new offer, I am adamant on driving organic traffic to the page, funnel, and offer to validate it before driving paid traffic. Once you know that your landing page or an offer is validated, you can confidently drive traffic to it and know that you’re not taking your ad spend to the casino.
Advice when driving traffic
Here’s some advice when you’re driving traffic. Whether it be organic or paid traffic, make sure you understand the temperature of your audience.
Why is traffic temperature so important? You’ll need to tailor your hooks, the story, and offer based on whether you’re driving cold, warm or hot traffic. I have a lot more on this and examples in my ‘Content Pizza’ book but to summarise: cold traffic needs to be made aware of the problem, warm traffic is problem aware and might be looking for a solution, and hot traffic wants a fix right now.
You’re planning your top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel messaging, and even some of the best creative agencies out there get this wrong. I was once an agency owner, but you have to understand the sales process and really get sales to hit the nail on the head with this.
No matter where your audience is on the triangle or your funnel, you’re working on that three-legged stool to get them to know - love - trust you.
There you have it, the answer to where your next client is coming from is traffic. So, let's get started.
What traffic channel do you want to try?
What do you think the budget should be?
How do you think you should test it?
When you find the formula that works with one traffic channel and it brings in a nice steady stream of leads, you can move into the next one. Don’t expect this to be an overnight magic bullet, it’s going to take time if you’re going to test, track and tweak to get it running like a well-oiled machine.
What would the impact be on your business if you added a new traffic channel to your business every quarter? By the end of a year, you'd have several sources of new leads, clients and revenue to grow your business to a point where you can really start to look at scaling.
Summary of your actions
Get your numbers in line, set up your KPI scorecard.
Schedule one hour and create a systematic referral program for your business.
Decide on one traffic source to focus on, schedule time to put it in play, test, track and tweak.
Get a copy of Content That Sells Like Hot Pizza.
Start driving traffic, traffic, traffic.
If you’d like a hand with strategy and some support to help you master getting new clients to your business, let’s talk. We can find some quick wins in your business and identify some solid long-term strategies so you never have to face feast and famine again. Find out more about my four-week coaching experience.
