Clients are the lifeblood of any business. But getting the steady flow needed to sustain a business is a challenge. That is why innovation with regard to finding new clients is key. This article introduces five creative ways to find new clients that will not only help sustain a business but improve the way it’s operated too.
Change Your Pitch
Like anything else in life, change is good. The same is true for pitching businesses to new clients. If a business is stagnant or at a standstill, the pitch may be the issue. Making adjustments to it may bring more clients. Bringing in a new client is partly about relationship building and creating trust. Taking the time to build a relationship and create trust makes a potential client more willing to listen to the business pitch. From there a business owner can convince their service or product is valuable.
Map Relationships
Mapping out relationships is a unique way to analyze a current customer base and expand on it. Mapping illustrates where relationships are the strongest. Knowing which parts of an existing network are strong helps guide the direction of a business’ marketing and lead generation efforts. A relationship map also helps reveal opportunities.
Perhaps a partner has a big client without the resources to do all the work. A partnership might be an excellent thing to propose. Or maybe a client mentions that someone they know needs services that your business could provide. Creating and then regularly updating a relationship map leads to new clients and even new services or improvement on services.
Make a Website and Leverage Its Data
A website is an essential tool for bringing in clients. On the surface, it doesn’t seem a particularly creative way to bring in clients since most people have one. But by engaging in blog writing, video-making, or article writing, more visitors will start coming to the site. And the visitor data can be leveraged to find new clients.
Website visitor tools provide an entire treasure trove of data to sift through. Visitors can be filtered down by city, state, and country. The one caveat is that a visitor can hide that information using various web browsing tools. For those cases, using a reverse DNS search may prove helpful. A reverse DNS search uses an IP address to find a visitor’s general location which gives insight into where mystery visitors are coming from.
Network in Person
Networking, like having a website, is another key tool for getting new clients. Cold-calling, sending emails, and networking on LinkedIn only goes so far though. Networking in person is actually a very creative way to find new clients. By using events such as those offered on sites like Meetup, making a connection in person with someone will leave an impression. In these situations, potential clients, partners, and other additions to your network will get to know the person behind the network. This is often more beneficial than any pitch that is given.
Market Using Instagram
As a visually driven social networking platform, Instagram is another way to drive new clients to a business. Develop a strategy. This includes determining which hashtags are relevant for a business and finding user accounts that compliment that business. An example is an interior designer following a furniture company or an entertainment writer following different entertainment outlets.
From this point, start building a following. Find photos from the list of hashtags and users and start liking and commenting on them. This encourages connections with other people and follows too. Putting out content from your business also helps boost engagement. Those with more visually driven businesses can simply post photographic evidence of their results. But posting pictures that show the process for the type of work you do also go a long way for any business. So don’t be afraid to be a little unconventional with marketing.
Getting a steady flow of clients for any business often involves a combination of methods. Business cards, ads, and websites are standard tools. But as this article has proven, there are always new things to do with tools of the business trade. It just takes a bit of creativity and thinking to find them. Clients who come to business owners through these methods will appreciate the effort and creativity taken to connect with them.