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Social media is a great tool for finding new clients. Potential clients are there, looking for the products and services you offer, so it’s the perfect place to connect. But it’s not just a matter of creating a profile and having new clients flock to you. You have to proactively go out there and find them. Here are some strategies to best use social media to generate new clients.
Meet Your New Clients Where They Are There are many social media platforms out there, and not all of them are appropriate for finding new clients. Create a target profile for your ideal client and find out which platforms they use for finding goods and services. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are very popular with a wide range of users. LinkedIn is a professional B2B networking site, so it’s a great place to look for clients. If you’re not sure, sign up for all and drop the ones that don’t bring results. Communicate Your Natural Strengths at a Glance On each platform you plan to use, create a profile relevant to the work you do. At a glance, a person who doesn’t know you should be able to easily understand what you do. Emphasize your natural strengths and the unique value you offer. Make it visually appealing so it will grab people’s attention and don’t include anything off brand. Search with Hashtags There are people on each site looking for the services you offer. The best way to search for these individuals is to use hashtags. Hashtags are search keywords for social media. Use words and phrases related to your industry and product. Do some research to find hashtags a potential client might use when searching for you. Also, use hashtags when you post content so your posts will appear in searches. Become a Regular Social Media User Spend time each day posting, replying, searching, and interacting with the connections you make. Focus on posting content that helps people solve their problems and shows your expertise since this is your selling point. Content should mostly be informational and not promotional. Focus on building relationships. If they like the information you share, they’ll check you out to see if you’re offering what they need. Point Users to Your Other Content A great way to strike a balance between informational and promotional is to use social media to point to your other content. For example, when you publish a new piece on your blog, tell your social media followers about it and provide a link. This will drive traffic off social media to your other content and you can gain followers there as well. Reach Out to Prospects In addition to posting content and interacting with people naturally on social media, you can reach out to potential clients and give them a pitch telling them what you do. Emphasize the unique benefits you offer. The person might not offer you a job today, but at least you’ll start a relationship with them. Reflection Question: Are you spending your time on the social media platforms where your ideal clients actually engage, or simply where it's most comfortable to post? Consistency on social media starts with having a simple plan. Download the free Weekly Client Attraction Planner to organize your weekly marketing activities and stay focused on the actions that help build visibility and attract new clients.
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How do you sell yourself to clients? What do you do well that’s unique from other businesses in the market? In order to explain this to prospective clients, you need to clearly understand your unique strengths. Our strengths aren’t always apparent to ourselves, so you have to do some strategic thinking.
Examine Your Experience Go over your experience working in this area. Where have you spent the greatest time working? Whatever you’ve done most is probably something you’re good at. You’ve accumulated knowledge and expertise through doing it. Look at Your Biggest Successes Go back over your history and look for your biggest successes. Find the times when you really achieved something fantastic. For each, what was behind the big success that made it happen? Sometimes the timing was good, you were lucky, or it was something external to your business, but look for instances where something you did brought about the success. Consider Soft Skills Don’t just look at topic areas you know about or hard skills you’re good at. Look also at soft skills like communication, problem-solving, reliability, or other facets of your personality that affect the way you work. One of your natural strengths might be that you always deliver work on time and you’re always easy to reach. Your Reputation What do people say about you? When people have praised you before, what did they say was great about your services? Try to find comments where a customer or client expressed their satisfaction for the work you did and see what they said they were happy with specifically. Gather as many as possible and look for patterns. If you can’t find many, reach out to current clients with a survey asking for their feedback. Focus on the Positive Focus on positive aspects of the work you do, not the negative. For example, “I don’t turn work in late,” isn’t a good natural strength. You can frame it positively by saying, “I always turn work in on time.” Don’t make a list of things you don’t do. Sample Other Services If you have the resources, use other services that are similar to yours and see what’s different about them. You might discover some natural strengths through this. For example, you might find another ecommerce store’s ordering process to be clunky and awkward, leading you to realize that yours is smooth and simple. Make a list of as many natural strengths as you can. You may know some off the top of your head, but try whenever possible to use actual feedback from the market or clients. Use what you discover in your marketing materials. After all, these qualities are the reason people choose you over another similar business. Get into the regular habit of collecting feedback from customers and clients so that you can maintain an understanding of your natural strengths in case they change in the future. Reflection Question: What are three strengths your clients consistently appreciate that you should highlight more often in your marketing? Understanding your strengths is only the first step. The next step is making sure the right people know about you. Once you've identified what makes your business different, the next step is sharing those strengths with the people who are most likely to value them. Download the free Ideal Client Location Checklist to identify the online and offline places where your ideal clients spend their time so you can confidently put your message in front of the right audience. How do you get potential new clients to your website and convert them from visitors to customers? Although you may be active on social media, online forums, and other places online, it’s your website that will have the biggest impact on how you acquire new clients. Here are a few things you can do with your site to help you generate more business.
Keyword Optimization The written content on your site should be search engine optimized with relevant keywords that will bring traffic to it. This will help with search engines like Google. Use a free keyword tool to find some good keywords and focus especially on long-tail keywords. These are longer phrases and sentences that have less competition. Add a Blog Add a blog to your site and post helpful, informational content regularly. This will help with search engines by providing fresh content and more keywords. It will also help to show your expertise in your topic area. You can write on topics that are of interest to your potential clients and show what you know. Include Social Proof Social proof refers to content that shows how you’ve helped others solve their problems. It is very powerful in demonstrating the unique value you offer. Testimonials from former clients are easy to use on your website for social proof. Reach out to people you’ve worked with before and ask if they’d give some feedback that you can use for a testimonial. Use Video Content A great way to tell site visitors about your business is to create a short video that shows you talking to the viewer. This puts a human face on your business. The video can be short and simple. Just introduce yourself and your business and give the viewer your elevator pitch about what unique value you can offer them. Check out Other Business’ Sites Spend some time looking around at the websites of businesses that are similar to yours. See how they represent themselves. Look at their design, their content, and the site navigation. This can give you some ideas on how to improve yours or set it apart. Offer a Free Information Product Put a free info product for download on your site, like an eBook that helps your target market solve some problem they’re facing. This is a great way to demonstrate your expertise and start a relationship with the prospect. In exchange for the free download, they submit their name and email address so you can send them content and promotions by email. Call the Visitor to Action In addition to explaining the unique value you offer, give the visitor a clear call to action. Tell them exactly what they need to do in order to get the benefits you’re promising them. Experiment with different wording in your call to action and see what performs best with your specific audience. Monitor Your Analytics Set aside some regular time to check your analytics to see what’s working and what isn’t. This is how you refine your website strategy and constantly improve to make it more effective. Soon, you’ll have a streamlined site that easily converts visitors into new clients. Reflection Question: Which one improvement to your website could you make this week that would make it easier for a visitor to become a client? Your website should do more than look professional, it should help turn visitors into clients. Ready to strengthen your online presence? Download the free Weekly Client Attraction Planner to organize your marketing activities, follow up with potential clients, and stay focused on the actions that help build visibility and attract new business. Making decisions that have a huge impact on your business isn’t easy, but it’s an extremely important part of running any business. You need to be able to think on your feet and make key decisions quickly and decisively. How do you do that? There is a great deal to be learned by studying CEOs and how they make decisions. Based on Data and Experience A CEO knows everything that’s going on in their company and in the market. They know the numbers. They also have accumulated experience and knowledge from the past. All this information is at their fingertips at any time, and they can access it when needed to make decisions the right way. Inner Knowing Along with data, a CEO makes decisions with a good dose of internal knowing. They have a gut feeling that has been honed through years of listening to the right voice, experience and learning from missteps they’ve taken in the past. A good leader also has high emotional intelligence, which allows them to accurately judge a person’s character at first glance. Strategic Planning and an Eye to the Future One reason CEOs can make decisions so quickly and decisively is that they’ve already considered that the issue at hand might arise. CEOs think strategically, always calculating what could possibly happen and how to react to it. With a plan already in hand, they can make snap decisions for maximum benefit with the least amount of risk. CEOs think proactively, not reactively. They make decisions not from a defensive position but based on what they want to see happen in the future. Unafraid to Make Mistakes CEOs aren’t ambiguous or wishy-washy. They don’t hesitate and ruminate. The downside is that you might make the wrong decision on something important. But rather than fearing failure, a CEO makes that decision based on the best information available, and then accepts the mistake as a great learning opportunity. Even failure is better than indecisiveness. Don’t Do It All Alone Although a CEO looks like the strong individual leader of an organization, they are nothing without their team and network. A good CEO is acutely aware of what they know and what they don’t know. When they need help making a decision, they’re not afraid to ask. They rely heavily on the expertise of trusted partners and team members. Core Values in Mind One of the unique roles of the CEO is protector of the company’s core values. They need to keep these values in mind at all times and make each decision so that it’s in line with them. You don’t need to be the CEO of a company in order to make decisions like one. Whether you’re leading a team, running a small company, or simply working for yourself, you can learn to make decisions like a CEO and lead your business in the right direction. Continue Your Leadership Journey Every business owner develops leadership over time. Understanding your current strengths and recognizing areas for growth can help you make more confident decisions for your business. If you're curious about how your current leadership approach compares to the habits of effective CEOs, the CEO Readiness Assessment provides a thoughtful starting point. You'll receive insights into several areas of business leadership along with practical guidance for continued growth. When you are ready, take the CEO Readiness Assessment and discover ways to strengthen your leadership habits. Pat Simes is a Business Strategist, blogger and Founder of Innovative Business Solutions and Innovate Academy. She currently resides in the Midwest and is committed to inspiring and empowering entrepreneurs to transform their vision to reality.
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