How to get clients with a small audience

Followers don't equal buyers, and yet I keep meeting entrepreneurs who are focused on their follower count. This is a major misconception in marketing. You don't need a following to get booked out, especially as a service provider, there are millions of service providers every day getting booked with client work with little to no audience. Building a following takes time, but building a client base can go much faster. In this episode, we're going to look at three winning ways you can build a client base with a small audience. I'm Lex Roman and this is the Low Energy Leads Show.

[00:00:30] As we kick this episode off, I want to talk about the difference between followers and buyers as social media marketing has really taken hold over all of marketing people really conflate the idea of your audience with your following, and while it's great to have a lot of followers, if you're focused on building a social media presence, it doesn't necessarily mean that those people will become buyers [00:01:00] and you don't necessarily need a social media following to have buyers. If you've seen any of my episodes before, you know that I don't rely on social media and there are a lot of business owners out there who get their clients through other channels. So in this episode, we're really going to focus on buyers, not followers. Making this switch from broadcast style strategies to relational style strategies can help you book your year faster. In this episode, I'm going to talk about three levels to what that relational strategy can [00:01:30] look like.

What it looks like for you to go to your clients rather than waiting for them to find you. Layer one is go to them through people you already know. Cultivating a networking practice is key if you're selling services and it's key if you have a small audience, but one of the main pitfalls of networking is that often people will approach it as a volume game. It's not a volume game, it's a depth game. The reality is when you hear service providers say, my business is run off of word of mouth, a lot of times this is what they're doing behind the scenes, right? They'll say to [00:02:00] you, oh, people just talk about me. But the reality is they're putting in years of work building relationships, and you too have done that. Even if you recently started your business, you spent years cultivating relationships with all kinds of people in your life, past colleagues, family members, good friends, college classmates, and you can leverage those as you build your network for your business.

Working those relationships that you've already put the time into to establish that trust to meet the next tier of people. Expedites [00:02:30] that networking and gets you to a yes faster, gets you to a booking faster. You want to draw a map of the people that you already know and who they know. These are people that will ideally serve more than one role in your life or in your business. That helps create the depth of relationship. It also really helps if you genuinely like them and if you think that they are an attractor of people, that you also want to know how can you hone and grow this network over time, deepening relationships with people so that ultimately [00:03:00] you have a strong network of people that you can go back to stay in touch with, and that that will become an engine for your business. I think it really helps to have a wishlist of who you want to meet, types of business owners, geographic areas, roles, titles, industries.

Who are you trying to meet? What is the role in your business? And if you can clarify that for yourself, you can very easily clarify that for your network and as you're moving through your network, you're hanging out with friends, you're catching up with past colleagues, you're DMing with people on LinkedIn, [00:03:30] you can pepper those conversations in and make those asks. I'll give you an example of this from my early days when I started Lex Roman Inc. And I was doing tech consulting. The people that I reached out to were people in LA who I had been networking with for years, other designers, other product managers, other engineers who I knew worked at tech companies and knew my clients, and I made sure that they all knew exactly what I was offering and that I sent them my blurb, I sent them an email to Ford, I sent them a link to my portfolio, and through [00:04:00] that I got introductions to probably 10 to 15 potential clients.

You forget that these people exist. You assume that if they had work for you, they would reach out, but that's not true. They might not be paying attention. They might not know that you're looking for work, making sure that people that you already know, know what you're doing, know that you have availability. This will pay off time and time again in your business and you want to ultimately cultivate that as a practice. How am I going to keep in touch with people? Who am I going to keep in touch with and how frequently? Level two of how to get clients [00:04:30] with a small audience is to go to them through platforms where they are looking for you. Now, this actually falls sort of in the middle of going to them and making them come to you, but if you really are struggling with networking or you feel like that's going to take some time, you can go to them on platforms where they are expressing a need for a service provider.

This works in two ways. You can go to freelancer style platforms where people are looking for fractional help or you can go to job [00:05:00] boards and try to convince them to do it on contract.

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With freelancer platforms. These can be kind of hit or miss and it really depends on the structure of your business. If this will work for you, you are culling through requests there for services and you are qualifying clients on these platforms, so can go in and search for a keyword and find a project [00:06:00] that makes sense for you and try to win those projects through those platforms. This is a great early stage strategy and I do know people that use this continually in their business, especially when work is slow. If you do something like web design, copywriting, graphic design, these platforms are filled with requests for stuff like that. So you can always go and look for client projects there and if you pick one platform to get really good at, you can start to stand out on that platform. Lindsay Hanson, who hosts the Quit Your Job Sis podcast, specializes in helping people get seen on Fiverr, so [00:06:30] you can learn similar to how you might learn social media, you can learn how to stand out on these platforms and the difference between learning these platforms and learning social media is at the end of learning a platform is money.

That's a skill that will pay back, especially if you want to do small gig work or you want something to fill in the gaps, or if you have some kind of productized service, like if you're doing podcast editing for example, that is something that you can really easily package and sell on one of those freelance platforms, but you can also look for that exact kind of client there [00:07:00] and then say, I offer this one package and just put together a proposal that you're sending over and over again for the same kind of service. I'm not necessarily advocating for these freelancer platforms because they take a big cut and they can be a lot to get right, but at least you are in front of your buyers so you know that the folks there are more likely to be in buy mode if you're selling higher ticket services like 10 K and up.

I think the job board's angle is more strategic, so you can look for companies that are hiring full-time or even part-time around the thing that you offer and [00:07:30] you can talk to 'em about doing it on a contract or you can approach them about ongoing work. I've used this strategy multiple times. My first contract, which was a hundred thousand dollars, came from this approach, so I went to a job board. I found a role that was exactly the kind of contract I wanted. I talked to the hiring manager and won that as a contract position. And then when I used to do graphic design work, I've also used this strategy to find companies that were repeatedly hiring for graphic designers and to pitch myself as a freelance graphic designer, you're not having to guess [00:08:00] as much and make presumptions. You're able to know that they're in a buy moment for what you do, and you really just have to build that trust quickly.

I really would not advise applying everywhere. I think it's better to focus in on one or two companies you think you could serve really well where they would be an ideal client for you, and then you just pitch them on what you do. You've thought it through, and so that comes through in how you approach them and it's easier to win that business. Level two works best if you're B two B, but there are B two C applications. For example, if you're a dog walker and you go to a platform like Next Door, you [00:08:30] might be able to find people that are looking for dog walkers or dog sitters if you're a care provider of some kind. Same thing with parent forums. Is there a place where my buyer is hanging out where I can go to them? That's really the question that you're answering here.

That brings me to level three. Go to them through people who have gathered your buyers rather than going one by one or working every relationship you have, you can go to a group of potential buyers, and this would look like networking groups, communities, forums, memberships, events, conferences. If there is [00:09:00] a room of people, digital or physical where your buyers are gathering together, you can go there, you can network there, you could speak there. You could offer something to that group. One way that I've used this is that I used to offer webinars to different professional groups that I thought would make good clients. I made an offer of a free webinar to heca, which is the Higher Education Consultants Association. I hosted a webinar for them and then I made a pitch for my web design services and I got I think six or seven [00:09:30] clients through that.

You can go to buyers that have been sort of gathered together in a room. If you're targeting artists, you might go to the local watercolor class. If you're targeting parents, you might go to the P T A. If you're targeting dog owners, you might go to the dog park, right? So where are these places where your buyers are hanging out? Are there people that are already gathering your target clientele together? And can you go there and offer value to that group by giving a guest talk, by offering a promo code, just by showing up and being present? What are the ways that you could [00:10:00] tap into groups of your buyers? We talked about this recently on the Growth Gym, Joanne Kaminsky known as the online tutor coach, and we were looking at which marketing plays would pay off faster, slow, and Joanne had mentioned that she had done many speaking gigs in front of families and parents at schools where she was able to get tutoring clients, and my mom used to do this as well in the college consultant space, speaking in front of groups of parents about how to get into college, and so you, again, you're going to your buyers, but they're all together in one room, so you're not going [00:10:30] one by one.

You're reaching a group, and I think this is a really good balance between what people are trying to do on social media and what can actually get you booked out, which is that you're going to people who are in a situation where they would be buy ready for the service that you're selling. Joanne spoke about this. You build that trust because you're there present and you're speaking to them and you are explaining things. You're being helpful, you're adding value. They're right there. It's your sale to lose. The more targeted you can [00:11:00] get here, the better. So if you can reach people that are in a specific turning point. In the case of my mom's college consulting business, she was going to speak to a room of parents with sophomores, juniors, and seniors who are thinking about college. They're in the scenario where they need her service.

There's a pretty qualified group of people. If you can go to a group like that that's really targeted either by industry or role or by situation that they might be in, where they would be buy ready for what you do, you're going to be better off. You're just going to get better results than going to some [00:11:30] kind of vague networking group or just going to a generic event. So here's the three levels we talked about today. Level one, go to them through people you already know. Level two, go to them through platforms or your buyers are hanging out. Level three, go to them through people who have gathered your buyers together. As you move through your marketing activities, I want you to think about which activities are about you going to them versus them come to you. It's okay to run a mix of these activities, but if work is slow and if building a following [00:12:00] is slow, you really want to think about some ways that you can go to them.

And remember, there's multiple options here. There's always another play at hand, another group, another strategy, another channel that you could be trying. It's really about opening up your options and trying them on for size to see which one fits you best, and to see which one gets you booked faster. I'd love to hear what you think of this episode. Leave me a voicemail over@lowenergyleads.com. You can also take charge of your lead generation every week with the Low Energy Leads Newsletter, where I share tips on staying booked with less effort.

Tune in for next week's episode with Eleanor Mayrhofer. Eleanor is a web designer based in Germany. We talk about some of these strategies and how they worked for her in practice. We also talk about making that shift from relationship to broadcast strategies and how those two things dovetail together. So be sure to come back for that next week.

If you're experimenting with how to find your best clients, you're invited to join us in the Growth Gym. The Growth Gym is a practice space where we work out your marketing ideas and make sure that you're making [00:13:00] smarter Betts with your time and your money. Join me Fridays at noon Eastern on YouTube and LinkedIn and get on the Low Energy Leads newsletter to get notified about upcoming sessions.

Until next time, keep that energy low until the value will be high.