As an agency owner, most of your nights will be spent worrying about two things:
- How to authentically engage your customers and keep them?
- How to get clients and build your customer base?
These are classic problems— one, an activation problem, and the other, a retention problem. As such, nailing both is equally important if you want to make it big. According to Outbound Engine, acquiring new clients may be up to 5 times more expensive than retaining old clients.
But all good things come to an end; so do the contracts of your most loyal clients. The reasons might be many:
- The scope of work has been completed.
- You do not have the requisite expertise to handle their newer scopes.
- They might be moving to a bigger scale, one that is beyond your resources.
There could be several reasons, and you might be tempted to have only a finite clientele that you want to service for a lifetime. But this is hardly a sustainable strategy. You have to be on the lookout for new clients all the time, even if ALL your existing clients are on lengthy retainers and extremely satisfied with your work.
So, how do you maintain a steady stream of client prospects? Which channels should you use to hunt for new client leads? What are some of the common places to get more clients? How do you pitch and persuade strangers that you’re the best agency to meet their requirements? What are certain hacks you can use to reduce lead times and sales cycles? How do you feed the ‘new client’ flywheel?
All these are vital, existential questions for an agency. Let us look at four tried-and-tested ways to get clients and keep them:
How To Acquire New Clients?
Have A Strong UGC Game
User-Generated Content (UGC) can work wonders for your new client acquisition. Catch the attention of new clients by answering questions on Quora and Twitter.
Join relevant Facebook groups, subreddits, and other niche communities in your space, and just try to be helpful without being spammy.
Don’t forget to link your website or business page. If you do it right, people will start noticing you and discover your agency in the process.
Tap Into Your Network
The highest ROI yielding strategy to get more clients is word of mouth. Mobilize your clientele to do your sourcing. Since they are happy with the experience of working with your agency, they’ll be more than happy to put the word out there for free.
You can also incentivize them to introduce you to potential clients by attaching a referral fee to it. Add case studies and testimonials on your website to show that you can walk the talk. Nothing convinces someone more than a genuinely unbiased, neutral opinion of their experience working with you.
Level Up Your Blog
People are tired of aggressive, pushy marketing and instead want to find stuff on their own, at their leisure. Also known as inbound marketing, this strategy is all about anticipating what your clients want and then creating helpful content to let them know that you can fulfil it.
For example, if you’re a copywriting agency, you can write a blog titled ‘7 tips for brands to write high-converting website copies [2021]’. Not only can you source new leads through this, but you can also engage better with customers since you’re providing real value and are not merely after their money.
How To Keep Clients Happy?
Go The Extra Mile
This is the most effective way to keep your clients happy! They love it when vendors are not sticky about deliverables. Going above and beyond can be one of the best customer engagement strategies because it shows you care and are in it for the long haul.
Set yourself apart and build long-term relationships by accommodating reasonable change requests that are beyond the stipulated scope of work, and you have yourself a happy client.
Wrapping Up
Acquiring new clients is a marathon, not a sprint. You have to put in the work, foster relationships, and service your current clientele well to have any shot at standing out and coming on the radar of new clients.
Hopefully, this guide has given you a solid foundation for going about things the right way.
Happy Clients = More Business
.jpeg)
.png)
