Taking the Guess-Work out of Large Client Acquisition Plans
Table of Contents
A lot goes into running a marketing agency, from hiring staff to developing strategies to selecting wholesale SEO fulfillment partners.
But with all the ins and outs of marketing, arguably the hardest part is getting new clients.
Clients are, after all, the lifeblood of your business!
So how do you get your name out there, set yourself apart from other marketing agencies, and convert people into paying clients?
Most agencies employ “outbound marketing”, a sub-type of marketing where you reach out to your clients first. Maybe you’d send a few dozen cold emails to prospective customers, or invest in sponsored social media posts. If you have a bigger budget, you might even be able to afford a commercial or two.
Outbound marketing is a great way to build brand awareness, especially if you’re a startup marketing company. But it can also be time-consuming and resource-draining. Plus, it doesn’t even guarantee good results. You could spend thousands of dollars a month in ads only to reach people who aren’t ready or able to become clients.
There is, however, an alternative.
An alternative that is more cost-effective, engaging, and sustainable. Instead of you reaching out to potential clients, they come to you!
In this guide, we’ll break down the basics of inbound marketing, the different client acquisition tactics you can use to expand your client base, and our proven strategy that has brought us hundreds of thousands of dollars a month – all without a single cold call or email.
What Is Inbound Client Acquisition?
Client acquisition is how you obtain clients.
The process is broken down into different stages, also known as the customer funnel or sales funnel.
There are many different models, but we can simplify it into four stages:
Awareness:
At this stage, people learn about your brand and products/services but are not necessarily interested in making a purchase.
Interest:
As people learn more about your business, their interest builds.
Desire:
Customers want to purchase your product/service but still haven’t acted on their desire for personal, financial, or other reasons.
Action:
The client has done your target action, whether that’s buying your product, signing up for your newsletter, or reaching out to your sales team for more information.
Inbound client acquisition relies on strengthening the first three stages of the process. If you can attract clients to your business, generate interest, and fuel their desire, then you can inspire them to take the next step: working with your marketing agency.
We’ll talk more about the specifics below.
Benefits Of Inbound Client Acquisition
Builds Your Brand
When it comes to the internet, visibility is the most valuable currency. After all, if people don’t know about your agency, you won’t get any clients. Inbound client acquisition relies on tactics that are meant to build your brand online, targeting the people who are most likely to convert, through great content. If they like what you’re putting out, they’ll share your content with their friends, family, and followers – building even more brand awareness and trust without you having to do it directly.
More Affordable
Cost is always going to be a significant factor when it comes to doing business. Inbound marketing is significantly cheaper than outbound marketing, with companies spending around 62% less per lead with inbound compared to outbound client acquisition.
Shorter Timeline
With outbound client acquisition, you reach out to people who may or may not be interested in your services in the first place. But with inbound client acquisition, they’re already looking for a marketing agency – you just need to convince them that your agency is the right one for them. And since they already have a need and are ready to purchase, it doesn’t take as long to turn this high-quality lead into a client.
Less Effort
Yes, inbound marketing takes a lot of work initially since you are building authority and credibility. But once you have that setup, it’s much easier to sustain. You no longer need to spend hours prospecting, cold emailing, or networking. You can automate many tasks (e.g., email campaigns), saving you time, money, and effort.
Our Approach
Most marketing agencies use the same old techniques to get customers.
They send out cold emails to potential clients, reach out to websites that have low rankings, or rely on networking or word-of-mouth marketing to build their client base.
The problem with this is that you have to dedicate a pretty significant amount of time and resources to keep chasing prospects. Plus, outbound marketing can feel annoying and pushy, which is why this method has notoriously low conversion rates.
What if we told you that, instead of chasing after them, clients could chase after you?
Here’s the step-by-step breakdown of how we do what we do.
Step #1: Create Content
Every client acquisition strategy needs a solid foundation to build on. For our approach, that foundation is content.
Great content can help you build trust, establish your authority, and convince potential clients that you are knowledgeable in their specific field.
If you can demonstrate your expertise and provide them with valuable information, they’ll be much more likely to remember your brand when they need a marketing agency.
Creating niche-relevant content is paramount for best results in the funnel, and while not every SEO and marketing agency has ‘niched down’, it is absolutely imperative that you ‘niche down’ your content to speak directly to a specific industry.
This makes the later parts of the funnel work efficiently. Your content gets more organic visibility with less effort because these are hyper-targeted pieces of content that will end up matching very specific inquiries that very specific business owners are searching for answers to.
The next important component is ensuring you are creating the right type of content. This content should help answer very specific questions that business owners are asking. You can begin your search into what these questions are by using a site like https://answerthepublic.com.
And then we like to look at what the competing niche marketing agencies are publishing. A tool like Ahrefs can help you estimate how much traffic their content is garnering them.
Finally, look at the industry blogs and forums, scan them for recurring topics and similar content. Using this data you can develop a list of content topic ideas and begin planning the funnel around the topic.
Here are some of the most common formats for your published content:
Blogs
Blogs remain the most popular type of content online because they’re easy to write, extremely shareable, and an excellent medium for delivering information. You need to make sure that your blogs are well-written and educational for this to work – low-quality, spammy blogs will just turn clients away.
Use your blog space to address your clients’ most significant pain points and provide solutions. For example, if your clients are struggling with SEO and want to know more about it, you could come up with articles like “5 SEO Tactics that Cost Nothing but Will Double Your Law Firm Website’s Traffic” or “How to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Dental Site with One Simple Trick.”
Videos
While blogging is still the reigning “king” of content, videos come in at a close second.
A 2000-word article is an excellent way to explain a topic, but most people don’t have the time or patience to read long-form content. Videos, on the other hand, allow you to share a lot of information in a short amount of time. Plus, you can incorporate visuals and audio narration, which can help you illustrate complex concepts or processes easily.
One of our favorite ways to create video content is by doing a live Q&A on Facebook, Twitter, or your platform of choice. You can then chop it up into smaller 1-2 minute videos. Even a 30-minute Q&A can give you enough video content for weeks.
Infographics
People understand data better when it’s visualized, and this is why infographics are popular.
You can stuff a lot of information into an infographic full of charts and illustrations that make it a lot more digestible. And because of its aesthetic nature, infographics are extremely shareable on social media. More eyes on your content = more potential clients down the line.
Infographics are best used for traditionally “boring” data like numbers or statistics, but almost any topic can be translated into a well-done infographic with enough thought and planning.
Guides/Ebook
Blogs give you bite-sized pieces of information at around 500-1,000 words apiece. Guides and eBooks are much longer, ranging from 5,000 to as high as 50,000 for extremely in-depth content. While they (obviously) take much more time to create, guides are a great way to demonstrate your authority – only an expert could write thousands of words on a single complex topic.
Many marketing agencies offer eBooks or guides in exchange for an email. The potential client gets a lot of value, for free, and the agency gets a possible lead. It’s a win-win all around.
Webinars
A webinar is an online lecture or seminar where you can present information and facilitate discussions – even if you’re not in the same room or even country as your “attendees.” Think of it as a long-form and interactive version of video content, where you can dive deep into your topic and get feedback from your audience. Some platforms even allow you to share documents and slides as you are talking.
One of the most significant benefits of a webinar – as compared to, say, blogs – is that potential clients can put a face to the name. They can see you and hear your voice, which helps them create a more reliable and more emotional connection with your brand.
Webinars can be pre-recorded or done live. Like eBooks, you can exchange a link to the webinar for contact information, helping you generate more leads. You can even use webinars to create additional content by chopping it up into smaller videos.
Podcasts
In the last few years, the podcast format has exploded onto the scene. More and more people are getting into podcasts, listening to episodes on their daily commute, or while doing chores. And considering that more than half the US population has listened to a podcast, your marketing agency could benefit greatly by tapping into that audience.
Through a marketing-focused podcast, you could provide a lot of useful information in a short amount of time. You can inject humor and personality into it to make your business more likable and appealing to potential clients. Most importantly, it doesn’t take much to start a podcast – all you need is a microphone, a laptop, audio editing software, and someone with the charisma and voice to pull it off.
Case Studies
Before a potential client works with you, they usually want to know that you can get the job done.
This is why case studies are essential content for marketing agencies. A client is much more likely to trust an agency that’s proven to drive results versus one that has no case studies and no testimonials to back up their claims.
Case studies aren’t all too difficult to make, especially since you (should) already have all the data; you need to create one. More than just reporting numbers, a good case study needs to tell a story – what you did, how you did it, why it worked, and what kind of impact it had on your client.
Your case studies don’t need to be long, in fact, our best performing case studies are only a few pages long. If you want to see what our case studies look like, you can access a set of white-labeled case studies when you download your free brandable sales materials. These case studies are modeled after the exact ones we use successfully in our agency.
Step #2: Drive Traffic to Your Content
Once you have your fantastic content, the next step is to build awareness and generate traffic. But unlike traditional marketing, you’re not advertising your marketing agency – you have to market your content.
We use a variety of means to drive traffic, including organic social posting and organic search and even content syndication networks like Taboola or Outbrain but the quickest method of driving traffic is running paid ads.
We prefer using social media platforms to generate the initial surge of cold traffic. It tends to be affordable and provides decent targeting options to not be wasteful. You can technically use any social media platform, but Facebook has the most users, so it should be your top priority.
We also like to use YouTube and Gmail ads on the Display Network but this post is about creating your inbound funnel, not a paid traffic mastery course so we will briefly cover the high-level considerations for running Facebook ads.
It’s much better to promote content (your infographic, video, or something else) that gives them a “taste” of what they can expect from you, rather than the services you offer. If the prospect already knows what you’re all about, if they already trust your skill and output, then they will be more likely to work with you down the line.
Boost content that demonstrates your strengths and can be easily shared. Usually, this is content that addresses a small problem that your client has. ‘Small’ is the keyword here – instead of advertising an in-depth guide on “How to Rank #1 on Google”, scale it down to a specific issue or topic.
The Facebook ad should link to your prized content piece, whether it’s an infographic or in-depth guide or webinar. But don’t give it to them right away – collect their email address in exchange for the free resource. Once they opt-in, they are added to your email list. On the “thank you” page, you can encourage them to take further action, such as joining your Facebook group or following you on social media.
Remember that this part is setting the stage for client acquisition. At this point, you’re not asking them to sign a contract with you; you’re just trying to collect emails or get them to join your group. After they’ve opted in, you can then share the rest of your content, pushing them closer and closer to becoming a client.
Facebook ad mechanics are complex and change fairly rapidly, so instead of laying out the exact steps of setting up a campaign, testing it, creating retargeting, defining the offer and the exact path(s) to get there – which by the way might change based on content format and platform published on, we are going to offer some high-level advice based on the real-world experience we gained by having spent over one million dollars on Facebook ad campaigns driving traffic to content funnels.
- Specificity is key for your free offer or cheat sheet
- Your ad should solve a common problem in your target niche in an easily digestible portion
- Test Facebook Lead Ads versus Landing Page opt-ins to capture their name and email address
- Test Facebook Video Ads versus Facebook Image/GIF Ads
- Images and Graphics should provide high-contrast pattern interrupts
- Your ad should lead by stating the target’s desired outcome
- Include a brief intro and credibility sentence
- Contrast the ‘old’ method versus the new offer
- State the offer clearly
- Ask for them to take action
Step #3: Send Some Emails
Now, you have a list of emails of potential clients who have freely given you their contact info – no prospecting and no cold emailing required. After you’ve got them on the email list, the next step is to send short emails every day. Just short, simple emails that provide value in small ways. These emails should be automated using decent software like Klaviyo, MailChimp, or ActiveCampaign so you can ensure acceptable deliverability.
The purpose of these emails is to generate enough interest and curiosity to get them to click on the link that leads to the valuable content on a website, which features a prominent link and CTA to complete the application form mentioned below.
Lead with value, addressing a problem they’re experiencing. But don’t give them the answer in the email itself! Tease the solution in the email copy, then link them to whatever it is you want them to access – your book, webinar, podcast, website, social media profiles, etc. And then show them the application call-to-action.
Focus on micro-topics and small bite-sized pieces of information. Not only does this make it easy to read, but it also allows you to make more content. These emails are pretty easy to make as well, just use a template or format so that you can churn out emails quickly.
The format is quite simple. And always have these elements:
- Catchy subject line: If you don’t have an attention-grabbing subject line, they are not going to read your email! It’s a waste of your efforts.
For example: “Does more website traffic improve your company’s Google ranking?”
- Video thumbnail: Instead of writing lengthy email copy, send an embedded video.
- Offering: Offer a free copy of an eBook plus something else: a free guide, course, or other long-form content works well.
- Contact us: Include your social media links, plus a link to your contact us page. Market it as an alternative to reading your free resources – if they want your help to market their business (instead of doing it themselves), then “apply here.”
Send one of these short emails every day. Rather than directly selling your services, sell them on why they should hire you – the implication being because you are an authority who has created a lot of valuable content. If you do it over and over again, people will have you at the front of their minds when they need a marketing agency.
The same applies to your marketing business. Don’t try to close deals or sell your marketing services right away. Just get those leads into your funnel first and then hammer it home day by day. Eventually, these clients will contact you because they want to work with you – not the other way around.
Step #4: Direct Them To The Application Form
All of your content, ads, and emails should direct potential clients to one place: your contact form. A contact form is not only a way for people to reach you, but it’s also your last opportunity to market yourself.
This is where most marketing agencies fall flat. They add a standard contact form and nothing else. In the same way that you optimize your website, emails, and ads for conversion, your contact form should be optimized too.
So how should you do it?
You want to keep the upper hand here. Your clients should want to work with you, not you with them. This helps you gain control over the conversation and establish yourself as an in-demand agency. Even if you lack clients at the moment, they don’t need to know that – the more sought-after you seem, the more clients will seek you out for your authority and expertise.
We use an application form to convey this. Note how we call it an application form and not a contact form. This is because clients have to apply to work with us. We screen them and accept a limited number of clients on a case-to-case basis.
When we’ve set everything else up, we say something along the lines of: “If we feel you’re a good fit, we’ll set up a time to talk.”
This demonstrates that we have the final say in who we accept. The fact that we can be selective about our clients increases our desirability. After all, if so many people want to work with us that we have to reject work, that must mean we are great at what we do, right?
The content of your application/contact form should reinforce this idea, as well. Aside from the usual information (name, email address, etc.), you should gather as much information as needed to see if the client is a good fit:
Location:
A lot of marketing is location-dependent, so this is crucial information.
Business goals:
This helps you gauge if they have realistic, practical, quantifiable goals that you can help them achieve.
Problems/obstacles:
Their biggest obstacles in marketing will give you an idea of the best solutions to offer.
Revenue:
This will tell you if this client has the money to pay you for your work.
Timeline:
A rough timeline will help you plan your project pipeline/cash flow and balance it out with other clients.
Why you should work with them: This part is essential. It drives it home that you are the one calling the shots.
Step #5: Retarget Your Website Visitors, Video Views, and Form Fills
This is where it all comes together.
Retargeting is what drives every successful funnel. And lack of retargeting is what dooms funnels to failure and mediocrity. I like to retarget all general site visitors with every top-of-content piece we produce.
Clients that sign or buy will find themselves removed from wasteful ad spend naturally through the action of the funnel while those that still are on the fence, but highly interested in your topics and solutions will be in a perpetual cycle of valuable content and free offers.
You will retarget them, using the Facebook Ad Pixel with each new offer and the valuable content piece you publish. They will continue down the initial funnel and then into the top of a new funnel and down through that one and onto yet another one.
Each funnel will lead to the next funnel.
Clients will apply to work with you and naturally cycle out of the old funnels. Your touchpoints multiply and content funnels begin to run on autopilot.
Just as you retarget all website visitors and visitors to specific offer pages, you also want to retarget your video viewers.
There’s an easy option in Facebook that allows you to create custom audiences based on the percentage of video viewed, a fifty or seventy-five percent view rate ensures that you are showing your ads to an interested and engaged audience. That’s a sure sign of a warm audience. And the larger your warm audience becomes, the greater likelihood it produces hot clients ready to apply to work with your marketing agency.
Finally, we don’t like to stop retargeting after a lead becomes a client. Ideally, we want to be in a position to offer additional options to a client’s campaign. We want to expand a GMB-centric campaign to include a paid Facebook ad campaign. We want to offer aggressive reputation management and media outreach. A new website. Display Network and YouTube retargeting.
We want to be able to position our upsells so as not to be intrusive or pushy. We position them by retargeting our existing clients using another value-content funnel. It could be a new case study or white paper that discusses the benefits of the upsell offer.
Tips For Successful Client Acquisition
Focus On A Specific Niche
Most marketing agencies cater to all industries. The idea is that you cast a wide net and hope to catch a few fish. This makes sense in theory, but in practice, the opposite seems to be much more effective.
It seems counterintuitive to focus on a specific niche because it does limit the number of clients you market to overall. But this allows you to invest in that particular demographic and specialize. Different industries require different approaches, so if you zero in on a few niches, you can become an expert marketer for those niches.
Plus, this helps you narrow down your messaging and branding. Instead of saying that your marketing agency works for everybody (which seems too good to be true, anyway), you can market yourself as the best in a particular field.
Know Your Audience
If you don’t know your target market, how are you supposed to advertise to them? Understanding your clients is the best way to create content that truly resonates with them and get them to convert. Take the time to develop a client-centric marketing approach so that you can address your customer’s actual needs, rather than just pushing your business on them.
Provide Value
We’ve said it multiple times – your content should be the foundation of your client acquisition strategy. But it’s not about the content per se. There are millions of low-quality blogs out there that don’t attract any traffic, much less any customers. What you’re pushing is value; your content is just the medium for it.
This is why knowing your audience is paramount. You can’t provide value if you don’t know what your clients want. But if you’re in tune with your clients’ needs, desires, and problems, you can create content that provides them with useful solutions. That’s how you get people to trust you, build a relationship with your brand, and convert.
Diversify Your Content
Content diversity is essential to sustainable and robust content marketing. You don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket. Trends can change, and you may be neglecting a vast source of potential clients by limiting your content to just a few types of platforms.
Plus, great content marketing weaves together multiple platforms. For example, our approach combines several types of content. We use blogs, guides, and videos as a base for our marketing plan. Then, we use social media ads to push that content. Finally, we send emails with even more content.
The content might be varied and scattered across different platforms, but they work together to push clients down the funnel. Plus, if you diversify your content, you can see which content types are most popular with your target audience, allowing you to refocus your strategy to emphasize those.
Write Compelling Titles
When you come up with a title for your content or emails, make sure that it’s funny, attention-grabbing, and solves a problem for the audience. You have to know your audience to do this! You have to know their goals and their fears, what they want, and what they want to avoid.
For example, most business owners have probably already invested a lot of money into marketing. It’s possible that they didn’t get the results they wanted, and they want to stop wasting resources on agencies that don’t know what they’re doing. They want marketing that is worth the money they’re paying – this is an unfortunate pain point that you should address in your title.
An example of an excellent title for a successful ad campaign could be “3 Ways to Get More [Insert Target Niche] Clients from the Internet Without Getting Screwed by a Marketing Company”.
The secret to this eye-catching title? It’s a variation of this simple yet powerful template:
“How to [goal] without [pain point]”
This packs a 1-2 punch. You’re helping your clients achieve a specific objective while avoiding something they fear. In our case, that goal was to get more clients, and the fear is “getting screwed by a marketing company.”
Do It Over & Over Again
Repetition is the name of the game in marketing. Even big names like Coca-Cola or Apple continuously put out ads, so that they are always in customers’ minds.
When someone hears of your business for the first time, chances are, they won’t sign up right away. You need to keep marketing to them, keep pushing your content out. The more they are exposed to your business, the higher your brand trust and recall. When they are finally ready to hire a marketing agency, you’ll be top of mind.
Look At Other Marketing Agencies
Marketing is constantly changing – what works today may not work tomorrow. The best way to learn which techniques are the most effective is by taking a look at the marketing companies who are ranking well and raking in profits. They are doing something right, and you could benefit from learning their techniques.
Check out their marketing resources. Read their eBooks, attend their webinars, and engage them for consulting/mentoring. Alternatively, you could try to reverse-engineer their techniques. Learn from the experts and apply their knowledge to your practice.
Invest In Client Retention
Ideally, you want to foster long-term relationships with your clients instead of signing them up for one-off projects. Acquiring new clients can cost up to five times as much as nurturing current clients. It’s also much better for profits – increasing client retention by just 5% can increase your profits by up to 95%. Loyal clients are also way more likely to try out new services and refer you to others, which ups your earnings in the long run.
Retaining clients is mostly about follow-ups.
Follow-up through email, text, zoom calls, and reach out to clients that you haven’t heard from in a while. Send monthly progress reports and try to schedule monthly updates. Collect referrals from the people with which you are currently working. Build relationships, develop client loyalty, and take advantage of every opportunity to create enjoyable experiences for your clients.
Read Our Client Retention Blog Post:
Conclusion
Remember that you always have competition!
There are plenty of marketing agencies that are competing with you for the same pool of clients, so you need to make yourself stand out if you want to sustain your business. Most of your competitors will spend their time prospecting and sending emails, but that is not the only (or even most effective) way of getting new clients.
We’ve found a system that works for us – and it can work for you too.
The most important thing about inbound client acquisition is proving your value. By putting out content that addresses your target audience’s major pain points, you establish yourself as an expert in your field. Then leverage that to collect their contact information and push even more resources. Keep yourself at the forefront of their mind by sending out regular emails, and you’ll be their go-to when they need a marketing agency.
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