The 6 Most Effective Ways To Attract Clients – Without Using SEO, Facebook or Google Ads.
1. Cold calling:
Convince leads through real-time conversations.
Unsolicited calls to potential customers, or cold calling, used to be a favoured technique, but it’s popularity has decreased. Understandable, because calling people can be scary and is the least favoured method for business owners.
It can also be tiresome and time-consuming if they’ve never heard about your business before – and might not appear super interested.
That doesn’t mean that this form of telemarketing is always a bad idea. Having actual, real-time conversations with potential customers, can play an important role in persuading them. And if you aim your efforts on decision makers, you increase your chances of convincing them considerably.
Cold calling:
What to do:
Focus on clear, targeted audiences with a well-prepared script and compare statistics regarding your activity (the number and length of your calls), quality (how many decision makers did you reach? how many leads did you qualify?) and conversions (in how many demos or purchases did the call result?) to discover if this is a technique you should invest in.
You can purchase call lists for this, or curate lists yourself through e.g. events or online searches.
Cold calling:
How to do it:
1. CRM
Set up a CRM so you don’t get lost in your many calls and follow-ups.- We suggest https:/engagebay.com/ as they have a great free version that has all you will need to get started. Sign up and watch the videos on how to use it.
2. Plan your approach:
- Identify your verticals – First, you need to cherry-pick who you’ll call. Your time is valuable — don’t waste it on prospects that aren’t a good fit for your product. Think about who your best customers are (or who you’ve had the most success calling in the past) and look for common attributes.
- Identify 20 good fit prospects – It is easy to find specific companies or people who could use your product or service. LinkedIn is a powerful tool that can help.
- I know, I know, you’d rather just pick up the phone and call. But trust me, spending just a minute up front will make you wildly more successful. So do it. Since you’re already on LinkedIn, check out each prospect’s profile to personalize your approach.
3. Set a space of time each day for cold calling
Say 10 am until 11:30 am every morning and have your call list ready before you begin. The trick is, like anything else, is to just do it.
You will have to fight through your personal fear barrier to begin, but I guarantee you that the first time you have a conversation that feels interesting, it will make your day.
- Fear is hard to overcome – so, tell yourself that you will deal with it later and crack on with your calls… every day. Don’t stop doing it for two weeks, and you will have new clients.
- Update your CRM fully as you go (take no longer than 3 minutes each call) – I guarantee that you will forget otherwise.
- Follow up. Either have your CRM loaded with several pre-written emails that follow up each scenario, or have template text ready in word docs, that you can cut and paste into emails.
There are two methods that really work for us:
- Use a cold calling approach that establishes rapport. (see https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/cold-call-script) for an idea on how it should be done.
- Offer something interesting for free. – ‘I’m a small, local business, just trying to make local connections and I am writing a blog post where I am highlighting local business that offer (their service) I wondered if I could add your company on to the post?’ – This opens up a world of information from the prospect and can quickly lead to a conversation about your service.
2. Direct mail:
Make sure your targeted audience sees your messages:
Direct mail, whether that’s through email or post, can be a valuable technique if you want to target a specific audience efficiently.
Make people aware of your brand or grab their attention through creative and interesting messaging. For example: high-level executives might be important prospects for your business, but they don’t have much time to browse the web for information.
Make sure they don’t miss out on your content and send them a direct mail with some information you specifically compiled for them.
direct mail:
What to do:
The secret to successful direct mail is to research your target and pen a handwritten note to them that is personalised interesting and introduces your business.
I don’t know anyone that won’t open and read a hand addressed, handwritten note.
It can be a great way to get you and your company in front of potentially important clients.
direct mail:
How to do it:
The handwriten note:
Today it’s rare to see a handwritten note, and that’s especially true in the business world. Sending a quick email may be convenient, but there’s something to be said about the impersonal nature of digital communication.
If you feel like your inbox is always full, you aren’t alone. It’s estimated that the average office worker can receive 121 emails every day.
It can be easy to forget to reply to a text or to open an email when you get so many forms of digital communication throughout the day. Things can easily get lost in the shuffle, and important things can go unnoticed.
There’s something about a handwritten note that stands out to people. It’s so rare to receive them, so it’s easy to make a big impression when you send out some of your own.
Direct mail:
7 simple steps:
- Writing a letter takes more effort than simply typing something on a phone or a computer. Adding that thoughtful touch to communications you need to send can set you up to be seen as someone that pays attention to the small things in life.
- Research your audience and personalise the letter.
- Keep it short.
- Add a call to action.
- Research the topic – see: https://writingcooperative.com/
- Use smart envelopes and paper.
- Make sure that it hits the desk of the right person.
3. Content marketing
Content is the presentation of information to an audience, which can be shared through different formats.
There are numerous possibilities: next to e-mails, you could craft blogs, ebooks or product catalogs, create videos, and much more.
But let’s face it the Internet is jam-packed with content and to be fair, most people are doing it better than you. so, you have to do it differently with every piece having the ability to attract a customer.
Let us show you how.
content marketing:
What to do:
The most important part of content marketing is to make sure that everything you do, every post you craft, and every graphic or video you produce, is not wasted and delivers value to your business.
If you simply release content onto a social scrolling feed without prompting a click back to a page that you control, then you are simply wasting your valuable time.
Only release content that clicks through to a page with the content on it, and make sure that page is packed with ads for just your business.
content marketing:
How to do it:
So firstly, you have to understand your limitations; if you are not an avid writer or genius graphic designer you may have to purchase some of these services.
There are a few people who are comfortable creating and publishing talking head videos, and these can get more traction than just straight graphics, but video is scary and most people just haven’t got the bottle.
So let’s look at how the average, relatively lazy, business owner can make a real dent with content.
content marketing:
Make sure that every piece of content you create has these 3 things going for it.
- it is on a platform you control, with advertisements for your business around it. This is the most valuable thing you can do for your business and most people don’t do it. What is the point of posting anything on social media, unless it clicks back to a page that has adverts for your business on it.
- You can reuse the content across multiple platforms.
- You can use automation for distribution.
Let me explain all of this.
People tend to pile content onto social media feeds in the hope that they will build a level of trust with an audience that will eventually interact and buy from them.
This only works for about 0.2% of businesses.
We have genuinely never come across a business that makes this work for them. Yet, everybody does it.
To make content work for you; you must control the platform where content is read by the reader. This way, you can also control the advertising around the content.
There is no point in placing your content onto a scrolling feed, surrounded by lots of other content unless, when clicked, it lands onto a page that you control.
The real crux of this issue is that people read, like and share interesting content, and they never share advertisements.
So, so you go out of your way to create great content and you make sure that it delivers the reader to a page where they can enjoy it and also see advertisements for your business.
We use blog software, and very well written content to do this.
For example:
One of our clients is a ‘Will Writer’, and we created an article site about the ‘Sandwich Generation’. This appealed greatly to his target audience as there are around 7 million people in the UK who are living with children and supporting older parents – The Sandwich Generation.
We write and share original articles that appeal to this target group, and have surrounded each article with adverts for the will writing company. These adverts click through to a landing page that converts potential customers to a conversation with the client.
You can either do this yourself, or contact Marketing Beast at https://marketingbeast.co.uk/
4. Email marketing
With gdpr closing down the spam angle of this sector, email marketing has really come into its own.
Once again; it is a skill that involves sales copyrighting, design, some technical knowledge and consistency. So most lazy business owners try it for a little bit, see limited results and then bin it.
- Email marketing can be fully automated and bring in a regular string of clients.
- It is relatively cheap to do.
- A targeted email blast can resurrect a poor sales period by dropping fresh clients into your sales funnel.
email marketing:
How to do it:
There are three separate, moving parts to achieve success in email marketing:
- Email capture – it is essential that you target the email addresses of your potential market, just blasting out thousands of emails can have very poor results and a really bad effect on your email pipeline – leaving your emails dropping into the spam boxes off potential clients and not the inboxes.
- Build or have built landing pages that are targeted at your market, and offer up something of value (like a how to PDF) for a first name and an email address. If you can’t build these yourself, Marketing Beast usually have an offer on for landing page creation – https://marketingbeast.co.uk/lpo/
- Make sure that the open graphic image (the clickable image that appears on a social feed when you share the URL) is regularly updated and fresh. You can literally share the URL of your landing page creating a brand new clickable, visual advert as often as you need to.
- Set up a decent email responder – to deliver emails to your new contacts that keep them interested, and happy to receive an open email sent from you. This is harder than it looks, and involves targeted copy aimed at your market that is interesting enough to read regularly.
- Use a copywriter – to craft these emails for you and make them relevant.
- Use an email responder – that has great open rates and is easy to use when it comes to plotting automations and email broadcasts.
- We recommend Engage Bay or Klavio for this.
- Be consistent and advertise your business sparingly – we suggest either a banner ad on the bottom of each email or a text paragraph about what you do with a link to your website.
5. Discounts, Deals and Competitions
People often see discounts and deals as a huge opportunity to save money and enjoy a product or service for a whole lot less.
In fact, discounts and deals usually influence customers to buy more products or services than they initially planned and are a great way to upsell your services.
There are plenty of websites that will advertise your deal to their audience but beware these can be very expensive as the reduced price and the Commission to the website eat away at your bottom line.
discounts deals & competitions:
How to do it:
We use two methods very successfully:
- Create a landing page with a single offer on it and share it like crazy – regularly changing the open graphic image. (the clickable image that appears on a social feed when you share the URL) If you cannot do this yourself, Marketing Beast usually have an offer on for landing page creation – https://marketingbeast.co.uk/lpo/.
- Use deal software such as Snizl. – For £10 per month you can post your BtoC deal to over 250k people. Snizl also lets you run competitions to attract followers. https://www.snizl.com/business
6. Quiz marketing
If you want leads fast then quiz marketing is perfect for you.
let’s face it, you are reading this because you entered a quiz and you gave us permission to continue marketing to you.
How to do it:
- Hire us because we know what we are doing.
- You will get masses of data from each entry
- We will target quizzes at your audience
- We deliver you warm leads for you to connect and contact.
