Finding potential clients: 5 steps you can’t do without

14.08.2020

Author: Academy-of-capital.ru

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From this material you will learn:

Advice!

You should not use all methods at once to find clients. For advertising, one channel is selected, tested, the result is analyzed, then the next one can be connected.

Having decided which channel to start advertising from, we launch ads in the following format: for each typical client we offer 5-10 values, localization – 5-10 “watering holes”. Analyze the results, highlight the most effective areas and concentrate your efforts on them.

Offers for potential clients online and offline

Now let's talk in more detail about how to find clients online and in real life. There are a number of channels and tools for this. But before you start promoting, you need to fill your own website with quality content. It can be in the format of texts, graphics and videos, all of which is presented in proper proportions.

• In the form of texts there will be small advertisements, posts, articles, interviews.
• Graphics are photographs and illustrations. They must be memorable, high-quality, original. You can use stock images.
• Video materials are also of different nature.

High-quality content on a web site is very important, since it will not be possible to find and attract customers to the site without it. It is unlikely that you will be able to do everything perfectly right away; it is not so easy, especially with video. But all materials must be carefully thought out.

The blog format works well - you can post articles with useful information and unobtrusively advertise. Using technical tools and SMM for promotion, we solve the problem of how to find clients. SMM is the reposting of materials in public pages and accounts. As technical tools, we use the basic ones - SEO and creating a mobile version. You can’t do without the latter, because more than half of users already surf the Internet from their phones.

The effectiveness of messengers is growing, and they should not be ignored either. They provide access to a loyal audience, and also allow you to entrust some of the operations to chatbots.

In real life, you will have to spend money to replenish your consumer base, since, of course, you can find clients here for free, but the most effective events will be events on the topic, tastings, and promotions. If everything is done correctly, the return from these events will be very noticeable - it will provide good traffic plus word of mouth will turn on.

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The leitmotif of such actions should be the indulgence of eternal human weaknesses:

• people love to relax and have fun, especially when someone else is in charge of the organization;
• people love to receive something as a gift;
• people need to be cared for.

Choose a tool for finding and attracting new clients

Online:

1. Social networks:

• Targeted advertising on Facebook, VK, Instagram. Paid. Easy to set up. Easy to track results.
• Viral posts on social networks. For free. Difficult to track effectiveness. You can come up with a TOP or list of life hacks and list your company’s services in one of the points.
• Hashtags, geotags. For free. Difficult to track. Increases company awareness, attracts new subscribers, but there may be a lot of untargeted subscriptions.
• Practical jokes. Paid. Announce a drawing with the terms of subscription and repost, set a date, choose a winner. There may also be many untargeted subscriptions and it is difficult to measure effectiveness.
• Marathons on Instagram. For free. You need to put more effort than into a giveaway - come up with a creative theme so that people participate and share. As a prize, you can offer the winner your product or service free of charge.
• Word of mouth. For free. This mechanism is launched due to: good service, ridiculous situations (deliberately created), profitable sales, original advertising campaigns (like Yota), interesting email newsletters. Ask to tell about you, give the opportunity to share information, repost, give secret discount codes. You need to give customers the opportunity to talk about you.

“5 Principles on How to Increase Sales and Connect with Customers in the Digital Age”.

2. Messengers:

• Look for profile chats on WhatsApp and Viber, where customers and clients in your industry communicate. Post your proposals there and respond to applications.
• Look for offers on advertising exchanges from owners of popular telegram channels. Buy advertising where your target audience lives: posts about promotions or interesting articles. Be careful: analyze channel statistics in detail, because the number of subscribers can be increased. Don't forget to insert a UTM tag into the link to track the effectiveness of this method.

3. Search engines Google and Yandex:

• If you have a website, promote it in search results using SEO. The Engine service will help you with this. It will help you collect keywords and gather recommendations for articles on your site. The service is paid. Read more services that are used for SEO optimization in the article: “Website promotion: channels, tools and technologies.”

The Yandex.Wordstat service will help you with the selection of keywords for your content. The service is also convenient because you can view the “Query History” graph; if you have a seasonal business, you will know when to start using keywords.

For example, the search for the request “buy a bicycle” begins to be actively searched between May and June. By this time, it is better to prepare publications about this product - reviews, market news, interesting facts.

Read the article: “Why does a business need SEO?”

• Search contextual advertising. Your ad is shown to the user when he searches for a specific query in a search engine. You can run advertising in Yandex using Yandex.Direct, and in Google using Google Ads. It's not free. You need to spend time setting up advertising campaigns, but if you set everything up correctly, you will end up on the first page of search results. It's easy to track ad conversions using tags.

4. Thematic forums on the network:

Communicate with customers on forums, answer their questions, give recommendations, create your own discussion threads. It's free, but it will take a lot of time. The downside is that there are a lot of outbids on such forums.

5. Online platforms and marketplaces:

You can find clients on the business platform. Every day, Russian and CIS companies place orders on the website for the purchase of various products. That is, you don’t need to look for clients, you simply open a suitable order, leave an offer for the customer or contact him by phone and communicate about the deal. Upload products to the catalog on the website so that customers who are looking for products in the Yandex and Google search engines can find you.

You can find additional clients by placing a banner on your website or writing a useful article for your blog, so more clients will know about you. These features are available on the Supplier Premium plan.

Read the article: “TOP 10 industries on Supl.biz, where to find clients.”

6. Contextual advertising:

In the same Yandex.Direct and Google Ads, you can place ads on the network of this site (Yandex Advertising Network and Google Display Network), in applications, videos on Youtube, product ads or advertising in search. It takes time to figure it out on your own and set up campaigns.

7. Content marketing:

Share knowledge, create useful and interesting content. Conduct webinars, publish articles, create templates, diagrams and infographics. If your content helps the user, he will forward it further, so more people will know about you. This is a long-term strategy, but it will help you build a loyal audience that cares about what you do.

Services for creating infographics: easelly and Infogram. Services are in English, but intuitive and basic functionality is free.

For services for webinars, see the article: “How to advertise a company on the Internet and save money at the same time.”

The Glavred service will help you clear articles of bureaucracy and make it simpler.

You can check the article for originality and uniqueness of the text by following the link.

8. Advertising in online publications:

• Many online publications have the opportunity to place banners and paid articles.
• Free requests from journalists looking for experts can be found on Pressfeed and Deadline.Media.
• Native advertising. You can collaborate with publications and create useful or fun interactive materials. For example, a joint material by Meduza and the online language school Lingoda, which promotes an online marathon.

Offline:

1. Event marketing:

Participate in events: exhibitions, forums, conferences, round tables. You can organize these events yourself, at the federal, regional or city level. You can also organize tastings, trainings and meetings for potential clients.

2. TV and radio advertising:

Nowadays, many companies distribute advertising videos online. But TV and radio remain effective means of increasing brand awareness. You need to target your target audience. For example, drivers often listen to the radio and play it in taxis. TV is often turned on as a background in salons or cafes; in the evening, people spend time watching TV. A bright and unusual picture or a “sticky” motif or advertising slogan can hook a client and bring him to you.

3. Visual advertising:

Place advertisements in elevators, in entrances, buses, on bulletin boards, in shopping centers on digital screens, banners on billboards. Determine who your target audience is, because even if you work in b2b, you still communicate with a person, he goes shopping, lives somewhere, goes to shopping centers, walks around the city, drives past billboards in a car.

4. Audio advertising:

Record high-quality commercials; you can order them from professional advertising companies. Try to avoid excess information; advertising should be catchy and memorable, but at the same time understandable. Play them in shopping centers and buses if your client can be found there.

5. Cold calling:

You can search for companies in databases or company directories and call them, offering your products and services. You can buy a ready-made database and call using it. However, be prepared to face a lot of rejection. Cold calling is like a sieve; you need to sift through a lot of refusals to find your client.

Finding clients through networking

Networking is a social and business activity in which, through personal contacts, people find common interests that help them solve problems not only in business, but also in private life. Contact can be made online and in person.

Networking significantly expands the horizons of communication and is sometimes simply irreplaceable, since it is impossible to find clients at home without it. It works like this:

• Let's say you need access to a specific company (person). First of all, you need to find these clients on Instagram (or another network) and little by little like the posts. The next step is to leave a comment that will present you as a professional. After you are noticed, you can ask to be a friend or organize a meeting.
• On your social media page, post information that speaks about your interests. These could be useful articles, your cases and achievements.
• Take part in webinars. This is a good opportunity to introduce yourself by talking about an interesting experience when the presenter asks those present to introduce themselves.
• Find professional communities and register in them.
• To find clients on your own, you need to constantly monitor advertising on the Internet.

That is, you will need to be active in watering places, since you can find clients only through intensive communication. Attend training events, forums and exhibitions. It is also worth going through personal contacts - it is possible that among your acquaintances and former bosses there are the right people.

Search among your friends

This is the traditional and most obvious advice we can give you. It is easiest to search among your acquaintances, because these people know you, they trust you, and it will be easier for you to work with them. Sit down and think about whether you know any businessmen who have not yet managed to get their own website. Or maybe one of your friends or relatives is just planning to start a business? One way or another, you can be useful to each other. Ask around people around you and perhaps this is how you will find your first clients to get a little hands-on and create a starting portfolio.

Simple ideas on how to find a customer base

To find a database with customer phone numbers, you need to use several sources:

• online catalogs and printed directories. Find companies by profile there that may be interested in your product. Use any contact information or feedback form to find out who to discuss purchasing issues with. Even if you are rejected now, this does not mean that the client is lost. Just remind him of your offer a couple of times a month;
• personal connections. Among your circle and friends, there are probably people who also need your product;
• targeted and contextual advertising. Ads are aimed at reaching the target audience as fully as possible. First of all, you need to place them in the most popular search engines - Google and Yandex.

All obtained contacts must be saved in the database, since simply finding customer phone numbers is not enough; it is necessary to ensure the possibility of communicating with consumers in the future.

Adviсe

Regardless of the chosen method of finding clients, the following recommendations will be useful to you:

1. Be honest, do not promise what you cannot deliver, otherwise customer trust will be lost and your reputation will be damaged.
2. Do not use gender discrimination, objectification of women as a sexual object, humiliation of other nations and races, insults or obscene language in advertising.
3. In advertising, talk not about how cool and the best you are, but about the benefits and benefits that the client will receive after the purchase.
4. Use several types of promotion, track statistics and results of advertising campaigns to evaluate effectiveness.
5. Study the target audience, so as not to make a mistake and not waste your advertising budget, hire an experienced marketer with an impressive portfolio.

Newsletters.

The most powerful tool. E-commerce projects definitely need to use it. If you don't use this channel, start right now. And if you tried it, but it didn’t bring you sales, you’re definitely doing something wrong. This channel sells better than others. Look at the mailings that your colleagues in the market send, remember the messages that you yourself received from famous brands, and form your strategy.

For tangible results from this channel, you need a good address base (from 10,000). If you do not collect contacts of your clients or site visitors, then think about how to place subscription forms on your resources in order to actively collect the database.

At the same time, remember that this tool is not limited only to mailing lists - you can connect push notifications, SMS mailings, and communication in instant messengers with clients.

What are “cold calls” and “cold base”

Almost every entrepreneur faces the task of finding new clients. One of the most effective methods of winning over consumers is cold calling.

Cold calling is calling potential customers who have not previously purchased from your company and are likely unaware of your company and your product.

Calls are made to phone numbers from the cold database.

Managers do not like to call cold bases because of the negative reaction from clients. Often interlocutors interrupt the conversation mid-sentence and insult the manager. Even those clients who make contact with an employee are distrustful of such negotiations and try to object to every proposal of the manager.

In addition, the effectiveness of cold calls usually does not exceed 10%. But this outcome is far from the rule, but the result of errors in compiling the call database and sales script.

The base for cold calls is a collection of contact details and other information about the company’s potential clients.

Let's look at the definition to highlight the main features of a high-quality “Cold” base.

Firstly, the definition says that the database must have contact information. At first glance, this is obvious. But we are talking here not only about telephone numbers, but also about other client coordinates.

For what? You may need an email to send a price list or presentation at the client's request. You can get this information during a call, but this is fraught with the loss of a potential consumer.

Secondly, the definition talks about other information about clients. What kind of information is this? In fact, the more data you can gather about your prospect, the better.

Where to get the base

Now that we have looked at what information a high-quality cold database should contain, we need to think about the channels for obtaining it.

We have identified the following ways to obtain a client base:

• Self-composition . You can independently search for clients and information about them on the Internet. But the maximum you can get is a name and contact information, which is not enough for effective sales;
• Buying a base . Buying a base is easy, but quite expensive. On average, one client will cost you 10 rubles, but please note that the minimum number of rows in the database is 10,000. This means that you will have to pay at least 100,000 rubles. Before purchasing, check its quality; often unscrupulous organizations sell outdated databases or replace the information in the database with the information you need. To check, select a couple of numbers from the list and make test calls;
• Using a collector program (parser) . Inexpensive but low quality method. You can buy the program on freelance exchanges.

Advice for beginners given on paid courses

1. You must be aware of and build your own sales funnel, have an audit template and consultation.
2. Familiarize yourself with the theories of traffic warmth , this will help not only in personal sales, but also in building promotion logic.
3. Always read a lot of cases, adopt experience and technical solutions.
4. Before starting a new niche, be sure to find cases on it.
5. Understand the technology of SPIN sales, it is useful
6. Pack like a human being, indicate your occupation on your social accounts and give the people around you the benefit of your topic.
7. It’s good to have 3 proposal options with different amounts of work and justification for the importance of each.

That's all. Good luck to everyone in attracting warm clients to SMM and see you again.

Ask questions in the comments and write what worked in your case.

Lead generation.

Lead generation is a marketing tactic aimed at finding potential customers with specific contact information.

The tool is somewhat similar to email marketing, but it works more widely and technically it is cold selling.

Using special services, such as Netpeak Spider, you can collect (parse) emails from sites where your clients may be. For example, if you sell bed linen, you can parse addresses from hotel booking services and try writing to them.

Or you can collect contacts of people from specific companies through LinkedIn. For this tool to work and not just cause a wave of negativity, you need to send personalized messages showing how you can be useful.

For this, the Reply mailing service is suitable, in which it is possible to add variables such as first name, last name, company, name of the event (at which you met), etc. In the letter, the person receives a letter from you that is the same in appearance, if you would send it manually from your email.

Important: 80% of the success of your mailing depends on the title of the letter - it is in it that the main problem with poor conversion is hidden.

Avito and Yula

Sudden point? And he works. There they are looking for and finding those willing to pay for targeting and running communities.

Post your services there and receive calls with meetings from your city. Free, fast and angry method.

Imagine writing an ad for a promotional post of targeted advertising.

A couple of recommendations:

• Write in human language
• Create your USP directly in the text
• Do not underestimate your claims in price or you will catch freeloaders and inadequate
• Put your face on your avatar
• Add Call-to-action

Competition in EKB, for example, is not significant at all, applications are coming from the channel, the main thing is to wisely divide the advertisements by service and think about the texts of the advertisements.

Information for cold base

A good client base should contain such a volume of information that allows you to create a portrait of the client. Moreover, this applies to sales in both the B2B and B2C markets.

Client portrait for the B2C market.

To get an idea about the client, it is necessary to obtain information about his age, gender, marital status, status, salary level, interests, and recent purchases.

This list can expand and contract, depending on your goals and the specifics of your activity.

Example. We sell hair shampoo for various purposes. We need clients, for which we create a client base (later we will tell you how to do this). In order for negotiations with the client to be successful, the following information must be entered into the database:

• Age . We must know the age of our interlocutor in order to offer a care product that is suitable for the skin and hair of a person of this age. Otherwise, you will be mistaken for a rogue who does not understand his own products;
• Family status . You can always offer an additional product to the client’s family members and increase sales several times;
• Status and salary level . Knowing the position held is necessary to determine the approximate level of consumer earnings. And this, in turn, will allow us to offer a product that is available to the client;
• Recent purchases or queries on the Internet . This information is not easy to obtain, but it is possible. She will be able to help determine the type of product that may be of interest to the client.

As you can see, any information about the consumer can help you during negotiations.

Portrait for B2B sales.

A B2B client has his own specific characteristics, so the information to compile his portrait must be different. These include: industry, financial condition of the enterprise, volumes of purchases from other companies, geographical location, information about the contact person.

Let's go back to the shampoo example. Only now we will choose beauty salons as clients.

We create a database with the following information:

• Industry. Everything is clear here;
• The financial condition of the beauty salon allows you to understand what price category you can offer;
• Geographical position. You need to know where your client is. Otherwise, he will decide that you are unfamiliar with the activities of the salon, which will scare off the customer;
• Information about the contact person. You must know who you are communicating with.